“Wield” is a special type of holding, as I’m sure you are well aware. There is a difference between a monk carrying his friends Greatsword vs. trying to wield it. “A wielded sword is not merely held” is every bit as true and every bit as misleading for this context as JCs “a donned shield is not merely held.”
Boots and Gauntlets are types of clothing or armor. Armor is worn, and tells us it’s worn. Armor does NOT tell us it’s held, and does NOT take up a free hand. Shields DO tell us they are held, and DO take up a free hand. So... no, there is NOTHING similar between a Shield and a Gauntlet, much less a Boot.
I agree with you that shields are held. Do you agree that shields are also worn? Because that is the crux of our argument.
Shields are held (wielded) and worn. Weapons are only held (wielded). To say "a wielded weapon is not merely held" is little more than semantics and not a rules answer, while saying "a donned shield is not merely held" is about mechanics.
As for the boot argument, if your leg is in your hand are you not holding your boot? What about an amulet on a necklace? If these objects that you are holding are disarmed, do they come off your body as well?
Carried = hold. Takes up a hand = hold. Wielded = hold.
All three of these are understood to mean an object is held in your hand in every other day-to-day context other than this debate. Don’t start making bad faith arguments that they don’t mean that here.
And none of this has anything to do with Donning or Doffing, which are required steps for armor and shields. Can armor or shields be removed by features? Only if they say that they can do such a thing without doffing those items.
“Wield” is a special type of holding, as I’m sure you are well aware. There is a difference between a monk carrying his friends Greatsword vs. trying to wield it. “A wielded sword is not merely held” is every bit as true and every bit as misleading for this context as JCs “a donned shield is not merely held.”
The difference has nothing to do with whether the item is merely gripped or also worn/attached though. The difference is your ability to use it effectively for its intended purpose.
The game's rules clearly assume shields aren't merely held, which is why you don/doff them and it costs 1 action. Crawford's ruling reflects that. That's silly since as SagaTympana points out there's many shields that are simply held, but the game's designers put their foot down on shields being 1) interchangeable and 2) not simply held.
You can go along with the game's overly-simplistic model of shields, rationalize it by saying you can't get at someone's hand when there's 2 feet of wood between your weapon and their hand, or house rule it, but I don't see how you can possibly make the case Disarming Attack is intended to force a target to drop a shield without also fully committing to similar shenanigans where players simply drop their shield to bypass the doffing rules.
My point was, JC said “not merely held” as if that was a slam dunk argument. Like you said, it’s semantics, it’s meaningless, because even weapons are “not merely held.” If JC was trying to say “wearing” or “donning” are the problem, he should have come out and said it instead of being cute.
I think it’s not 100% air tight that Shields are “worn,” though they’re certainly “donned.” I’m willing to agree to both “worn” and “donned” for the purpose of this thread. I’ll say it again so that every single comment in this thread isn’t yet another “BUT THEYRE WORN11!1!1” post: Shields are HELD AND WORN AND WIELDED AND DONNED. All four of those are true labels about how a shield is used, simultaneously.
Disarming Strike says it forces held items to be dropped. It doesn’t say items that are ONLY held are dropped. It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, unless the creature would be unable to drop them voluntarily.” It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, except for donned shields.” The ability is very straightforward, very clear to understand, and gives no suggestion it has exceptions. Reading an unwritten exception to it, THAT is what needs to find some textual support.
The don/doff rules tell you that it takes you some time to (on my phone, forgive me if this is a paraphrase) to take an object off yourself. That isn’t explicitly to say that it takes that long for someone else to take it from you by force.
Disarming Shields has always been a thing in D&D. You could do it in 3.5, which 5E is similar to in a lot of ways. No, 3.5 rules aren’t controlling... but I think that IS persuasive, that the concept of disarming someone’s shield has never been seen as so illogical or impractical that we should read unwritten rules to make it impossible. I don’t see anything in Disarming Attack to invite us to start doing that now.
Trip Attack on a Snake, or a Shark, or etc. is very on point analogy I think. Logically, how would you trip a creature that’s already on its belly or swimming?! Impossible! But Trip Attack doesn’t care, it trips anyone you hit, unless they’re immune to Prone. So, it works, and you and your DM just need to deal with it and use your imagination for how that happened narratively to fit the mechanical condition. That’s what we’ve got here... “but it was strapped on, how could I drop it?” I don’t care, the rules said you got hit in a special way that caused it to be dropped, so figure it out.
Your analogy of Trip Attack on a snake is a non sequitur. Tripping a snake works precisely because the the attack applies a particular condition in spite of logic. In the case of disarming attack, you are trying to logic your way into a ruling on a feature that does not mechanically provide a way of doffing a shield.
Your analogy of Trip Attack on a snake is a non sequitur. Tripping a snake works precisely because the the attack applies a particular condition in spite of logic. In the case of disarming attack, you are trying to logic your way into a ruling on a feature that does not mechanically provide a way of doffing a shield.
Mostly, this is a question of 'do you need to doff a shield to drop it?' Disarming attack does not care whether an item is worn, it just cares whether the item is held and causes the item to be dropped. Being worn does not mean an item is not held, but may mean the item is immune to being dropped.
Yeah, that’s what everyone’s argument seems to be boiling down to, that “don” was meant to provide some immunity to being disarmed against your will. I find that very unlikely, since there are other printed examples of what that would look like (see Warforged, see Armorer), but no similar language is to be found in the Don & Doff section, the Shield description, or anywhere in Armor & Shields in general.
My point was, JC said “not merely held” as if that was a slam dunk argument.
Why does it matter? JC wrote most of the rules, he knows or can find out what the line of reasoning behind a rule is, and runs a column where he gives his opinion on how to resolve rules issues. He doesn't need an airtight argument. You can choose to take his line of reasoning or leave it.
I really feel like a lot of the times these threads get derailed because a ruling rubs you the wrong way (which is fine, I disagree vehemently with JC about some things as well)but you absolutely refuse to concede there's some validity to it.
Disarming Strike says it forces held items to be dropped. It doesn’t say items that are ONLY held are dropped. It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, unless the creature would be unable to drop them voluntarily.” It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, except for donned shields.” The ability is very straightforward, very clear to understand, and gives no suggestion it has exceptions. Reading an unwritten exception to it, THAT is what needs to find some textual support.
And every rule in D&D comes with the invisible asterisk that this is a story telling game, the rules can't cover every single possibility, and the devs will generally leave the corner cases to the DM. So yes, in a vacuum Disarming Strike will force a creature to drop whatever it's holding at its feet with no exceptions, but when you sit down to play the game with real people, you'll find there's situations where it doesn't make sense for Disarming Strike to do what it says it unconditionally does. If the object is anchored to something else in addition to being held, or you disarm someone that's flying or swimming, the object can't always fall at the target's feet. And if you concede that it's silly to pretend Disarming Strike will violate the laws of physics and gravity in these situations, why not concede that a strapped shield can be one of those cases too?
"The rule gives no exceptions" is not the same as "there are never exceptions to this rule" or "you must never deviate from what the text says in any situation."
Disarming Shields has always been a thing in D&D.
It's a rather silly thing to be able to do reliably, in my opinion. Disarming someone of their weapon and disarming someone of a shield are totally different things.
Trip Attack on a Snake, or a Shark, or etc. is very on point analogy I think. Logically, how would you trip a creature that’s already on its belly or swimming?! Impossible! But Trip Attack doesn’t care, it trips anyone you hit, unless they’re immune to Prone.
Destabilizing it would suffice. Knocking a snake prone could mean flipping it on its back, or knocking its head down from a coiled position so it can no longer immediately attack. I presume a shark can't swim well upside down either. It's not that hard to find a narrative angle for these things.
Disagreeing with you is not derailing a thread. No matter which side of this you come down on, we should all be able to agree that there’s nothing printed in the PHB that says Shields can or cannot be disarmed. I’ve presented and defended one ruling, that they can be disarmed because they’re held. You have presented and defended a different ruling, that they can’t because they’re also worn. Neither of us is derailing the thread, or taking an unreasonable position, so please don’t act like you’re the only one with moral high ground.
I think I’ve sufficiently argued this out, I’m not seeing any new arguments come forth for or against at this point, and it sounds like we’re all pretty much still where we started. Oh well.
I'd kind of like to see some animations or skits that exemplify the illogic of some 5e rules (when used literally). In this case:
Character A: shackled to a wall Character B: enters "I've come to rescue you." Character A: "Have you brought the key?" indicates shackle Character B: "No need. Are you injured?" Character A: "No... Just captured." Character B: "Then take hold of your chains." Character A: does so Character B: "Disarming punch" strikes character A's arm with a fist Character A: "Ow! Why did you-?" Shackles pop off wrist and tear out of wall to drop to character A's feet "huh." Character B: "C'mon let's go."
I don’t think a reasonable DM would need to say much more than “the part of your chain you’ve taken hold of drops. The shackle is still attached to your wrist and wall.”
or, “Disarming Strike is a combat ability, and you’re twisting intent. That’s not going to work” and leave it at that.
But hey, if they want to have the blow be just right so that the locking mechanism snaps open? Great, there’s plenty of memorable fantasy scenes where that trope is used.
There’s no slippery slope here. We’re talking about shields and other items you’d be carrying in your hands in combat. there’s no reason that we need to be worried about unintended consequences for anything else other than shields, unless we go out of our way to dream up bad faith hypotheticals.
Shackles being worn are not contingent on you holding them, carrying them, wielding them, etc. Donning a Shield requires all of that. A Shield and Shackles have almost nothing in common mechanically, and we’re talking game mechanics here.
I don’t think a reasonable DM would need to say much more than “the part of your chain you’ve taken hold of drops. The shackle is still attached to your wrist and wall.”
Ah, if that's the case, the argument is settled.
"The part of the shield you were holding drops, but it is still strapped to your arm. You reclose your hand and raise your arm."
Yeah, that’s what everyone’s argument seems to be boiling down to, that “don” was meant to provide some immunity to being disarmed against your will. I find that very unlikely, since there are other printed examples of what that would look like (see Warforged, see Armorer), but no similar language is to be found in the Don & Doff section, the Shield description, or anywhere in Armor & Shields in general.
I interpret that as "if you can drop the item without taking another action first, you can be disarmed." I am perfectly comfortable to say that there exist both shields that have to be doffed before they can be dropped, and shields that can be dropped immediately.
Contrary to Chicken_Champ’s stated position, I’m having trouble finding any text that “tell[s] us EXPLICITLY that [shields] are held in a hand.” Is there anything anywhere that says shields are held at all?
in SAC it says
Can you gain the magical bonus of a +2 shield if you are holding the shield without taking an action to don it?
Yes, but only the magical +2, which says you gain it when holding the shield. You gain the shield’s base AC bonus only if you use your action to don the shield as normal
Do a monk "holding" a +2 shield can still get unarmoured defence but only gets the magical +2 to AC rather than the +4, and this is different to donning it. This does not however answer the question is donning a shield mean it is a specail type of holding or completely different to holding.
It also says
Official rulings on how to interpret rules are made here in the Sage Advice Compendium. The public statements of the D&D team, or anyone else at Wizards of the Coast, are not official rulings; they are advice. The tweets of Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford), the game’s principal rules designer, are sometimes a preview of rulings that will appear here.
A Dungeon Master adjudicates the game and determines whether to use an official ruling in play. The DM always has the final say on rules questions.
So the SAC is part of the official ruleset, and the SAC answers the question by saying they are not merely held and therefore disarming attack is not effective against them.
Of course the DM determines whether to use an official ruling in play (whether from the PHB, DMG, SAC or elsewhere)
Disagreeing with you is not derailing a thread. ... Neither of us is derailing the thread, or taking an unreasonable position, so please don’t act like you’re the only one with moral high ground.
It's not the fact that you disagree. It's not even that your position is unreasonable. It's that you tend to be unreasonable, and these threads so often play out like this:
Someone gives the official ruling
You act like it's totally off base and claim that it's wrong because you interpret X as Y and the book didn't explicitly say Z.
People point out why it's not outrageous.
You dig your heels in. Maybe even acknowledge they've brought up valid points, but you won't yield an inch on yours.
The discussion devolves to splitting hairs over specific words.
I'd bet good money if you approached steps 2 and 4 differently these threads would be a lot shorter and I wouldn't be wondering if I'm going to get dragged into a dissertation defense every time I answer a really basic question that's had an official answer for years.
Disagreeing with you is not derailing a thread. ... Neither of us is derailing the thread, or taking an unreasonable position, so please don’t act like you’re the only one with moral high ground.
It's not the fact that you disagree. It's not even that your position is unreasonable. It's that you tend to be unreasonable, and these threads so often play out like this:
Someone gives the official ruling
You act like it's totally off base and claim that it's wrong because you interpret X as Y and the book didn't explicitly say Z.
People point out why it's not outrageous.
You dig your heels in. Maybe even acknowledge they've brought up valid points, but you won't yield an inch on yours.
The discussion devolves to splitting hairs over specific words.
I'd bet good money if you approached steps 2 and 4 differently these threads would be a lot shorter and I wouldn't be wondering if I'm going to get dragged into a dissertation defense every time I answer a really basic question that's had an official answer for years.
I am visualizing this guy at a table, parsing every word in a section of the PHB. The DM's word is final. End of story. As I have said before, the real danger is this guy infects new players with bad information. Most times, people who know more about the rules just give up arguing with him over time, and he is free to disseminate misinformation.
You guys are being pretty awful right now, and I don’t really understand what the point is of a rule forum other than to... talk about rules. Get off my back. If you think your argument is correct, great for you! I happen to think mine is instead! Which of us is closing the day with more internet points? Hard to tell... but at least I’m spending my energies picking apart the PHB rather than other people. Chill out.
I agree with you that shields are held. Do you agree that shields are also worn? Because that is the crux of our argument.
Shields are held (wielded) and worn. Weapons are only held (wielded). To say "a wielded weapon is not merely held" is little more than semantics and not a rules answer, while saying "a donned shield is not merely held" is about mechanics.
As for the boot argument, if your leg is in your hand are you not holding your boot? What about an amulet on a necklace? If these objects that you are holding are disarmed, do they come off your body as well?
And none of this has anything to do with Donning or Doffing, which are required steps for armor and shields. Can armor or shields be removed by features? Only if they say that they can do such a thing without doffing those items.
The difference has nothing to do with whether the item is merely gripped or also worn/attached though. The difference is your ability to use it effectively for its intended purpose.
The game's rules clearly assume shields aren't merely held, which is why you don/doff them and it costs 1 action. Crawford's ruling reflects that. That's silly since as SagaTympana points out there's many shields that are simply held, but the game's designers put their foot down on shields being 1) interchangeable and 2) not simply held.
You can go along with the game's overly-simplistic model of shields, rationalize it by saying you can't get at someone's hand when there's 2 feet of wood between your weapon and their hand, or house rule it, but I don't see how you can possibly make the case Disarming Attack is intended to force a target to drop a shield without also fully committing to similar shenanigans where players simply drop their shield to bypass the doffing rules.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
My point was, JC said “not merely held” as if that was a slam dunk argument. Like you said, it’s semantics, it’s meaningless, because even weapons are “not merely held.” If JC was trying to say “wearing” or “donning” are the problem, he should have come out and said it instead of being cute.
I think it’s not 100% air tight that Shields are “worn,” though they’re certainly “donned.” I’m willing to agree to both “worn” and “donned” for the purpose of this thread. I’ll say it again so that every single comment in this thread isn’t yet another “BUT THEYRE WORN11!1!1” post: Shields are HELD AND WORN AND WIELDED AND DONNED. All four of those are true labels about how a shield is used, simultaneously.
Disarming Strike says it forces held items to be dropped. It doesn’t say items that are ONLY held are dropped. It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, unless the creature would be unable to drop them voluntarily.” It doesn’t say “held items are dropped, except for donned shields.” The ability is very straightforward, very clear to understand, and gives no suggestion it has exceptions. Reading an unwritten exception to it, THAT is what needs to find some textual support.
The don/doff rules tell you that it takes you some time to (on my phone, forgive me if this is a paraphrase) to take an object off yourself. That isn’t explicitly to say that it takes that long for someone else to take it from you by force.
Disarming Shields has always been a thing in D&D. You could do it in 3.5, which 5E is similar to in a lot of ways. No, 3.5 rules aren’t controlling... but I think that IS persuasive, that the concept of disarming someone’s shield has never been seen as so illogical or impractical that we should read unwritten rules to make it impossible. I don’t see anything in Disarming Attack to invite us to start doing that now.
Trip Attack on a Snake, or a Shark, or etc. is very on point analogy I think. Logically, how would you trip a creature that’s already on its belly or swimming?! Impossible! But Trip Attack doesn’t care, it trips anyone you hit, unless they’re immune to Prone. So, it works, and you and your DM just need to deal with it and use your imagination for how that happened narratively to fit the mechanical condition. That’s what we’ve got here... “but it was strapped on, how could I drop it?” I don’t care, the rules said you got hit in a special way that caused it to be dropped, so figure it out.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Your analogy of Trip Attack on a snake is a non sequitur. Tripping a snake works precisely because the the attack applies a particular condition in spite of logic. In the case of disarming attack, you are trying to logic your way into a ruling on a feature that does not mechanically provide a way of doffing a shield.
Honestly, there should probably be more than one type of shield, as historically there have been both handheld and strapped shields.
Mostly, this is a question of 'do you need to doff a shield to drop it?' Disarming attack does not care whether an item is worn, it just cares whether the item is held and causes the item to be dropped. Being worn does not mean an item is not held, but may mean the item is immune to being dropped.
Yeah, that’s what everyone’s argument seems to be boiling down to, that “don” was meant to provide some immunity to being disarmed against your will. I find that very unlikely, since there are other printed examples of what that would look like (see Warforged, see Armorer), but no similar language is to be found in the Don & Doff section, the Shield description, or anywhere in Armor & Shields in general.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Why does it matter? JC wrote most of the rules, he knows or can find out what the line of reasoning behind a rule is, and runs a column where he gives his opinion on how to resolve rules issues. He doesn't need an airtight argument. You can choose to take his line of reasoning or leave it.
I really feel like a lot of the times these threads get derailed because a ruling rubs you the wrong way (which is fine, I disagree vehemently with JC about some things as well) but you absolutely refuse to concede there's some validity to it.
And every rule in D&D comes with the invisible asterisk that this is a story telling game, the rules can't cover every single possibility, and the devs will generally leave the corner cases to the DM. So yes, in a vacuum Disarming Strike will force a creature to drop whatever it's holding at its feet with no exceptions, but when you sit down to play the game with real people, you'll find there's situations where it doesn't make sense for Disarming Strike to do what it says it unconditionally does. If the object is anchored to something else in addition to being held, or you disarm someone that's flying or swimming, the object can't always fall at the target's feet. And if you concede that it's silly to pretend Disarming Strike will violate the laws of physics and gravity in these situations, why not concede that a strapped shield can be one of those cases too?
"The rule gives no exceptions" is not the same as "there are never exceptions to this rule" or "you must never deviate from what the text says in any situation."
It's a rather silly thing to be able to do reliably, in my opinion. Disarming someone of their weapon and disarming someone of a shield are totally different things.
Destabilizing it would suffice. Knocking a snake prone could mean flipping it on its back, or knocking its head down from a coiled position so it can no longer immediately attack. I presume a shark can't swim well upside down either. It's not that hard to find a narrative angle for these things.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Well, basically the argument is that a feature doesn't do things that it doesn't mention...
You are welcome to make the ruling that you can drop a shield instead of doffing it. Without that ruling, though, disarming a shield is meaningless.
Disagreeing with you is not derailing a thread. No matter which side of this you come down on, we should all be able to agree that there’s nothing printed in the PHB that says Shields can or cannot be disarmed. I’ve presented and defended one ruling, that they can be disarmed because they’re held. You have presented and defended a different ruling, that they can’t because they’re also worn. Neither of us is derailing the thread, or taking an unreasonable position, so please don’t act like you’re the only one with moral high ground.
I think I’ve sufficiently argued this out, I’m not seeing any new arguments come forth for or against at this point, and it sounds like we’re all pretty much still where we started. Oh well.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
I'd kind of like to see some animations or skits that exemplify the illogic of some 5e rules (when used literally). In this case:
Character A: shackled to a wall
Character B: enters "I've come to rescue you."
Character A: "Have you brought the key?" indicates shackle
Character B: "No need. Are you injured?"
Character A: "No... Just captured."
Character B: "Then take hold of your chains."
Character A: does so
Character B: "Disarming punch" strikes character A's arm with a fist
Character A: "Ow! Why did you-?" Shackles pop off wrist and tear out of wall to drop to character A's feet "huh."
Character B: "C'mon let's go."
I don’t think a reasonable DM would need to say much more than “the part of your chain you’ve taken hold of drops. The shackle is still attached to your wrist and wall.”
or, “Disarming Strike is a combat ability, and you’re twisting intent. That’s not going to work” and leave it at that.
But hey, if they want to have the blow be just right so that the locking mechanism snaps open? Great, there’s plenty of memorable fantasy scenes where that trope is used.
There’s no slippery slope here. We’re talking about shields and other items you’d be carrying in your hands in combat. there’s no reason that we need to be worried about unintended consequences for anything else other than shields, unless we go out of our way to dream up bad faith hypotheticals.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Shackles being worn are not contingent on you holding them, carrying them, wielding them, etc. Donning a Shield requires all of that. A Shield and Shackles have almost nothing in common mechanically, and we’re talking game mechanics here.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Wearing a shield is contingent on you wearing, wielding, holding, and donning it. Disarming attack only undoes one of those things.
Edit: Unless, of course, you are saying the feature does something other than what it says.
Ah, if that's the case, the argument is settled.
"The part of the shield you were holding drops, but it is still strapped to your arm. You reclose your hand and raise your arm."
I interpret that as "if you can drop the item without taking another action first, you can be disarmed." I am perfectly comfortable to say that there exist both shields that have to be doffed before they can be dropped, and shields that can be dropped immediately.
in SAC it says
Do a monk "holding" a +2 shield can still get unarmoured defence but only gets the magical +2 to AC rather than the +4, and this is different to donning it. This does not however answer the question is donning a shield mean it is a specail type of holding or completely different to holding.
It also says
So the SAC is part of the official ruleset, and the SAC answers the question by saying they are not merely held and therefore disarming attack is not effective against them.
Of course the DM determines whether to use an official ruling in play (whether from the PHB, DMG, SAC or elsewhere)
It's not the fact that you disagree. It's not even that your position is unreasonable. It's that you tend to be unreasonable, and these threads so often play out like this:
I'd bet good money if you approached steps 2 and 4 differently these threads would be a lot shorter and I wouldn't be wondering if I'm going to get dragged into a dissertation defense every time I answer a really basic question that's had an official answer for years.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
I am visualizing this guy at a table, parsing every word in a section of the PHB. The DM's word is final. End of story. As I have said before, the real danger is this guy infects new players with bad information. Most times, people who know more about the rules just give up arguing with him over time, and he is free to disseminate misinformation.
You guys are being pretty awful right now, and I don’t really understand what the point is of a rule forum other than to... talk about rules. Get off my back. If you think your argument is correct, great for you! I happen to think mine is instead! Which of us is closing the day with more internet points? Hard to tell... but at least I’m spending my energies picking apart the PHB rather than other people. Chill out.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.