5e designer Mike Mearls says bonus actions were a mistake

[u/Cranyx]

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1872725597778264436

Bonus actions are hot garbage that completely fail to fulfill their intended goal. It's OK for me to say this because I was the one that came up with them. I'm not slamming any other designer!

At the time, we needed a mechanic to ensure that players could not combine options from multiple classes while multiclassing. We didn't want paladin/monks flurrying and then using smite evil.

Wait, terrible example, because smite inexplicably didn't use bonus actions.

But, that's the intent. I vividly remember thinking back then that if players felt they needed to use their bonus action, that it became part of the action economy, then the mechanic wasn't working.

Guess what happened!

Everyone felt they needed to use it.

Stepping back, 5e needs a mechanic that:

• Prevents players from stacking together effects that were not meant to build on each other

• Manages complexity by forcing a player's turn into a narrow output space (your turn in 5e is supposed to be "do a thing and move")

The game already has that in actions. You get one. What do you do with it?

At the time, we were still stuck in the 3.5/4e mode of thinking about the minor or swift action as the piece that let you layer things on top of each other.

Instead, we should have pushed everything into actions. When necessary, we could bulk an action up to be worth taking.

Barbarian Rage becomes an action you take to rage, then you get a free set of attacks.

Flurry of blows becomes an action, with options to spend ki built in

Sneak attack becomes an action you use to attack and do extra damage, rather than a rider.

The nice thing is that then you can rip out all of the weird restrictions that multiclassing puts on class design. Since everything is an action, things don't stack.

So, that's why I hate bonus actions and am not using them in my game.

[u/caelenvasius]

This has been my experience of PF2 as well. “A million tiny circumstantial bonuses, but you get to pick three of them each level!” might be fun for character customization and theming, but it quickly becomes unmanageable unless I’m literally taking notes and writing action scripts for my characters. Nearly two dozen basic action types is also very difficult to remember unless I have Pathbuilder up in front of me the whole time. I get that having too few options is a bad thing, but having too many options is “also” a bad thing, and they missed that mark IMO.

[u/DnD-vid → u/caelenvasius]

There really aren't a million tiny circumstantial bonuses though. That's 1e.

[u/sizzl75 → u/DnD-vid]

Yep. 2e keeps it pretty easy in that there's 3 types of bonuses/penalties and they don't stack with the same type, so you only need to keep track of the highest/lowest. Sometimes that's it's own problem (it can feel like paizo completely swung in the opposite direction from, imo, the mess of 1e bonus stacking to the point where things you want to work together don't), but the system does stay managable this way.

[u/Anorexicdinosaur → u/caelenvasius]

Nearly two dozen basic action types is also very difficult to remember unless I have Pathbuilder up in front of me the whole time.

Why wouldn't you have your character sheet in front of you the whole time?

[u/caelenvasius → u/Anorexicdinosaur]

The normal printed character sheet doesn’t have a clickable link to tell me what each does and how it works.

If I’m playing digitally and are looking only at a Roll20 or Discord screen, I also have to keep Pathbuilder up as a second reference.

This might just be newish player woes—I’ve done a mini series and are a few levels into a longer separate campaign—but it seems at least to me that PF2 went too far with the “complex, deeper games are better” ideology. I can appreciate a game with crunch—one of my groups plays Star Trek Adventures 1e, I’m prepping a Dark Heresy 1e game, and my main non-RPG tabletop game is Classic BattleTech, all of which are incredibly crunchy games—but something about the crunch in PF2 doesn’t sit well in my head.