What's the first 3.5 sourcebook that detailed swift actions?

[Libertad]

I recall reading about it in the 2004 Miniatures' Handbook, although I don't have that tome on hand so I cannot confirm if that was the first or merely very early.

[Username17]

Miniatures Handbook came out in 2003, and I believe it was the first book to call Swift Actions "Swift Actions."

-Username17

[Jefepato]

I'm pretty sure you're right and it was the Miniatures Handbook.

Of course, "swift action" is essentially a formal term for the type of action that casting a quickened spell always was anyway. The Miniatures Handbook just gave the mechanic a proper name so they could start using it to print new spells.

[Libertad]

Thank you both for your answers. Looks like my spidey-sense was right!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Is this the thread where we say how much we love Swift Actions for being the halfway step between Standard and Free Actions?

[erik]

No this is the thread where we get nit picky and say Miniatures Handbook was more like 3.25. Oh wait, maybe that was Fiend Folio.

[WiserOdin032402]

Miniatures Handbook was a weird one to be quite honest and the fact that I can't remember anything really good about the book other than a few busted-ass cleric spells and the swift action probably speaks volumes about its quality.

[merxa]

If we're taking early print history, when was immediate actions first mentioned?

[Username17]

If we're taking early print history, when was immediate actions first mentioned?

I think Expanded Psionics Handbook, April 2004.

Functionally this is what Feather Fall has always been, but I think the XPH was the book that gave that action type a name. And like with the Swift Action, I am ambivalent. On the one hand, "a free action that you can use when it is not your turn and also counts against the one Quickened Spell you can cast on your turn even if not cast during your turn" is fucking bullshit to write in an ability or spell effect, and having a piece of terminology that clearly describes that kind of thing is good.

On the other hand, once there start being enough Immediate Action abilities that the action slot becomes a valuable resource and people not having things to do with that action slot starts mattering and also new abilities you introduce are sometimes worthless to certain characters because they are already using the action slot and can't make use of it... that's a lot less good. Swift and Immediate Actions weren't in the PHB and the game as a whole really needed to be written with them in mind.

And it just wasn't. There were never enough Swift and Immediate action abilities to have full coverage but also too there were enough that some abilities were randomly invalidated in their entirety because of the scarcity of the action slot.

-Username17

[merxa]

Seems fitting for a psionics splat to formalize the most broken of actions.

As a DM I more or less hate immediate actions since they tend to slow down play and everyone needs to be aware of them in order for the actions to be used, otherwise you end up with people mentioning them after the fact.

Of course in a turn based game there's an obvious space and desire for them.

Redesigning action economy, is there a better way? Even though i think PF2 is unplayable, three actions and a reaction seems like a solid foundation for action economy. I remain unconvinced the 3e action economy was the zenith of ttrpgs.

[deaddmwalking]

Redesigning action economy, is there a better way? Even though i think PF2 is unplayable, three actions and a reaction seems like a solid foundation for action economy. I remain unconvinced the 3e action economy was the zenith of ttrpgs.

I don't think it is. I mean, first off, in PF2, certain actions may take 1, 2, or 3 actions. Further, certain actions suffer a penalty if they're attempted more than once.

If you want to encourage people to take actions from different piles of action types, you want to give them different types of actions. If you want dynamic battles, you want movement and attacks; so making it so you have both a move and an attack that you can't trade one for another encourages using both.

It is true that reactions slow the game down, but they also add a lot. Attacks of Opportunity, for instance, happen on someone else's turn, but they (potentially) add a lot of tactical depth to the game.

As far as how you approach it, I'm half-way convinced that every character should have several reactions, but each has a specific trigger that can't be used more than once. Ie, you might have a reaction that you can only use when you're attacked directly, or one that you can only use when an adjacent ally is attacked. If both happen in the same round, you might use both.

[merxa]

AoO probably, ultimately, have not been worth the bandwidth.

They could be changed to matter more, but my experience has been a short calculus to determine if the potential hp penalty is worth the repositioning, and usually it is. If AoO caused you to lose your move or force a spell caster to make concentration checks for their turn then maybe, but as it stands AoO in 3.x are mostly to help some martials matter more at the cost of everyone else spending more time per turn.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even though i think PF2 is unplayable, three actions and a reaction seems like a solid foundation for action economy. I remain unconvinced the 3e action economy was the zenith of ttrpgs.

PF2's action system is more complicated with no real payoff. Complete fungibility of actions when some of the available actions can range from 'blow up the building with a fireball' to 'leap behind that barrel' is idiotic. Asking people to evaluate 9 x 9 x 9 actions is literally four times than 3 x 6 x 9 and it'll only get worse as the game introduces more expansion options.

4E D&D's action system is, embarrassingly, probably the best one. It still has some problems (classes with native actions to minor/immediate actions dominate the beginning of the game but get hurt in the post-Essentials endgame due to magic item bloat) but at least it's clean. My major suggestion would be just to get rid of immediate actions and opportunity actions and just have actions that can be used as an attack of opportunity. 4E and 5E D&D didn't really gain anything tactically from having Shield being able to be cast right when a sword smashed you in the face.

[deaddmwalking]

There's some advantage of giving people a reason to remain engaged when it isn't their turn. There's some cost to it as well. But it's not as clear cut as you would think.

If people aren't paying attention when it isn't their turn, they have to be brought up to speed when they play. Knowing they have an action they COULD use gives them some reason to focus.

[erik]

Miniatures Handbook was a weird one to be quite honest and the fact that I can't remember anything really good about the book other than a few busted-ass cleric spells and the swift action probably speaks volumes about its quality.

I kinda liked the Bonded Summoner. It was sneaky because you turned your wizard character into a cohort who supported the main character of an Elemental brute. Having a huge earth elemental with a wizard full-time buffing him and laying down battle field control is a fine way to let someone play a melee character. It's even a fun bard prestige class when you take a familiar early on and can even shift back over to Sublime Chord at 11 if you want to start being a caster with a huge elemental companion.

That's my one thing I appreciate about the Miniature's Handbook.

[jt]

Miniatures Handbook also gave us one of the component parts of the Hulking Hurler build, which is one of the more entertaining things that came out of the character optimization scene.

I haven't seen reactions keep players engaged in practice. I've seen a lot more of them causing additional breaks to catch people up (someone else noticed you missed a reaction).

One problem I've had with the Standard/Move/Minor setup is that people don't seem to remember any of the actions until they have two options for that slot that they routinely choose from. Move actions get shorthanded into "I can move 6 spaces," because that's the only thing players use their move action for. This causes problems when a new ability forces them to relearn rules they've already been using.

What would folks here think of Standard/Move/Move? That is, your typical move action is a bit shorter, and all your usual minor-action stuff now takes some of that.

[Emerald]

My major suggestion would be just to get rid of immediate actions and opportunity actions and just have actions that can be used as an attack of opportunity. 4E and 5E D&D didn't really gain anything tactically from having Shield being able to be cast right when a sword smashed you in the face.

Yeah, condensing off-turn action types and giving out more of them is probably a good approach. Star Wars Saga gives characters unlimited reactions per turn* but only allows using 1 reaction per triggering event and ensures that multiple reactions a single character is likely to get are unlikely to overlap, and I've found that not having to remember whether you already used your 1 immediate action, not having to decided which of N immediate action thingies you want to use that round, and so on really helps speed things up and avoid a lot of the normal problems with off-turn actions.

* Except for AoOs, which were 1/round probably solely so they could shove a Combat Reflexes feat in there, but that's commonly houseruled out.

What would folks here think of Standard/Move/Move? That is, your typical move action is a bit shorter, and all your usual minor-action stuff now takes some of that.

So, similar to 5e where standing up from prone, opening a door, etc. consumes N feet of your 30 feet of movement so you see a lot of "move half your speed and also do X"?

Eh. As with 5e, letting everyone move-attack-move leads to a bit of a yoyo effect in combat and screws with cover, choke points, and similar; I find you need to have good (house)rules for overwatch/covering fire, readied actions, and such to compensate. And if you can trade out one of your moves for a minor ability, either you can trade out both of them and you run into the "everyone stands in one place and flails away" problem of 3e full attacks, or you can only trade out one and so you might as well stick with Standard/Move/Swift.

[Username17]

The Miniatures Handbook had a surprisingly large amount of influence. Like, no one cares about the Healer or Warmage, but they pioneered the casting system used by the Dread Necromancer and Beguiler that actually saw quite a bit of play. Quite a few people have suggested scrapping all the full casters and replacing them with a range of classes templated off the Miniatures Handbook. It's a legit position to have, because that casting style does what people wanted spontaneous casters to do.

But the biggest reason that the Miniatures Handbook went over like a lead balloon isn't how raw and experimental it all is - but in how much of the book isn't even about Dungeons & Dragons. The Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game was a spinoff that you may well have forgotten about because there wasn't much too it as a game. It's a tabletop skirmish game of middling quality that can't readily handle battles much larger than what actual D&D can.

Anyway, the move action and the standard action are golden and I wouldn't replace them with anything. The Swift Action and the Immediate Action are much more complicated. You need a very strong set of editorial guidelines on how many options players are supposed to have for those things. If most players don't have a Swift Action, then the first Swift Action option is free money. If most players are using their Swift Action, a new Swift Action is essentially unusable unless it's better than one you would otherwise be using (and then its effective value is only the difference in effectiveness between the two).

The only edition where Swift Actions were written into the basic game enough that such editorial guidelines were even possible was 4th edition. And obviously that edition did not deliver on solid editorial guidelines for absolutely anything.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm a big fan of making the default Swift action uses moderately significant. In a tactical wargame, if you aren't moving and attacking you aren't playing. But in an action story, people are frequently doing more than that, like wrangling for control of a scroll or shoving hostages around or whatever, and if you have to give up moving or attacking to do those things, many players will consider that to be too high a cost and action scenes get much less interesting.