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Unnecessarily Complicated Rules interactions of 5e
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I am irritated.

I've found at least three generic areas of rules where Wizards of the Coast's formatting and writing leads to unnecessarily large interaction searches.

What I mean is, to take the most recent example I found: the "incapacitated" condition.

It says "Cannot take Actions or reactions."

Then, in another area, you have to combine that with (PHB 189) "Anything that deprives you of your ability to take actions also prevents you from taking a bonus action" to determine if bonus actions can be used.

And then, here's the other issue. Look at the other conditions - that's when you see the implication that incapacitation doesn't prevent movement or speaking because the other conditions spell that out.

What about concentration? Well, you need to go to the Concentration rule(s) to see that Incapacitation ends concentration.

The point here is that the description for Incapacitated requires one to peruse other rules to determine the full extent of what that condition affects.

This is one of three cases I've personally found where something that could have been spelled out in one place, even if it would have been duplicated text, was not, and so one needs to scour the rest of the rules to understand how a rule actually works.

(Look at the Invisible condition btw, for one of the others.)

I get why it works this way. They didn't want to duplicate text and make things seem more complicated than they should be. But it leaves DMs in a strange place when looking up rules questions during a session. Say a player gets a spell that causes the Incapacitated state. Now, I need to look up, probably during an important combat, what that does. And then I need to look up a bunch of other stuff as well to understand the full implications.

In the end, its not one and done, where I can say after one search that they can't take actions, reactions, or bonus actions, can't concentrate, but can talk and move.

Are there other areas of rules where this happens that you've found?

Edit: Imagine if you will, exactly how helpful your responses would be to new or aspiring DMs. Do better. I know you can.

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4 years ago