Filling a much-needed space...

The title is actually one of my favourite jokes, because people never seem to spot that it means the opposite of the obvious. But I digress...

Back in early 3e, characters had two actions in their turn: a Standard action and a Move-equivalent action. (In 3.5e, the latter became just a Move action.) You also got a number of Free actions.

However, dotted around the text there were various instances of "a free action, once per turn". For example, using the Quicken Spell metamagic feat turned a spell into a free action, but you could use only one per turn.

With the "Expanded Psionics Handbook", a new action type was added to the game: the Swift action (later renamed the Minor action in 4e - a better name). The Swift action formalised all of these exceptions - now, Quickened spells became Swift actions.

But because Swift actions were added to the game late, and in a supplement, they were rare. And they remained rare for the rest of the edition. And so, they were a useful formalisation of something that already existed in the game, at almost no cost.

With 4e, Minor actions were added to the core rules. And the designers at WotC looked at them, and saw they were good. And they saw that the addition of Minor actions had opened up a whole new "design space", which they promptly set about filling - whole new realms of powers were added, so that every class had powers that used Minor actions, and any well-built character would always have something he could do with his Minor action in the round.

As a consequence of this, the game slowed down significantly. Whereas in 3e Swift actions largely went unused and ignored, unless the player had something specific in mind, in 4e players started to scrabble around for something, anything to do with their Minor action so that it wasn't 'wasted'.

With 5e, WotC have decided to drop Minor actions from the game. Only not, because characters will still be able to do all these same things; they just won't be formalised in the text. And you can bet that that "free action once in a round" language will be coming back, because sooner or later some designer is going to want to do that. (I give it three months after the core is released... assuming the core doesn't include that text.)

Which of course will lead to some bright spark, during the development of 6e (if there is such a thing), coming up with the wonderful innovation - "wouldn't it be good to add a formal Minor action type?"

The lesson from Minor actions is this: they do indeed open up a design space, but it's a much needed space. Minor actions should exist in the game, as a bar to those power-gamers who will talk their DMs into letting them do a hundred 'minor' things in the round, but the uses for those actions should be rare. Such that most of the time they just get handwaved away, and such that players generally don't worry about them unless they have some specific use in mind.

(Or perhaps I'm just annoyed. The "action economy" was one of the things that 4e finally got right. And now 5e seems intent on doing away with it. Sigh.)