The basics of your turn: movement, action, bonus action, reaction. It’s a small list, but I still get tripped up on bonus actions. Fitting them into the rotation seamlessly and leveraging them to create the best strategy has been easier said than done.
“Okay Fae, that’s your action, are you using any movement?”
“Hmm, no, I think I’ll be staying here for right now…”
“Bonus action? Anything else?”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“Alice, you’re up, what are you doing?”
Thor is busy toggling from token and GM layers on Roll20, managing two young blue dragons, waiting to spring mama dragon on us, measuring cubes and cones and areas on the map for the upcoming lair action, preparing to bring in the purple worms. It’s my responsibility to handle Faelinthara Moonwalker.
SO much of my advice for new players boils down to this: be familiar with your character’s abilities. Read your spells. Know your class features. Know what you can do on your turn. This will keep combat running smoothly, make your DM’s life easier, and helps ensure that you don’t miss out on all the cool shit your character can do!
The concept of bonus actions and making the most of them has come up repeatedly in our games the past few weeks so it’s been on my mind.
The thing to know upfront is that it will be explicitly stated if it is a bonus action, and you only have one. Unless your DM has a different house rule, you cannot substitute your action with a bonus action. You can use your bonus action whenever you would like on your turn unless specified otherwise, for example, “at the end of your turn, you may use a bonus action to…”
Classes have certain bonus actions, feats can give you bonus actions, some spells can be cast as a bonus action or allow you to do something as a bonus action, which can be two different things: see Heat Metal at the end.
There’s a master list of bonus actions divided by class here!
I haven’t met a DM who expects you to have the entire rogue class detail section memorized straight out of the Player’s Handbook. My DMs want us to succeed, they don’t buy into the DM vs. the players mindset. Group members worth playing with aren’t just going to leave you stranded; my friends are going to do their best to make sure I don’t miss anything but they can’t be responsible for what’s on my character sheet.
So everything is on my character sheet. If it’s not in front of my face, it doesn’t happen. All of our games are on Roll20 for now so I’ve listed almost all my abilities in the Features and Traits section for easy reference.
That may be more than is useful for you in your game but for me, it’s a simple matter of clicking through the options as I prepare for my turn, so I can have the text right in front of me. It also makes it easy to show the DM in case there needs to be a ruling. Even the professional DMs we’ve seen have to look things up sometimes—I want to make their lives as easy as possible!
Not using Roll20? I can’t speak to other virtual tabletops but I can show you my other method of keeping things straight. Hopefully you’re already taking notes—I personally find it super easy to have a Google Doc open for game notes, with another tab set up for character notes (right next to my giphy tab for react gifs).
And if you’re at an actual real-life game… what is that like?! Although when we did that, I still had a Doc open on my phone.
Here’s what the character notes look like for Rhaena, my Circle of Sacrifice druid centaur in our Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign.
Overall Rhaena’s bonus actions are a lot simpler than my rogue’s but they’re still critical to know. I’m constantly summoning the Flame Bound (the Wildfire Spirit from the Circle of Wildfire Druid seen in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything); it’s so useful and also adorable—
—but I have to work managing the little guy into the rest of my strategy. Consider Wild Shape: it’s an action to take a beast form, and a bonus action to drop it.
Of course, just knowing these doesn’t mean a flawless strategy or guarantee victory. In our most recent Odyssey session, I spent a few minutes going back and forth on where I wanted to fit the flame spirit in around my other actions. Ultimately I made the wrong decision when I prioritized the flame spirit, thinking it would be useful in the long run, when I should have used my action to mulch the cultists with Wall of Thorns.
But at least you can make informed decisions and as I mentioned, not miss out on cool abilities. More options are going to open up at 6th level. Using mistletoe, the Circle of Sacrifice druid is able to cast detect magic, cure wounds, purify food and drink, and heroism as a bonus action.
For all of my experience as a caster, I’ve found D&D Beyond to be indispensable. It takes about fifteen seconds to pull up the Spells section, filter by Casting Time: 1 Bonus Action, and boom, a list of all of your options, because I keep forgetting if it’s Cure Wounds or Healing Word that’s a bonus action, and Fae is our only healer so it’s a little important…
A lot of this came from a discussion on Heat Metal in my D&D group and on the dungeons_and_doodles_ IG recently.
Casting Heat Metal is an action: you choose a metal item, and anyone in contact with that object takes 2d8 fire damage. There’s no rolling for it, it just happens. As a bonus action, you can choose to deal another 2d8 fire damage for the duration of the spell. It just… happens!
It’s a second level spell. As a druid, I’ve had it available for years! But only recently our bard picked the spell up and used it to incredible effect, and I realized I hadn’t been reading all of my spells closely enough. What else had I been missing out on? For one, at lower levels, I focused on Cure Wounds and never prepared Healing Word when as a ranged bonus action, that could have been so useful, and I would just like to apologize to our warlock.
I will not apologize to our barbarian, because I told you not to pick that fight and honestly I should be charging for these heals.
Dungeons and Doodles | Tales from the Tabletop 