For the Find Steed spell, what does it mean to bond with your steed and “fight as a seamless unit”

dnd-5emountspells

The description of the find steed spell says (emphasis added):

Your steed serves you as a mount, both in combat and out, and you have an instinctive bond with it that allows you to fight as a seamless unit. While mounted on your steed, you can make any spell you cast that targets only you also target your steed.

What does "fight[ing] as a seamless unit" mean?

There's no fluff text, right? Perhaps it is just introductory to the following sentence about a spell affecting both rider and steed. That seems to relegate it to fluff text, though, if the sentence could be omitted without changing the meaning. I'm not sure there's a RAW answer, at least I can't find a specific one.

If there's no RAW specific meaning, and it isn't fluff text, what's a reasonable interpretation of this line?

Best Answer

It means exactly what the spell says

So it's apparently well-accepted that "5e has no flavour text". Fine; I'm not personally sure that's actually true, but let's assume it is. Every part of that spell text is meaningful in that none of it describes something that isn't actually happening in the game. You definitely have an "instinctive bond" with your mount and can fight with it as a "seamless unit". What does that mean?

Let's look at another example. Here's the paladin's Divine Sense ability:

The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces. Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any celestial, fiend, or undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover. [...]

Here's an excerpt from twitter showing us what the author of the rules has to say about how to read them, in the context of interpreting the paladin's Divine Sense ability:

Beats @Beats_Alive · Apr 30, 2018
Morning @JeremyECrawford! My group's Paladin seems to think he can Divine Sense someone's alignment and whether or not an item is cursed. From what I understand, the first sentence is meant as flavor text. Could I get clarification?

Jeremy Crawford @JeremyECrawford · Apr 30, 2018
Divine Sense doesn't detect alignment or curses. The feature's text explains what it means by strong evil and good: fiends, undead, celestials, desecration, and consecration. #DnD

dandanfielding @DMdandanfieldng · Apr 30, 2018
So the first line is flavor text, then? There are people who insist every word in the rules have mechanical impact while others state that some, like the first line of Divine Sense, are just flavor with the "crunch" following after.

Jeremy Crawford @JeremyECrawford · Apr 30, 2018
In any piece of writing, context matters. If a rule has multiple sentences, they're meant to be read together. For example, the first sentence of Divine Sense is meant to be read with the rest of the feature's sentences, which explain that first sentence. #DnD

Here Jeremy Crawford explains that often, the rules are written such that one sentence may say a thing and then the following sentences explain what that first sentence meant, providing context and clarification. Divine Sense says a thing that is vague - paladins can sense strong evil and powerful good - and then immediately explains what it actually means when it says that. The fact that the ability is actually more restricted in scope doesn't make the first sentence not true (i.e. "flavour text"); paladins can detect certain kinds of evil and good.

This is the exact same sort of text as in find steed.

Your steed serves you as a mount, both in combat and out, and you have an instinctive bond with it that allows you to fight as a seamless unit. While mounted on your steed, you can make any spell you cast that targets only you also target your steed.

You have an instinctive bond with your mount that allows you to fight as a seamless unit. What does fighting as a seamless unit mean, in this context? It means that you can affect yourself and your mount with certain spells as if you were a single person, both enjoying the benefit of a spell that normally would only affect you as an individual; one might almost say the spell observes no seam between you and your mount.

This isn't a circumstance where the rules say a vague thing and then don't explain it and we have to figure out what it means; this is a circumstance where the text immediately explains itself. You are not meant to try and infer some kind of extra benefit beyond what the spell itself explains about how it works.