House rule: treating standard action as attack actions

[Zombimode]

I can only fit so many words in the title, so I have to explain the idea more thoroughly.

There are many things that specifically work only with "the attack action or the full attack action", like Combat Expertise, Reckless Offense or, for attack action, even Spring Attack.

Now, there are also many options that have specific activation costs but result (also) in an attack. Most prominently many maneuvers from ToB, but there are other examples as well (Intimidating Strike comes to mind).

By RAW, you can't combine those two. That is, you can't for instance move, attack with Steely Strike, then move again with Spring Attack.

The house rule I'm proposing is to let this distinction slide. Meaning that you can use stuff like Reckless Offense with actions that aren't attack or full attack actions but will result in an attack.

What do you think of this house rule? The context would be an E6 game.

One downside I see is that it diminishes the advantage non-maneuver-users had over the maneuver-users.

[TuggyNE]

If you simply say "any time you could make exactly one attack action you can make a standard action instead", you open up spellcasters with Combat Reflexes to casting multiple spells per round from AoOs and other weird things. Needless to say, this is highly undesirable. If, instead, you restrict it either to the defined subset of things you want (spring attack, reckless offense, etc), or to full-round actions that allow an attack action, it'll likely work a lot better.

[Devronq]

Also there's a potential of it being.broken when.used to full attack with standard actions. I don't know if the potential is still there with an E6 game but I could imagine something like full attacking with manyshot would be pretty ridiculous as might some maneuvers with able to full attack with them might be too good. Again not sure I'd the problem would still exist in.Even.