There are four types of actions: single actions, activities, reactions, and free actions. Some activities can vary in their action cost, potentially costing 1 action, 1 free action, or 1 reaction.
In these cases, does the activity itself count as a single action, free action, or reaction instead of an activity? This is particularly relevant for the Ready action, which only accepts single actions and triggerless free actions.
Cast a Spell is one such activity. Cast a Spell used to say that if it costs a reaction or free action, it counts as a reaction or free action instead of an activity. However, the stat block for the activity didn't make it into the remaster. Instead, any spell counts as the Cast a Spell activity.
Cover Tracks and Track are other such activities. They can sometimes be performed in an encounter as a single action without the exploration trait.
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There's been a lot of debate in the past about whether you can ready one-action activities, because they are single actions, but they're also activities which are sometimes described as discrete from single activities.
The main description of actions doesn't even seem to acknowledge single action activities as an idea, though the subsection on activities does say that
In some cases, usually when spellcasting, an activity can consist of only 1 action, 1 reaction, or even 1 free action.
Although even then you could quibble over whether 'consist of' suggests that the activity is a container with a single action in it or is a single action.
As far as I remember there was no real clear RAW answer though most people I've seen assume it's allowed or allow it in spite of the ambiguity.
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I have never seen a clear RAW answer posted in all the years that this has been debated over.
The arguments for allowing it are generally that the loose language that the rules are written in don't make the distinction that clearly, and that forbidding it would nerf Summoner's Act Together (that has very similar rule phrasing and examples) too much. It would prevent things like Boost Eidolon being used by the Summoner on any turn where the Beast Eidolon uses their version of Sudden Charge and makes a second Strike.
The arguments against allowing it are generally that Readied Flurry of Blows with the Stunning Fist upgrade is too powerful because of how Stunned 1 during your turn works.
IMO, fixing Stunned 1 is a better plan than nerfing all of the abilities that allow using 1-action actions by forbidding them from working with 1-action activities.
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My understanding is that, originally, only multi-action sequences were supposed to be considered "activities." However, enough of the developers didn't get the memo and wrote it in incorrectly that the whole team later collectively just went "oh well," and so now action(s) and activities are--at least in practice--more or less synonymous with each other another.
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The crux of my argument on this topic in other threads is that an action has to not just cost only 1 action, but also BE only one action for it to count as a single action; because if you're taking MORE than one action it's not much of a SINGLE action
With that requirement one could NOT Ready Flurry of Blows or other multi-action activities that cost only 1 action, but COULD use Boost Eidolon as your single action during Act Together
This contradicts Player Core pg. 15: "Single actions use this symbol: [one-action]" They're the simplest, most common type of action. You can use three single actions on your turn in an encounter, in any order you see fit.
The game defines single actions as those that take one action to use and you get three "single actions" on your turn. It's a unit of action and not an indicator of not having subordinate actions.