For example of how it messes things up: As it is now, even the AI uses shove to cheese the game mechanics. No, I am not referring to enemies pushing PCs off off ledges. In-game, there is a Help action. It reoresents a bunch of different action usage from the 5e rules, such as making Medicine checks to stabilise dying characters, or rousing sleeping characters awake. It costs a full action.
So say you use Sleep on a bunch of goblins and one stats awake. The way the Help action is intended, he could then spend his action to help one of his sleeping comrades up. But you also awake on being attacked, and shoving is a kind of attack, so the way the AI is written is that the goblin will instead bonus action shove his friend and then use his full action to attack as well. His buddy will awake and immediately run over and bonus action shove another sleeping goblin. This makes the Sleep spell (already heavily nerfed ingame) pretty much useless, and all because of how the action economy changes from making shove a bonus action instead of an action. And that isn't fun either.
As a bonus malus, it also puts you the player in the position of either having to similarly cheese the game mechanics when your characters are felled asleep or deliberately play it suboptimally -- when even the AI wouldn't do that if it had the opportunity.
I'm guessing that an easy solution would be to change the AI so that it wouldn't use Shove on sleeping characters, and not often if ever on characters near ledges.
Alternatively, they could make it so that using Shove on a sleeping character has some sort of consequence, like a sleeping character attacking whoever used Shove on them, or a character woken like that having negative status effects (e.g. reduced AC) for a few turns.
For using Shove to push characters off of ledges, with the changes that I suggested, it shouldn't be likely for most characters to be able to consistently use Shove to push others off of ledges.
If the character being shoved has enough Weight, they wouldn't be pushed far if at all unless the character using Shove had a
very high Strength stat.
