Persuader9494

Technically the Mitflit has no penalty to its ability to see through a Lie: its Self-Loathing ability affects Will saves from Coerce, Demoralize, Make an Impression, and Request, and it's specifically flavored as self-loathing, so unless the bard is setting up the lie to attack their competence "You idiot, why are you attacking us? We're the emissaries sent by your boss" it doesn't really make sense to apply it. The flavor is very specifically that they're easy to bully because they hate themselves, so the bard nicely interacting with them doesn't work the same way.

From the Lie action block:

The GM might give them a circumstance bonus based on the situation and the nature of the lie you are trying to tell. Elaborate or highly unbelievable lies are much harder to get a creature to believe than simpler and more believable lies, and some lies are so big that it’s impossible to get anyone to believe them.

So ideally you'd just want to give them a large circumstance bonus for the pretty unbelievable lie, and let the dice decide.

Lie also has no Critical Success effect, the target either believes it or doesn't, so rolling particularly high above the DC doesn't do anything.

If the party does manage to succeed on the Lie with the circumstance bonus, I think TowardsTheFuture has it: you'd get a momentary cease-fire while they try and figure out what's going on, and the party would probably have to make additional lies to back it up. Going to check with the boss, resuming combat, and accepting your claims and doing what you tell them to might be on the table.

Another approach you can take is simply making it so a violent resolution does not lead the players to accomplish their goals as well.

Trying to get information about a big nasty with a cult, and the players decide to just murder all the cult members? Well, the players might be able to beat the cult in a fight, but not fast enough to prevent the cult from burning their sacred texts, and now you have to piece info together out of the ashes.

This is a difficult line to walk: you have to plausibly present that the outcome would have been better if they had negotiated or infiltrated, versus just "well the DM was never going to give us the text anyway". You also have to make sure you don't just lock off the plot because they fought.

You need a clear backup plan that's just annoying enough to make it clear putting a little more thought into your first approach could have saved a lot of time., and maybe a slight downgrade of the end result of the plot (time is classic here, maybe a couple people the party was expecting to save got sacrificed while the party was messing around).

Not every fight has to end in death: have an encounter with enemies motivated to capture PCs (ransom, perhaps, or simply averse to killing), and have them do so when a PC goes down.

If it's a TPK then they have to break out of captivity, or possibly negotiate their release in exchange for solving a problem for their captors. If only one or two PCs go down then the remaining members might have to find a way to pay the ransom, or find a way to break them out. If it's mixed, then maybe it's a coordinated jailbreak with PCs working together from inside and outside.

Fun scenario, but a giant pain in the butt for whatever other goals they had in the campaign, and a great wakeup to "hey, maybe I shouldn't just be bulling into every fight". You can steer towards a solution that doesn't involve fighting as well, to give them a forced crash course in their characters' nonviolent capabilities.

Yeah that's valid, the case where we've suddenly lost an item or are trying to take it might come up very suddenly. I was thinking more of a situation where you know the maguffin is in an area but don't know where, or are in the right house but need to find its hiding place: you often go into that with advance knowledge.

I chose Locate Object as my example spell because it's on a lot of spell lists so is plausibly something that could be used no matter what class other people suggested, which actually kind of cuts into the concept of wizard supremacy. Arcane Gate, Modify Memory, Seeming, Guards and Wars, Fabricate*, Control Water, and Speak with Dead are all also good candidates for "I don't know how often this would come up, but when it does boy howdy is it useful"

*Fabricate might be good enough to be learned by a spontaneous caster.

I'm very intrigued by artificer, and I think you're absolutely right: it has utility reminiscent of bard, but gets a prepared list that swaps like a cleric/druid (no having to worry about getting access to the spell), and a bunch of other utility through infusions. Filling your hideout with sentient plant spies through replicating Pots of Awakening is exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. The spell list is a little shallow to me, definitely not the same depth as the wizard list especially since it cuts off at 5th, but there are a decent number of niche tools there.

If there ends up being a good niche for a Defender or Scout, Armorer is on my shortlist, especially because it can plausibly fill both roles with the same build.

That's definitely some powerful utility, you basically get to cherrypick the best stuff from the entire game.

But it's more "Bard does a few (granted, quite a few) things amazingly well" versus a wizard or druid getting to do anything on their spell list.

That being said, between this and your comment about scrolls I think I at least have to spec out a Creation bard and see how well it would approximate what I'm trying to do.

I'm certainly not denying Bard's utility power, it's just not quite hitting the "oh there's a spell for that" feel I wanted out of this character.

If you’re a bard you should honestly make your character last because it’s less flexible once done (spell known), but can fit any niche in construction.

I think we're kind of on the same page with this: bard can fill any role it wants very well, what I'm trying to do is fill a hundred weird niche scenarios. A bard can be a great skill monkey, blaster, controller, striker... whatever. you want.

But it can't really solve "we need to fortify this keep against a zombie horde that will arrive in a week", because the spells that would do that well aren't spells you can take for the other 99% of situations. A Druid preps Wall of Stone, Stone Shape, Plant Growth, Druid Grove, Move Earth, and Transmute Rock, and goes to town. A Bard might have one or two of those since some of them are actually pretty good for general use, but he won't be able to access all of them. And if for some reason he does, he won't have the toolkit for the next weird scenario that pops up.

I think in a lot of situations, particularly non-combat, there's plenty of time to handle things the next day. Combat tends to be very time-pressured while non-combat situations tend to not have meaningful time pressure.

The comment about the scroll is a good one: if I'm going to need Locate Object 3 times in the campaign as a wizard, and I'm certainly not taking it as one of my leveled spells, I'll have to obtain at least one scroll of Locate Object to have it as an option at all. How confident am I I'll only be able to find one, versus just finding 3?

This does only apply to the Wizard though, and might be a point against the Wizard doing this best. A Cleric is never more than 24 hours from having Locate Object available.

Any particular tricks to making scroll stockpiling easy? I guess it's really just up to the DM making them accessible and having income to use them.

It has more to do with the American war strategy in general: air supremacy is just the plan, and America has a lot of tools to root out AA and destroy enemy air forces. Compare to someone like Russia who is explicitly choosing not to dominate the airspace and relying on artillery for its fire support, and as a result has different focuses.

It doesn't have zero defense against AA- as a commenter upthread pointed out, this picture is literally showing it launching flares against heat-seeking missiles- but it's not something that's designed to work only when fighting non-peer forces, it's essentially capitalizing on the air supremacy that other components of American forces will be creating.

It's interesting because you don't want the level 13 end concept, so the question becomes how the power level compares to normal progression? Obviously the first level is the same since you can't multiclass, but at some point this is going to drop way off. I'm not sure at what point.

I think the biggest problem is that you'll have to be incredibly mediocre in all your abilities: even with +3 ASIs from race, point buy can only get you straight 13s, and while you could theoretically delay some abilities through ASIs, you pay extra in point buy past 13 (versus ASIs which are all equivalent).

You could probably set up an Eldritch Blast character with a bunch of utility cantrips, but making attacks with a +1 bonus is going to be agonizing, unlike your damage since you can't take Agonizing Blast. You'll scale with level but it'll drop off pretty quick, since one level in lock keeps you behind on damage and you'll never get the splashier spells more focused characters will.

As others have said, Sunlight Sensitivity is probably the gamechanger here. If you're getting reliable advantage, that's huge, and if you aren't then you don't really get much from Volo's.

If you're locked to Scout, I think this provides a strong argument for Volo's kobold. The level 17 ability is very powerful, but locks down your build in a couple ways:

• Because you need to attack two different targets to get full Sneak Attack damage, you will almost always want to be building for ranged. This means that the sorcerer cantrip you get from Mordenkainen's kobold is just utility: you won't be able to use Booming Blade well, and Fire Bolt won't be as good as just taking a shot. It also means that Draconic Cry isn't very good, as you'd need to be within 10 feet of your enemies to use it.
• Because it takes up your bonus action, that means you're missing a reliable way to get Sneak Attack. Steady Aim would be fine on other ranged rogues, but it also uses your bonus action. Pack Tactics provides this quite easily off your frontliner, who will generally be within 5 feet of two enemies.

If you're planning a more melee-focused rogue, you probably want a different subclass.

The problem I have with bard (and in general spontaneous casters) is that they can't change out spells except on leveling, and they have very few spells known.

So that's great if you want something like Enhance Ability that's going to be useful in a lot of situations, but it'd be very hard to take a spell like Locate Object, because it's a significant chunk of your spells known and you'd probably use it 3 or 4 times across an entire campaign.

But if you're a prepared caster, if it's looking like a situation where you'd want Locate Object, you can just prepare it that day, use it as needed, and then swap it back out for something more generally useful. That kind of approach is what I'm trying to build on.