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.

Yes, sorry, I was saying that I wish that they had fixed that when they reworked focus points.

Taking random focus spells that you don’t need because you had to boost your pool was an issue before the rewrite, and it’s arguably even worse now post rewrite, because you benefit by taking them earlier.

Previously you just needed a second focus point by 12 and a third by 18 (since the once-a-day extra points weren’t that big a deal). Now if your party has time to rest longer you can get more focus spells per encounter as soon as you can take more spells.

• I’m very happy to see they’re keeping the “Anyspell” version of Wish as a ranked spell. That was an important component of Wish and was my biggest concern about moving Wish to a ritual. Making the gamebreaking side of Wish a ritual makes a lot of sense.
• I also like that the “monkey’s paw” aspect of Wish is now tied into the ritual check. Crit-succeeding a level 18 ritual is not trivial so it’s probably not going to break anything, and it adds some more chaos into world development instead of kicking it to the DM.
• I kind of wish the focus pool scaled independently of spells known, because now we still have the issue of a character that really only wants to do one thing with his focus pool having to spend extra feats on things he won’t use just to expand the pool. I think maybe the game just needs more focus spell options, especially utility stuff, and it will be easier to fill out the pool now that every spell expands the pool, but it’d be nice to not just have to take filler. A feat that just pushes the pool to 3 and nothing else would be neat.

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.

Ha ha! You think this is my REAL head?

These are all excellent points.

I think druid suffers a little from being so concentration-dependent, but in a campaign with an appropriate number of encounters that’s not really a big deal, you just want to ride one or two concentration spells for most of an encounter. And even in a too-few-combat-encounters situation, druid isn’t bad, they just won’t be quite as overpowered as everyone else.

Stars has always been a front-runner for me: I don’t like that its special form conflicts with Wild Shape utility, but with only a short rest to recharge them it’s pretty easy to get back up and running if you need a scout form. And it gives you a lot of flexibility both in and out of combat.

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.

Note that while Augury has a costly material component, the component isn’t consumed.

I think you covered everything that’s relevant. It’s a neat item in that it strongly incentivizes you to throw out divination spells as much as you can. Great for information gathering, but not a lot of combat relevance, and I’d expect the wizard to use it for a few days/weeks to get a bunch of information about the current plot and then attune to something else as he gets more magic items and more gold that makes just paying the price for new required divinations more reasonable.

Fortune’s Favor doesn’t seem wildly impactful to me, compared to some of the other 5th level spells you could be throwing around: you could have one reroll for each party member, or you could have a Transmute Rock or Wall of Stone that completely reshapes the encounter.
I think the one place it is pretty nice is on a Divination Wizard where you’re not paying the spell slot cost, you’re just paying whatever the difference between a 5th and a 4th level slot would be.

I also think that’s the only real benefit of Expert Divination here: it’s a tough sell casting Legend Lore at the start of a combat day even without the gold cost, it’s better to make that the last spell of the day if you didn’t need all your slots, or better yet just doing it on a downtime day. Especially since it’d cost you a preparation slot as well.

Optimizing this is probably just “Divination Wizard, cast Fortune’s Favor once a day for every combat day, cast free Divination/Legend Lore every downtime day”. If you consider that the effect of the item (trade a 5th level for a 4th and the whole party gets one reroll) that looks pretty good if not amazing.

It might not be worth the spell progression delay, but if you took Hexblade to 3 you could pick up Pact of the Chain for a familiar, which you could have be an imp for great flavor and a little extra survivability with invisibility.

Pact of the Tome also offers a familiar through the Book of Ancient Secrets invocation, but that doesn’t feel like it’s as worth the delay.

I would give some thought to taking Eloquence over Whispers: while the bonus damage is nice, the big thing is making sure you can reliably get Fear running, and Unsettling Words allows that reliably.

Your payoff here is permanently locking down one target for a whole combat as long as you can consistently land hits, and in that situation the damage rolls won’t really matter so much.

They don’t get another save, the rest of your party cleans up the others while you just plink away at your target (or just shoot at other targets, honestly, you don’t actually need to kill this one fast).

The primary drawback is a lack of reliable advantage,

For reliable advantage, the easiest approach would be Blindness/Deafness, but unfortunately I think that qualifies as the target not having line of sight to you anymore for Fear.

Shield Master won’t work either since the target will likely just stand from prone on their turn, before taking the AoO.

The Help action would give you a consistent source of advantage though (for only one attack, but that’s all you need), and it’s not too hard to get Find Familiar on a bard: using a Magical Secrets on it feels bad, but Ritual Caster or Magic Initiate would work. The normal risk of your owl getting swatted is much less since you can just move him into danger after your target is locked down from Fear.