Bardic College: College of Dirges [Second Draft]

Chances are, when I think something is perfect straight-off, it's way more deeply flawed than I thought.

The original Dirgesinger bard worked great as a proof of concept, but the nitty-gritty needed a lot of polish. While I was proud of how simple and short I made the whole thing, almost every ability needed some level of modification and suffered at least a small bit of bloat because of it.

Ah well, at least it's probably balanced. Probably.

CHANGELOG:

• "College of the Dirgesinger" is now "College of Dirges," to keep more in-line with naming convention
• Macabre Melodies now offers a choice of two cantrips, adding thaumaturgy as a possible cantrip you can learn. 
• Sorrowsong has been reworked, and now costs an action to use. It can deal psychic damage that scales with your Bardic Inspiration, and applies Incapacitated on a failed save. It's balanced to feel like an empowered vicious mockery that consumes a BI die to use. 
• Death's Defiance has been tweaked, only allowing for one successful usage per short or long rest. 

CONCERNS:

• Sorrowsong got changed quite a bit, which introduces a strong chance of it being buggy. It seems like it works, to me, but v0.1 also seemed perfectly fine. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Pre-release bug checks are a great thing, I should do them more often. 

Bardic College: College of the Dirgesinger [ROUGH DRAFT]

After that last bardic college, I figured I'd try another one. It's good to up the bard content of this blog, y'know?

The dirgesinger is an old 3.5 favorite, coming from the pages of Libris Mortis as a bard-focused prestige class, and generally being the way to capture a necromantic bard. The concept of a bard playing music compelling enough to raise the dead was always cool to me, and I felt 5e needed a better way to capture that than playing a Lore bard with heavy refluffing.

Also of note: this is the first project in a long while to end up with only two pages. I've been trying to make the abilities I write more concise and less long-winded, and this seems like a step in the right direction.

FEATURES:

• Death-themed cantrips and spells, high on flavor and low on complication. 
• Cast sorrowful songs and funeral dirges, making your enemies weep and bring voice to the dead.
• Stave of death with your music, by serenading death itself!

CONCERNS:

• I'm not sure where the power balance on Sorrowsong is. If anything, it could be too weak, because I tend to keep rough drafts conservative on ability strength.
• Death's Defiance seems at odds with the fact that this class option gets spare the dying, but I'm feeling that it makes for a more tactical and thematic bard experience, to give the bard multiple options to address the would-be death of a comrade. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• I don't know why, but I keep writing halflings in really depressing situations for the intro paragraphs. It works so well, I just can't help myself. 

Bardic College: College of the Crossroads [Second Draft]

It's funny, sometimes I see problems in my content that just don't exist. I thought flavor was weak in the rough draft this one, but you guys unilaterally disagreed. I'm betting it's because I've been staring at this option off and on for about half a year.

BUT, that's not to say the rough draft didn't have issues. Rough drafts always have issues. That's why there are second drafts.

CHANGELOG:

• You can now summon or dismiss your Precious Instrument similar to a warlock's pact blade.
• Silver Tongue no longer requires you to be holding your Precious Instrument, because it needed a little streamlining.
• Fiendish Tempo doesn't negate resistance or immunity, because that's just a bad mechanic to add when there's already a feat that confers it. 
• Infernal Orchestra and the Fiendish Instrumentalist have been buffed, as the ability now summons twice as many instrumentalists, and the instrumentalists have their damage and to-hit slightly increased.

CONCERNS:

• Nothing right now, aside from me still sucking at monster math. I'm beginning to believe that monster math is more of an art than a science, anyway.

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Always bug-check old content for mechanics you thought were a great idea half a year ago, that you've since learned are a terrible idea. 

Bardic College: College of the Crossroads [ROUGH DRAFT]

Sometimes, I sit on projects for a really really REALLY long time. If you look, you can see that I made a reference to this project in July of last year.

True to its name, the Bardic College of the Crossroads is a Devil-Went-Down-To-Georgia deal, gaining infernal musical power through besting a devil, or simply by cutting a deal or stealing from the forces of Hell.

Originally, I planned to have this as a sort of answer to a warlock's pact, with options dealing with the fey and great old ones, but I ended up feeling this was ill-advised for a couple of reasons. For one, it made the option feel very indistinct, like it didn't know what it was trying to do. For two, the Glamour Bard UA came out and undercut me with a fey bard. Such is the price of going on hiatus and dragging my ass, I guess.

What's worth playing about a Crossroads bard? Well:

FEATURES:

• A precious instrument that is the source of your powers, made of gold, silver, ruby, or similar.
• Self-focused Bardic Inspiration powers to keep you (and only you) safe from harm.
• Conjure a band of backup demons, good for helping in combat AND cheating at fiddle contests.

CONCERNS:

• Surprisingly, flavor might be weaker than I'd like. It IS a rough draft, though, and usually you guys are very good at helping me with flavor. 
• Bard capstones are hard to balance against one another, but I think this one was just about right. If it's too weak, it'll be easy to tweak and rebalance. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Apparently I'm sitting on a wealth of almost-finished work. Time to fix that.