this will be unpopular but a group of barbarians would be really fun. imagine rolling a steam train through a dungeon, constantly raging bashing everything they see
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
this will be unpopular but a group of barbarians would be really fun. imagine rolling a steam train through a dungeon, constantly raging bashing everything they see
i was looking for the most optimal class, the one that would be the most versatile in such a party, but such an party could probably work out quite nicely as long as you find a way to disitinguish between diffrent party members personality wise (the more schizophrenic/ supersticious ancestral guardians and totem warriors contrasted by the more hands on berserker barbarian and the hyper religious preacher of an zealot), barbarian can actiually have quite a bit of out of combat utility with some spell rituals and some more unorthadox uses of rage like using it to dampen a fall or to break objects or scale walls, the totem warrior would excell at such areas of the game. Would work best however if some feats were involved like maybe ritual caster (cleric or druid), inspiring leader, grappler, healer etc just to make shure they are as diverse as can be with their abillites, and maybe also make shure diffrent people focus on diffrent gimmics like maybe an horse barb and an brappling heavy barb etc
Specifically with the druids. theres no situation you can’t handle from combat to utility to role play.
Want to recon an enemy base. Wildshape into a flock of geese migrating. Can’t fly? A bunch of rats/cockroaches and a “exterminator” for the rat problem. stray cat and it’s kittens, spiders, etc. you can go anywhere unnnoticed, and that’s without even needing to rely on invisibility or pass without a Trace.
Druids can prepare spells daily so there’s little chance of players ever feeing like they are completely redundant to another. And druids aren’t a class where you’re limited in what kind of proficiencies in skills and tools you have for noncombat usage. It also was a lot of fun engaging in the various creative and inventive different ways of how people were druids. The stereotype hippie, the stereotype anti establishment, the stereotype DIYer, etc.
all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
I would definitely recommend wizard, mainly because (like Silmakhor said) after about level three, they could destroy most low level monsters, and they could share their spells with each other. Of course, this only works if they have don’t all have the same spells.
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I'm just... you know... friendly... possibly evil necromancer...
The biggest advantage of having a single class party is that you don't have any arguments about the amount of rest needed.
A party of Rogues never has to worry about the other classes complaining about how they need to stop and rest. They would need some short rests to use hit dice to heal up, but that's about it. A party of Warlocks would be happy to do four or five short rests in a day, and to stop for a short rest when most other classes are wanting to keep going. A party of Wizards would do their one short rest each day, and that's it.
For my most recent character, I chose to do a Warlock in great deal because the party already had an Evocation Wizard (who would at least agree to one short rest each day) along with a Lore Bard and a Battlemaster Fighter - both of whom love having short rests to get their Bardic Inspiration back and their Superiority Dice back.
I think Warlock, Cleric, and Druid stand out as having the best combined tanking, healing, and ranged damage abilities. I'm a bit hesitant about the Bard's tanking abilities or the Paladin's ranged damage abilities. It's important to not just have healing abilities, but also to have restoration abilities. The inability to remove harmful debuffs from a teammate can be quite limiting. Especially in campaigns where you can't just visit the nearby town and pay a Cleric to remove the curse from your party member.
I think Ranger is an overlooked choice here. They get the D10 hit die, the ability to use shields, and to choose the defense fighting style. They get a decent amount of healing and restoration type magic. And they're fantastic ranged damage dealers. A crew of Gloomstalker Rangers, with one using the Sentinel feat and a shield to be tanky, would have the necessary healing and restoration abilities, the necessary tanking abilities, and plenty of ranged damage. Along with having an absolutely devastating first round of combat. In the right campaign setting - one with plenty of darkness in dungeons or the underdark, this might be the best single class party, and would do so as a single archetype.
Wizards do have a spell that lets them heal their allies. Has anyone used Life Transference? Is it a good enough healing spell that we can consider Wizards to have the ability to heal their allies?
Wizards do have a spell that lets them heal their allies. Has anyone used Life Transference? Is it a good enough healing spell that we can consider Wizards to have the ability to heal their allies?
I use it with one of my chars. Its under appreciated.
An all Fighter party would not be viable for long because there would be no way to deal with most traps. A well planned kobold dungeon with a few kobold Wizards would wipe out a Fighter-only party pretty easily.
Clerics and Druids have the versatility to deal with a really wide variety of situations.
There are Cleric domains for almost everything. Need a skill check? Knowledge domain. Need stealth? Trickery Domain. Need Area of Effect damage? Light domain.
Druids because wildshape + spells can solve almost any problem so long as players are creative enough. Recon, tracking, damage type resistance, stealth, avoiding traps, getting out of traps, AoE, tanking, it's all there.
I think Warlock, Cleric, and Druid stand out as having the best combined tanking, healing, and ranged damage abilities. I'm a bit hesitant about the Bard's tanking abilities
why do you feel that warlock is any more bulky than the bard, both have the same d8 hit dice, shure fiend warlocks get some temp HP and some resistances, hexblades get some armor proficiencies and you could always use an invocation to cast false life at will, but at the same time so can the bard use spells to bolster their defenses, particularly heroisim and whatever they can get themselves via bardic inspiration, valor bards can get some armor proficency and both valor and lore bards can use their bardic inspiration to straight up reduce damage taken? not saying you are wrong, just curious on your point of view
An all Fighter party would not be viable for long because there would be no way to deal with most traps. A well planned kobold dungeon with a few kobold Wizards would wipe out a Fighter-only party pretty easily.
Clerics and Druids have the versatility to deal with a really wide variety of situations.
There are Cleric domains for almost everything. Need a skill check? Knowledge domain. Need stealth? Trickery Domain. Need Area of Effect damage? Light domain.
Druids because wildshape + spells can solve almost any problem so long as players are creative enough. Recon, tracking, damage type resistance, stealth, avoiding traps, getting out of traps, AoE, tanking, it's all there.
Dungeon delver. Solved for your fighter scenario.
we had the delver go ahead at normal speed. And we followed behind at half speed.
“when the hunted, becomes the hunter.” You’d be surprised how many ambushes he lead would be ambushers into, as he would dodge and run, and then we’d be like: “oh ho?”
add on:
fighters with their many more ASI. We had a lot of feats here and there.
all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
that seems more like an player problem than an problem with the class itself, just because everyone can try to make a stealth check to sneak past the guard or make an athletics check to push open a boulder does not mean that everyone should do it or even that everyone will be good at it, adding double your proficiency bonus will be a lot better than adding half your proficiency bonus.
The sub classes do not seem to be that similar, all of them have very different roles in the party and pretty diffrent abillities, the only real genericness is valor and swords both getting medium armor and extra attack (and that is fine since not only is swords meant slightly as an valor 2.0, but it is also made distinct by its blade flourish that makes it play a lot diffrently to how an valor bard might), lore and valor both allowing an person to boost their armor class against an incomming attack and entralling performance being an similar mechanic to words of terror, but that is about it in terms of similarities between diffrent collages, along with the customization in the breath of spells given to you and the fact that you can get expertise in any skill you want and you should be able to make bard characters who have an laser focus towards an particular playstyle or theme, an glamour bard "face" with an heavier focus on persuasion and performance and enchantment spells like charm person, sleep hideous laughter, heroisim, animal friendship, entrall, calm emotions, suggestion etc will feel a lot diffrent to an lore bard detective / inquisitive who focuses a lot on investigation and insight and has a greater focus on detection and divination spells such as, detect toughts, detect magic, speak with animals, comprehend languages locate object, see invisibillity, zone of truth etc, who in turn would feel a lot diffrent to an whisper bard focusing in the deception and stealth skills and honing in on illusions, more parasitic enchantment spells and weird utillity such as, unseen servant, silent image, disguise self, bane, dissonant whispers, invisibillity, magic mouth, skywrite, silence, hold person, who in turn whould be quite diffrent from an purely combat and mobillity focused swords bard focusing on the athletics and actobatics skills, thunderwave, healing word, feather fall, longstrider, enhance abillity, lesser restoration, shatter, heat metal.
despite my rant and seeming anger, i am really curious as to why you feel that way and would like nothing more than for you to elaborate a bit more on why you feel that bard characters are too similar for them to work in a party
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
that seems more like an player problem than an problem with the class itself, just because everyone can try to make a stealth check to sneak past the guard or make an athletics check to push open a boulder does not mean that everyone should do it or even that everyone will be good at it, adding double your proficiency bonus will be a lot better than adding half your proficiency bonus.
The sub classes do not seem to be that similar, all of them have very different roles in the party and pretty diffrent abillities, the only real genericness is valor and swords both getting medium armor and extra attack (and that is fine since not only is swords meant slightly as an valor 2.0, but it is also made distinct by its blade flourish that makes it play a lot diffrently to how an valor bard might), lore and valor both allowing an person to boost their armor class against an incomming attack and entralling performance being an similar mechanic to words of terror, but that is about it in terms of similarities between diffrent collages, along with the customization in the breath of spells given to you and the fact that you can get expertise in any skill you want and you should be able to make bard characters who have an laser focus towards an particular playstyle or theme, an glamour bard "face" with an heavier focus on persuasion and performance and enchantment spells like charm person, sleep hideous laughter, heroisim, animal friendship, entrall, calm emotions, suggestion etc will feel a lot diffrent to an lore bard detective / inquisitive who focuses a lot on investigation and insight and has a greater focus on detection and divination spells such as, detect toughts, detect magic, speak with animals, comprehend languages locate object, see invisibillity, zone of truth etc, who in turn would feel a lot diffrent to an whisper bard focusing in the deception and stealth skills and honing in on illusions, more parasitic enchantment spells and weird utillity such as, unseen servant, silent image, disguise self, bane, dissonant whispers, invisibillity, magic mouth, skywrite, silence, hold person, who in turn whould be quite diffrent from an purely combat and mobillity focused swords bard focusing on the athletics and actobatics skills, thunderwave, healing word, feather fall, longstrider, enhance abillity, lesser restoration, shatter, heat metal.
despite my rant and seeming anger, i am really curious as to why you feel that way and would like nothing more than for you to elaborate a bit more on why you feel that bard characters are too similar for them to work in a party
8 different bard only campaigns.
2 as dm. 6 as player. With a total of 31 different people played with (8 female 23 male). No 2 same modules/campaigns. And only did the same group of people for 3 of them. Granted 1 we added on 2 more to make it a larger party.
and every single campaign felt exactly the same. It’s next to impossible to fail skill checks in general. Between bardic inspirations, Peerless skills, guidances, other spell buffs, etc etc.
it took a ton of extra work as DM to make anything that was non-combat challenging for the PCs to do once they got past the initial levels.
the problem with the scenarios you paint for your differences is, that doesn’t really work out as much as you think when everyone’s a bard. Even as the specialist, you will not be the “best” at doing your specialized task, compared to the other bards, every single time. Literally no one stands out compared to the others unless you’re going around killing people and stealing their shadows to impersonate them and get their memories.
when all’s said and done. You still got to roll the dice. And in a 5 person party. On average 2 roll better than you. 2 roll worse. And when everyone is at worst a +2 to any skill check, and at best a +17. And that’s before again guidances and bardic inspirations and etc.
as a player it was boring and generic.
as a dm, it was a lot more time consuming than it needed to be, for quick resolutions that leave you unfulfilled as a DM.
entire zones of Forbiddance and anti magic fields, still a cake walk. Zones of truth zones. Still a cake walk. Etc.
and to top it off the most. It didn’t even require coming up with creative solutions to things anyways, as unless the DM just rage sets impossible DC of literally impossible. 1/5 people would succeed at it when attempted.
so group checks was the way to go, because there it had a failure rate that was more successful.
That all said: those are my experiences. I in no way discourage anyone from trying it.
i use the 3 campaigns with the same group as my main model, because after the first campaign together we understood the “pitfalls” of it and tried to work around it to differentiate ourselves more. And after the 2nd we changed around the DMs to see if that changed anything overall.
I would probably go with clerics just because of the wide variety of subclasses. You can build a decent fighter with war domain. Forge domain takes the place of an artificer. Trickery can take over for rogues, nature and tempest for druids. All clerics have good healing. Light has some good damaging AoE spells. Knowledge helps with proficiencies. You pretty much have all the bases covered.
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all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
that seems more like an player problem than an problem with the class itself, just because everyone can try to make a stealth check to sneak past the guard or make an athletics check to push open a boulder does not mean that everyone should do it or even that everyone will be good at it, adding double your proficiency bonus will be a lot better than adding half your proficiency bonus.
The sub classes do not seem to be that similar, all of them have very different roles in the party and pretty diffrent abillities, the only real genericness is valor and swords both getting medium armor and extra attack (and that is fine since not only is swords meant slightly as an valor 2.0, but it is also made distinct by its blade flourish that makes it play a lot diffrently to how an valor bard might), lore and valor both allowing an person to boost their armor class against an incomming attack and entralling performance being an similar mechanic to words of terror, but that is about it in terms of similarities between diffrent collages, along with the customization in the breath of spells given to you and the fact that you can get expertise in any skill you want and you should be able to make bard characters who have an laser focus towards an particular playstyle or theme, an glamour bard "face" with an heavier focus on persuasion and performance and enchantment spells like charm person, sleep hideous laughter, heroisim, animal friendship, entrall, calm emotions, suggestion etc will feel a lot diffrent to an lore bard detective / inquisitive who focuses a lot on investigation and insight and has a greater focus on detection and divination spells such as, detect toughts, detect magic, speak with animals, comprehend languages locate object, see invisibillity, zone of truth etc, who in turn would feel a lot diffrent to an whisper bard focusing in the deception and stealth skills and honing in on illusions, more parasitic enchantment spells and weird utillity such as, unseen servant, silent image, disguise self, bane, dissonant whispers, invisibillity, magic mouth, skywrite, silence, hold person, who in turn whould be quite diffrent from an purely combat and mobillity focused swords bard focusing on the athletics and actobatics skills, thunderwave, healing word, feather fall, longstrider, enhance abillity, lesser restoration, shatter, heat metal.
despite my rant and seeming anger, i am really curious as to why you feel that way and would like nothing more than for you to elaborate a bit more on why you feel that bard characters are too similar for them to work in a party
the problem with the scenarios you paint for your differences is, that doesn’t really work out as much as you think when everyone’s a bard. Even as the specialist, you will not be the “best” at doing your specialized task, compared to the other bards, every single time. Literally no one stands out compared to the others unless you’re going around killing people and stealing their shadows to impersonate them and get their memories.
when all’s said and done. You still got to roll the dice. And in a 5 person party. On average 2 roll better than you. 2 roll worse. And when everyone is at worst a +2 to any skill check, and at best a +17. And that’s before again guidances and bardic inspirations and etc.
as a player it was boring and generic.
and to top it off the most. It didn’t even require coming up with creative solutions to things anyways, as unless the DM just rage sets impossible DC of literally impossible. 1/5 people would succeed at it when attempted.
so group checks was the way to go, because there it had a failure rate that was more successful.
okay, but why would you always be an situation where everyone makes a skill check? I can get it in situations where you need to make an int lore based check to see if an character knows an particular piece of information (even if in cases of particularly rare and hidden lore only proficient characters or characters who would have a background related to that particular piece of knowlege should be able to attempt it), but why would everyone individually try to sneak past a guard, why would everyone individually try to persuade a citizen to join them, why would everyone try to intimidate somebody at once? There are a lot of tasks where only a single person would be able to perform a task at a time and where an failure would prevent anyone else from trying (like trying to disarm a trap and failure ending up with the trap being set off, pulling a lever without being noticed etc), and there are situations where an task would simply be impossible, no check required, if the party did not attempt to be at least somewhat creative, climing a sheer cliff is impossible without equipment you must first acquire or improvise, you cannot just steal jewelry from guards constantly watching it who refuse to look away under any circumstance without first employing some kind of illusion or strange deception (like pretending to fire the guards and replace them), no way for an person to perform advanced surgery without proper traing and equipment (or magic), no possible way for an person to properly belive an outrageous lie (or even an outrageous truth) without first seeing an piece of believable false evidence to back the claim up, even if they have known you for years and know you would never lie to them. Impossible checks have their place, even if they can feel a bit cheap
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
I guess that could solve some trap problems, but you would still have problems with magical traps, especially ones not triggered by 1 party member going through a spot first. Also, all you would need to do as the DM is isolate Dungeon Delver Fighter through some kind of forced teleportation effect and the other party members are sitting ducks.
I guess that could solve some trap problems, but you would still have problems with magical traps, especially ones not triggered by 1 party member going through a spot first. Also, all you would need to do as the DM is isolate Dungeon Delver Fighter through some kind of forced teleportation effect and the other party members are sitting ducks.
Yeah. If the DM is trying to tpk the party. Sending stones and other magical items only help so much.
all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
that seems more like an player problem than an problem with the class itself, just because everyone can try to make a stealth check to sneak past the guard or make an athletics check to push open a boulder does not mean that everyone should do it or even that everyone will be good at it, adding double your proficiency bonus will be a lot better than adding half your proficiency bonus.
The sub classes do not seem to be that similar, all of them have very different roles in the party and pretty diffrent abillities, the only real genericness is valor and swords both getting medium armor and extra attack (and that is fine since not only is swords meant slightly as an valor 2.0, but it is also made distinct by its blade flourish that makes it play a lot diffrently to how an valor bard might), lore and valor both allowing an person to boost their armor class against an incomming attack and entralling performance being an similar mechanic to words of terror, but that is about it in terms of similarities between diffrent collages, along with the customization in the breath of spells given to you and the fact that you can get expertise in any skill you want and you should be able to make bard characters who have an laser focus towards an particular playstyle or theme, an glamour bard "face" with an heavier focus on persuasion and performance and enchantment spells like charm person, sleep hideous laughter, heroisim, animal friendship, entrall, calm emotions, suggestion etc will feel a lot diffrent to an lore bard detective / inquisitive who focuses a lot on investigation and insight and has a greater focus on detection and divination spells such as, detect toughts, detect magic, speak with animals, comprehend languages locate object, see invisibillity, zone of truth etc, who in turn would feel a lot diffrent to an whisper bard focusing in the deception and stealth skills and honing in on illusions, more parasitic enchantment spells and weird utillity such as, unseen servant, silent image, disguise self, bane, dissonant whispers, invisibillity, magic mouth, skywrite, silence, hold person, who in turn whould be quite diffrent from an purely combat and mobillity focused swords bard focusing on the athletics and actobatics skills, thunderwave, healing word, feather fall, longstrider, enhance abillity, lesser restoration, shatter, heat metal.
despite my rant and seeming anger, i am really curious as to why you feel that way and would like nothing more than for you to elaborate a bit more on why you feel that bard characters are too similar for them to work in a party
the problem with the scenarios you paint for your differences is, that doesn’t really work out as much as you think when everyone’s a bard. Even as the specialist, you will not be the “best” at doing your specialized task, compared to the other bards, every single time. Literally no one stands out compared to the others unless you’re going around killing people and stealing their shadows to impersonate them and get their memories.
when all’s said and done. You still got to roll the dice. And in a 5 person party. On average 2 roll better than you. 2 roll worse. And when everyone is at worst a +2 to any skill check, and at best a +17. And that’s before again guidances and bardic inspirations and etc.
as a player it was boring and generic.
and to top it off the most. It didn’t even require coming up with creative solutions to things anyways, as unless the DM just rage sets impossible DC of literally impossible. 1/5 people would succeed at it when attempted.
so group checks was the way to go, because there it had a failure rate that was more successful.
okay, but why would you always be an situation where everyone makes a skill check? I can get it in situations where you need to make an int lore based check to see if an character knows an particular piece of information (even if in cases of particularly rare and hidden lore only proficient characters or characters who would have a background related to that particular piece of knowlege should be able to attempt it), but why would everyone individually try to sneak past a guard, why would everyone individually try to persuade a citizen to join them, why would everyone try to intimidate somebody at once? There are a lot of tasks where only a single person would be able to perform a task at a time and where an failure would prevent anyone else from trying (like trying to disarm a trap and failure ending up with the trap being set off, pulling a lever without being noticed etc), and there are situations where an task would simply be impossible, no check required, if the party did not attempt to be at least somewhat creative, climing a sheer cliff is impossible without equipment you must first acquire or improvise, you cannot just steal jewelry from guards constantly watching it who refuse to look away under any circumstance without first employing some kind of illusion or strange deception (like pretending to fire the guards and replace them), no way for an person to perform advanced surgery without proper traing and equipment (or magic), no possible way for an person to properly belive an outrageous lie (or even an outrageous truth) without first seeing an piece of believable false evidence to back the claim up, even if they have known you for years and know you would never lie to them. Impossible checks have their place, even if they can feel a bit cheap
With a bard only party. No task, unless you go off solo, is ever done alone. So you have to DM fiat those scenarios. And even then. The consequences only go so far. it takes a LOT more prep work as a dm than the other solo classes do.
well, they’re all bards. It’s not inconceivable that they don’t always know each other aside from by reputation or occasionally working together as circus troupe or playwrights or etc etc etc any bard idea ever had.
so, the 1 fails. The others then have their chance to succeed or fail on meeting same consequences by saying they don’t know that guy, or etc.
sure. I guess the bard only campaign doesn’t encounter this metric if you have a group of players who are murderhobos. But if you have a table of murderhobos, IMO, now you’re losing out on fun and such for a different reason.
The other option is to be an excessively heavy-handed dungeon master, trying to prevent players from achieving any goals at every turn.
this will be unpopular but a group of barbarians would be really fun. imagine rolling a steam train through a dungeon, constantly raging bashing everything they see
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
i was looking for the most optimal class, the one that would be the most versatile in such a party, but such an party could probably work out quite nicely as long as you find a way to disitinguish between diffrent party members personality wise (the more schizophrenic/ supersticious ancestral guardians and totem warriors contrasted by the more hands on berserker barbarian and the hyper religious preacher of an zealot), barbarian can actiually have quite a bit of out of combat utility with some spell rituals and some more unorthadox uses of rage like using it to dampen a fall or to break objects or scale walls, the totem warrior would excell at such areas of the game. Would work best however if some feats were involved like maybe ritual caster (cleric or druid), inspiring leader, grappler, healer etc just to make shure they are as diverse as can be with their abillites, and maybe also make shure diffrent people focus on diffrent gimmics like maybe an horse barb and an brappling heavy barb etc
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
Specifically with the druids. theres no situation you can’t handle from combat to utility to role play.
Want to recon an enemy base. Wildshape into a flock of geese migrating. Can’t fly? A bunch of rats/cockroaches and a “exterminator” for the rat problem. stray cat and it’s kittens, spiders, etc. you can go anywhere unnnoticed, and that’s without even needing to rely on invisibility or pass without a Trace.
Druids can prepare spells daily so there’s little chance of players ever feeing like they are completely redundant to another. And druids aren’t a class where you’re limited in what kind of proficiencies in skills and tools you have for noncombat usage. It also was a lot of fun engaging in the various creative and inventive different ways of how people were druids. The stereotype hippie, the stereotype anti establishment, the stereotype DIYer, etc.
all bards is actually the least fun one. And by a large margin. Because at a certain point... (level 2) essentially, everything becomes group checks for the DM because everyone is either proficiency, expertise, or Jack of all. To get non-group checks you essentially have to go solo off somewhere. Nobody stands out vs the others except in combat. And even there it’s a limited difference of standing out.
the college of whispers guy had the most fun prob because the college features weren’t mimic’d by others or able to. So they were actually able to stand out. But all bards. Super tedious. After about 4 sessions literally everyone just felt it was a going through the motions thing for the 50 some sessions over 3 campaigns of bards only we did.
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I would definitely recommend wizard, mainly because (like Silmakhor said) after about level three, they could destroy most low level monsters, and they could share their spells with each other. Of course, this only works if they have don’t all have the same spells.
I'm just... you know... friendly... possibly evil necromancer...
Hands down; clerics
The biggest advantage of having a single class party is that you don't have any arguments about the amount of rest needed.
A party of Rogues never has to worry about the other classes complaining about how they need to stop and rest. They would need some short rests to use hit dice to heal up, but that's about it. A party of Warlocks would be happy to do four or five short rests in a day, and to stop for a short rest when most other classes are wanting to keep going. A party of Wizards would do their one short rest each day, and that's it.
For my most recent character, I chose to do a Warlock in great deal because the party already had an Evocation Wizard (who would at least agree to one short rest each day) along with a Lore Bard and a Battlemaster Fighter - both of whom love having short rests to get their Bardic Inspiration back and their Superiority Dice back.
I think Warlock, Cleric, and Druid stand out as having the best combined tanking, healing, and ranged damage abilities. I'm a bit hesitant about the Bard's tanking abilities or the Paladin's ranged damage abilities. It's important to not just have healing abilities, but also to have restoration abilities. The inability to remove harmful debuffs from a teammate can be quite limiting. Especially in campaigns where you can't just visit the nearby town and pay a Cleric to remove the curse from your party member.
I think Ranger is an overlooked choice here. They get the D10 hit die, the ability to use shields, and to choose the defense fighting style. They get a decent amount of healing and restoration type magic. And they're fantastic ranged damage dealers. A crew of Gloomstalker Rangers, with one using the Sentinel feat and a shield to be tanky, would have the necessary healing and restoration abilities, the necessary tanking abilities, and plenty of ranged damage. Along with having an absolutely devastating first round of combat. In the right campaign setting - one with plenty of darkness in dungeons or the underdark, this might be the best single class party, and would do so as a single archetype.
Wizards do have a spell that lets them heal their allies. Has anyone used Life Transference? Is it a good enough healing spell that we can consider Wizards to have the ability to heal their allies?
I use it with one of my chars. Its under appreciated.
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An all Fighter party would not be viable for long because there would be no way to deal with most traps. A well planned kobold dungeon with a few kobold Wizards would wipe out a Fighter-only party pretty easily.
Clerics and Druids have the versatility to deal with a really wide variety of situations.
There are Cleric domains for almost everything. Need a skill check? Knowledge domain. Need stealth? Trickery Domain. Need Area of Effect damage? Light domain.
Druids because wildshape + spells can solve almost any problem so long as players are creative enough. Recon, tracking, damage type resistance, stealth, avoiding traps, getting out of traps, AoE, tanking, it's all there.
why do you feel that warlock is any more bulky than the bard, both have the same d8 hit dice, shure fiend warlocks get some temp HP and some resistances, hexblades get some armor proficiencies and you could always use an invocation to cast false life at will, but at the same time so can the bard use spells to bolster their defenses, particularly heroisim and whatever they can get themselves via bardic inspiration, valor bards can get some armor proficency and both valor and lore bards can use their bardic inspiration to straight up reduce damage taken? not saying you are wrong, just curious on your point of view
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Dungeon delver. Solved for your fighter scenario.
we had the delver go ahead at normal speed. And we followed behind at half speed.
“when the hunted, becomes the hunter.” You’d be surprised how many ambushes he lead would be ambushers into, as he would dodge and run, and then we’d be like: “oh ho?”
add on:
fighters with their many more ASI. We had a lot of feats here and there.
Alert dungeon delver “scout” battlemaster guy.
observant eldritch knight guy.
champion pam/sentinel
I took the healer feat for my BM.
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that seems more like an player problem than an problem with the class itself, just because everyone can try to make a stealth check to sneak past the guard or make an athletics check to push open a boulder does not mean that everyone should do it or even that everyone will be good at it, adding double your proficiency bonus will be a lot better than adding half your proficiency bonus.
The sub classes do not seem to be that similar, all of them have very different roles in the party and pretty diffrent abillities, the only real genericness is valor and swords both getting medium armor and extra attack (and that is fine since not only is swords meant slightly as an valor 2.0, but it is also made distinct by its blade flourish that makes it play a lot diffrently to how an valor bard might), lore and valor both allowing an person to boost their armor class against an incomming attack and entralling performance being an similar mechanic to words of terror, but that is about it in terms of similarities between diffrent collages, along with the customization in the breath of spells given to you and the fact that you can get expertise in any skill you want and you should be able to make bard characters who have an laser focus towards an particular playstyle or theme, an glamour bard "face" with an heavier focus on persuasion and performance and enchantment spells like charm person, sleep hideous laughter, heroisim, animal friendship, entrall, calm emotions, suggestion etc will feel a lot diffrent to an lore bard detective / inquisitive who focuses a lot on investigation and insight and has a greater focus on detection and divination spells such as, detect toughts, detect magic, speak with animals, comprehend languages locate object, see invisibillity, zone of truth etc, who in turn would feel a lot diffrent to an whisper bard focusing in the deception and stealth skills and honing in on illusions, more parasitic enchantment spells and weird utillity such as, unseen servant, silent image, disguise self, bane, dissonant whispers, invisibillity, magic mouth, skywrite, silence, hold person, who in turn whould be quite diffrent from an purely combat and mobillity focused swords bard focusing on the athletics and actobatics skills, thunderwave, healing word, feather fall, longstrider, enhance abillity, lesser restoration, shatter, heat metal.
despite my rant and seeming anger, i am really curious as to why you feel that way and would like nothing more than for you to elaborate a bit more on why you feel that bard characters are too similar for them to work in a party
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
8 different bard only campaigns.
2 as dm. 6 as player. With a total of 31 different people played with (8 female 23 male). No 2 same modules/campaigns. And only did the same group of people for 3 of them. Granted 1 we added on 2 more to make it a larger party.
and every single campaign felt exactly the same. It’s next to impossible to fail skill checks in general. Between bardic inspirations, Peerless skills, guidances, other spell buffs, etc etc.
it took a ton of extra work as DM to make anything that was non-combat challenging for the PCs to do once they got past the initial levels.
the problem with the scenarios you paint for your differences is, that doesn’t really work out as much as you think when everyone’s a bard. Even as the specialist, you will not be the “best” at doing your specialized task, compared to the other bards, every single time. Literally no one stands out compared to the others unless you’re going around killing people and stealing their shadows to impersonate them and get their memories.
when all’s said and done. You still got to roll the dice. And in a 5 person party. On average 2 roll better than you. 2 roll worse. And when everyone is at worst a +2 to any skill check, and at best a +17. And that’s before again guidances and bardic inspirations and etc.
as a player it was boring and generic.
as a dm, it was a lot more time consuming than it needed to be, for quick resolutions that leave you unfulfilled as a DM.
entire zones of Forbiddance and anti magic fields, still a cake walk. Zones of truth zones. Still a cake walk. Etc.
and to top it off the most. It didn’t even require coming up with creative solutions to things anyways, as unless the DM just rage sets impossible DC of literally impossible. 1/5 people would succeed at it when attempted.
so group checks was the way to go, because there it had a failure rate that was more successful.
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That all said: those are my experiences. I in no way discourage anyone from trying it.
i use the 3 campaigns with the same group as my main model, because after the first campaign together we understood the “pitfalls” of it and tried to work around it to differentiate ourselves more. And after the 2nd we changed around the DMs to see if that changed anything overall.
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I would probably go with clerics just because of the wide variety of subclasses. You can build a decent fighter with war domain. Forge domain takes the place of an artificer. Trickery can take over for rogues, nature and tempest for druids. All clerics have good healing. Light has some good damaging AoE spells. Knowledge helps with proficiencies. You pretty much have all the bases covered.
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okay, but why would you always be an situation where everyone makes a skill check? I can get it in situations where you need to make an int lore based check to see if an character knows an particular piece of information (even if in cases of particularly rare and hidden lore only proficient characters or characters who would have a background related to that particular piece of knowlege should be able to attempt it), but why would everyone individually try to sneak past a guard, why would everyone individually try to persuade a citizen to join them, why would everyone try to intimidate somebody at once? There are a lot of tasks where only a single person would be able to perform a task at a time and where an failure would prevent anyone else from trying (like trying to disarm a trap and failure ending up with the trap being set off, pulling a lever without being noticed etc), and there are situations where an task would simply be impossible, no check required, if the party did not attempt to be at least somewhat creative, climing a sheer cliff is impossible without equipment you must first acquire or improvise, you cannot just steal jewelry from guards constantly watching it who refuse to look away under any circumstance without first employing some kind of illusion or strange deception (like pretending to fire the guards and replace them), no way for an person to perform advanced surgery without proper traing and equipment (or magic), no possible way for an person to properly belive an outrageous lie (or even an outrageous truth) without first seeing an piece of believable false evidence to back the claim up, even if they have known you for years and know you would never lie to them. Impossible checks have their place, even if they can feel a bit cheap
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
I guess that could solve some trap problems, but you would still have problems with magical traps, especially ones not triggered by 1 party member going through a spot first. Also, all you would need to do as the DM is isolate Dungeon Delver Fighter through some kind of forced teleportation effect and the other party members are sitting ducks.
Yeah. If the DM is trying to tpk the party. Sending stones and other magical items only help so much.
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With a bard only party. No task, unless you go off solo, is ever done alone. So you have to DM fiat those scenarios. And even then. The consequences only go so far.
it takes a LOT more prep work as a dm than the other solo classes do.
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Ex: one person lies to guess or tries something.
okay. Consequences.
well, they’re all bards. It’s not inconceivable that they don’t always know each other aside from by reputation or occasionally working together as circus troupe or playwrights or etc etc etc any bard idea ever had.
so, the 1 fails. The others then have their chance to succeed or fail on meeting same consequences by saying they don’t know that guy, or etc.
sure. I guess the bard only campaign doesn’t encounter this metric if you have a group of players who are murderhobos. But if you have a table of murderhobos, IMO, now you’re losing out on fun and such for a different reason.
The other option is to be an excessively heavy-handed dungeon master, trying to prevent players from achieving any goals at every turn.
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