New Bard College: College of Medicine

Bards of the college of medicine specialize in healing the sick and treating the injured. They have vast knowledge of herbs and poultices, and they use their skills in the arts to distract sufferers from their pain and to hinder their enemies.

Members of the College of medicine often create makeshift hospitals and gather together in informal medical schools, and they sometimes work closely with clerics to heal the wounded.

Bonus Proficiencies
When you join the College of Medicine at 3rd level, you gain proficiency with the Medicine skill and with herbalism kits.

Doctor
Also at 3rd level, you learn to grant great aid to those who are sick or injured. You gain the following benefits:

• You can use healer's kits as a bonus action.
• Whenever a creature uses one of your bardic inspiration dice, it also regains hit points equal to your level + the number it rolled.
• You can expend one of your uses of bardic inspiration to grant a creature you can see advantage on a saving throw against poison or disease.

Herbalist
At 6th level, you gain the ability to use your knowledge of herbalism to your harm your enemies. Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can cause the attack to deal an extra 1d6 poison damage to the target. When you reach 12th level, the extra damage increases to 2d6.

Master Physician
At 14th level, you reach the pinnacle of your craft. You can spend 1 hour ministering to a creature. At the end of the hour, you remove all curses, diseases, and poisons affecting the creature. The creature also regains all its hit points, and it has advantage on the next saving throw it makes against poison or disease. You cannot minister to another creature until you have completed a long rest.

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This College is an amalgamation of several abilities from clerics and wizards, altered somewhat, plus some original bard stuff. What do you think?

I like this.

One alternative you might consider for Herbalist is to impose the poisoned condition on the target until the end of the bard's next turn at 6th level, and at 12th level, to require that the target succeed on a Constitution saving throw for the poisoned condition to end.

This could be either in place of the extra damage in your description of the Herbalist feature, or in addition to it.

I like that idea. It makes it slightly different from the cleric ability.

Would you keep the spell list the same? Or would you modify it with more cleric-y spells like Restoration, Heal, etc (FYI - I am not sure if these are on the bard list)

Pretty cool. Only thing I can say might need changing is that a person who has one of your badric inspiration dice can either spend it to heal, or get the other features, but not both.

Good work. This is a really viable College for Bards.

Do we get a ClubMed?

Here's a revised version of the 6th level Herbalist feature. I decided that adding the poisoned condition would make the feature too powerful, especially since it can be used every turn on a successful hit. Instead, I made it an either/or choice for the bard:


Herbalist
At 6th level, you gain the ability to use your knowledge of herbalism to your harm your enemies. Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can cause the attack to either deal an extra 1d6 poison damage to the target or to impose the poisoned condition until the start of the bard’s next turn. When you reach 12th level, either the extra damage increases to 2d6 or the target is poisoned and must make a Constitution saving throw at the end of its turn for the poisoned condition to end. (revised)

I also considered adding a proviso for the 12th level poisoning that after the first failed saving throw, the second saving throw would be at disadvantage, but after that any needed saving throws would be with advantage as the target's Constitution began to break down the poison. That, however, might be complicating the crunch a little more than necessary.

That's not a bad idea. It may be too powerful to do both.

Thought I'd mention that my wife is going to be using this in about three weeks for her new bard. She's been itching to play a White Mage-y type character, and a bard is perfect for it.