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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6781724" data-attributes="member: 6790260">In combat, my Bard engages in vicious mockery quite frequently, but out of combat he's in the running for the most serious party member.I...don't actually want illusion of choice, though. My experience with 4e hasn't felt like an "illusion" of choice. I have enough variety of options from level-up powers that I can actually have meaningfully different options each turn, like a single-target spike, a whirlwind attack, etc. I honestly didn't play that much of 3e, in part because of the illusory "choices" you mention (particularly since specialization was the only way to make one of them good...unless you were a caster, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />)Kay so...I'm playing a Valor Bard, rather than Lore...and even if I weren't, I would only have just gotten it last session. So that's not super helpful, just from the get-go. (And, before it's asked: the DM insisted on beginning at level 1. I did ask, once, politely.)Secondly, I never said I don't care at all what other people are doing. I do care. But with only two uses of Bardic Inspiration per day, and at the moment *zero* things I can do with my reaction (not counting OAs), I don't really have a whole lot of options there. I had hoped that I could initiate some combos by grappling enemies, but my character is so fragile that trying to engage in melee has proven a death sentence (in one case, literally). I've handed out my BI dice...and then they typically go unused, even though I made every effort to remind people about them.I'm not sure what else I can be doing. I wanted to be providing a form of battlefield control by Grappling enemies (the Moon Druid typically takes Wolf form, so we have ample sources of Prone already), but as stated before, I got so thoroughly screwed up for trying, multiple times, I'm afraid to risk my character's life again. I wanted my spells to be clever battlefield-manipulations (my character sees himself as a budding blademaster), but instead they end up going almost purely to healing because combats have pasted us multiple times (in the span of...6 or 7 sessions, we've rolled at least 15 death saves between the five of us).My point about the "enjoying other peoples' turns" was not that I don't care what they do, but rather that what others do doesn't define my engagement with the rules. Whether I have to exert cognitive effort to participate in the fight is completely orthogonal to whether I care about the things other people are doing during their turns. As it stands, I feel like I have too few tools to work with, too few opportunities to use the tools I have, and too much pressure to conserve extremely precious resources because most every fight is a harrowing, barely-survived-with-some-people-bleeding-out experience. Most of the time, there's either too little material to engage with, or I don't get the chance to engage at all (like the combat where I dropped from full to 0 HP in the middle of the first round, because it's totally cool for a CR 2 enemy to have three attacks and thus do more average damage than I have health as a level 2 Bard).</blockquote>

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