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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 7159482" data-attributes="member: 2011">Err, Frost Giants have 60 foot range with their rocks (the same range as Cutting Words) and do 28 average points of damage. DC 14 Con save for Concentration if hit (40 points, DC 20 on a critical). A single giant can also double move and get within melee range of a Cutting Words bard in a single round. Since fighting giants typically means a larger room, I would expect a DM to assign one or more giants to melee attack the bard at least in some encounters.I don't know about your encounters, but the first casualty of nearly every encounter at our table is the plan.A bard who has a shield strapped on cannot cast any spells. It takes an action to get the shield off, so at best he might do is cast a bonus action spell in the same round. Once he loses concentration in the scenario you describe (or the foes get lucky and just plain wipe his animals out), the main option he has is to dodge. Course, dodging won't help when a giant grapples him and starts beating on him, or grapples/trips him, pins him to the ground and starts beating on him with advantage the following round. If he still has his Cutting Words on a given round, he might be able to stop a grapple. He might not. And my DM might just have the giant start walking away, carrying the grappled Bard 15 feet into the air while beating on him.A lot of this is dependent on the DM. Our DM has no qualms with ignoring PC tanks to focus fire on the squishy PCs, to have NPC allies hiding in the wings that the PCs do not know about, or to have traps and other impediments to our plans.Interestingly, the scenario you just described is something similar to what happened at our table (we weren't fighting Frost Giants, but the previous 3 battles were with Frost Giants). Unfortunately for our Lore Bard, the DM attacked his PC with a single foe 3 rounds in a row: critical, critical, and advantage critical. Basically, the odds of that happening against a PC that tends to stay out of melee is about once out of every three gaming decades (1 in 4103, assuming the PC gets attacked against AC about 5 times a gaming session unlike melee PCs who might get attacked against AC 25 times a gaming session). But, stuff happens. Unexpected stuff happens all of the time. In two of our recent giant fights, they had one or two adult white dragons on their side. +2 AC and dodging does not help against Dragon breath or most Dragon spells.The fact is that in your scenario, if crap hits the fan and the Bard has to start casting spells, it basically takes up to 2 rounds before he can get his first new spell out. 2 rounds is a lot of time when crap starts hitting the fan. It's a fine tactic if crap doesn't hit the fan and that's your basic assumption. That doesn't seem to happen a lot at our table. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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