D&D 5E Primeval Awareness and other hidden gems

[MonkeezOnFire]

Hero's Feast strikes me as a great buff for when you know you're going to get into an important fight that day. Such as when raiding a monster's lair. Really looks great when going hunting for green dragons.

You could always ask your buddies to help you with the cost as well. "Anyone wanna split a celestial pizza? It's absolutely divine!"

 

[EroGaki]

It also costs 1,000 gp per casting, so it's not something you can just cast every day.

1000 gp isn't so bad, especially since there really isn't much to spend gold on in this version of the game.

 

[Piratecat]

1000 gp isn't so bad, especially since there really isn't much to spend gold on in this version of the game.

That's my group's opinion: when you know there will be trouble, it's money well spent. They set aside an equal share of treasure into the party fund to pay for these sorts of expenses. It currently has some 36K in it, so they're feeling pretty profligate.

Another cool trick: one of the cantrips (I forget which one) creates a minor tremor you can use to impress people. You know what it's also great for? Utterly misdirecting monsters with tremorsense. They're using it as a Thumper to bring the burrowing beasties up out of the ground away from the group, and then for covering their own movement (giving them advantage on stealth checks when moving and it's underground.) Cool use of a minor spell.

 

[guachi]

Vicious Mockery. I have lost count how many kobolds have died from our bard's yo mama jokes. It has become tradition to hurl an insult every time something dies from it. Adds a lot of fun to the gaming table.

Your group uses Yo' Mama jokes with Vicious Mockery, too? We love when the Bard casts it and comes up with something funny.

 

[Chocolategravy]

Primal Awareness is pretty bad... and the fact that it is usually WORSE in your favored terrain is funny. It should let you know direction or something instead of giving you a radius so large as to be useless.

 

[pedro2112]

Guidance, the clerical cantrip. +1d4 to almost every noncombat ability check, such as skill rolls, as long as you have six seconds to prep for the task. If you aren't Concentrating on anything else out of combat, you can keep it running for whenever a fight starts and you need to roll Initiative, since that's a stat check.

That's silly, very silly. Does anyone really try to pull this stunt at your table?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

That's silly, very silly. Does anyone really try to pull this stunt at your table?

If anyone actually tried to keep guidance up all the time in my group, I'd require the player to constantly chant loud enough to be heard by the other players.

 

[PnPgamer]

Heroism is a spiffy spell as well. Also twin spell metamagic gives way more benefit for your sorcery points than changing them directly to spell slots.

 

[Zaruthustran]

That's silly, very silly. Does anyone really try to pull this stunt at your table?

It'd be a poor cleric who had the ability to offer his god's Guidance for the benefit of the party, and declined to do so at every opportunity.

 

[Riley37]

There's another thread about Guidance in particular, with some suggestions about making it limited-use, eg a limit similar to the limits on Bardic Inspiration or paladin's detection... in which case it becomes the *one* limited-use cantrip.

Others said fine, yes your God gave you that power and WANTS you to succeed as often as possible, just have the cleric's player hand d4 to the player of whichever PC is receiving Guidance.

Hm. An option I hadn't seen in that thread, inspired by "Mage: The Hero Discovered": the cleric can use Guidance only in the service of their god's purposes, such as domain-relevant and alignment-relevant. But that could still be every stat roll along the course of a raid on a temple of elemental evil (except tasks taking more than a minute, etc.)

Pedro, when would and wouldn't you tell a player "no, you may not cast that cantrip"?