Warning: This is a rant about game design. Ye have been warned.
Guidance is a terrible spell. It’s so bad, in fact, that I’d argue it flirts with being objectively bad.
I mean, not if you’re the character casting it. If you’re casting the spell, it’s absolutely fantastic. Guidance is not only incredibly powerful, it is constantly useful. That’s actually part of the problem.
Let me back up for a second.
There are two principles of game design on which this rant is based.
First, in a game where players choose between different abilities, any ability which is so good that everyone should pick it every single time is almost always an indication that the ability is broken. Whether or not the ability actually breaks the play of the game, it has broken the process of choosing abilities. The auto-choose ability flattens the game by reducing the diversity and variety of characters.
Second, declaration gotcha mechanics aren’t fun. This is basically the, “Whoops! You forgot to say ‘Simon Says’ before collecting your victory points, so I automatically win the game!” school of game design and it almost always results in terrible experiences. Just imagine Dennis Nedry laughing in your face for eternity:
(Another common example of this in D&D are DMs who resolve traps as purely declaration gotchas: “Whoops! You forgot to say, ‘I search for traps,’ so here’s your random damage tax!” See Rulings in Practice: Traps for a better way of running traps. But I digress.)
So let’s talk about guidance.
In 5th Edition D&D, guidance is a cantrip that allows the caster to touch one willing creature and grant them +1d4 to any ability check of their choice made within the next minute. It requires concentration, but because it’s a cantrip you can cast it as often as you like.
First off, this is clearly a must-have spell. It grants, on average, +2.5 on ability checks. So any group without guidance is, on average, performing 12.5% worse on ability checks. That’s huge! To put that in perspective, getting a +2 proficiency bonus requires at least five levels of advancement. Guidance allows 5th level characters to make skill checks as if they were 13th level characters.
This makes guidance the auto-choose spell that we were just saying is a huge, neon red flag in game design. If you’re the character in the group who has it on your spell list, you’re obligated to take it, and I’ve witnessed multiple Session 0’s in which players have specifically coordinated to make sure that someone has guidance covered. It’s absolutely a character creation tax.
It’s also just a terrible spell in actual play.
Let’s start by pointing out that it’s actually difficult to explain what guidance actually does. If I cast a fireball spell, it creates a giant ball of fire. If I cast absorb elements, we can visually imagine the flames of the fireball being absorbed or noticeably weakened around me. With knock we can imagine tendrils of magical energy turning the tumblers in the lock. And so forth.
But guidance? It’s a spell that can help the recipient with both a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check a Wisdom (Insight) check; and I don’t even have to determine which one at the time I cast the spell. In some cases you can kind of improvise something that the magic might be doing (lightening your limbs? letting you see someone’s pulse? whispering secrets from the primeval Font of Knowledge to help with that Intelliegence (History) check?), but in practice the spell appears to be sufficiently dissociated that its casting is almost always a simple declaration – “I cast guidance!” – with no clear concept of what’s actually happening in the game world.
More importantly, what makes the spell so essential is that it can improve every single ability check. And therefore, of course, it must be cast for every single ability check.
This is the declaration gotcha. You forgot to say you were casting the spell? Congratulations! You just made your group significantly worse!
And even if you do remember to say it, the experience at the table is just dreadful. “I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance. I cast guidance.” An endless, mindless drone which is both a tax you are obligated to pay and an action which is not only devoid of narrative worth, but an active distraction and detraction from whatever the focus of play actually is.
“But I like it when PCs assist each other!”
Me, too. But that’s not really what guidance does. Because the spell has no narrative presence in the game world, it doesn’t create the experience of one character helping another. And because its use is so generic as to be mindless in its application, there’s no true satisfaction or sense of accomplishment. In my experience, guidance actually gets in the way of players creatively coming up with ways of assisting each other!
“You should just tell the player to stop metagaming!”
There’s no metagaming here. If you’re on a dangerous adventure and you have a spell that you can freely cast that will help you or your comrades succeed in your tasks, you would absolutely cast that spell. In fact, because the spell lasts for one minute and allows the recipient to invoke it at the moment the skill check is made, it would actually make the most sense in character to be constantly casting the spell every minute. You’d be a fool not to.
“But guidance isn’t as useful in combat because the caster has to use an action to cast it!”
I honestly don’t care. You could completely ban guidance from being used in combat and it would still be a broken, awful spell.
It is true, though, that guidance is less of a problem in combat. Why? Because your actions in combat are a limited resource, and therefore the need to use one of those actions to cast the spell imposes a cost.
And that cost is, essentially, what’s missing from guidance. Without a cost outside of combat, it’s actually failing to cast guidance as often as humanly possible which is the cost. And it is precisely this which makes the spell miserable in play and broken in design.
So is there a way to fix it?
Yup.
Ditch guidance entirely and roll it into bless, which is a 1st level spell that currently only affects attack rolls and saving throws. The spell remains quite useful, but you’ll now need to exercise some thought to determine when it is best used.
I disagree. For one, it can add to the RP. As you noted, it is often forgotten by the cleric or druid or they aren’t quick enough to offer it. So as I player I always ask for a small prayer from the cleric or druid if I’m making an important roll. Then they are like, “Oh yeah, may the gods guide you towards a victorious outcome for your faith. I cast guidance!”
But if you insist on changing it, how about making it a class feature and limited to a number of uses equal to the character’s proficiency bonus like Bardic Inspiration?
Nobody is going to waste a 1st level spell slot on a single die roll if you merge it into the Bless spell. That seems like a non-starter for me.
“Let’s start by pointing out that it’s actually difficult to explain what guidance actually does.”
Much like Bless, this is fairly easily explained as the spell providing “divine guidance” to the person it’s cast on. You find yourself moving your pick slightly further than you originally intended and that’s exactly what you needed to open the lock, you find your eyes drawn to exactly where the ambush was hiding, or you tap in to a hidden well of strength to lift a heavy stone door. Prior to the Artificer class, only “divine” casters had it, so it was them literally asking their god to provide a blessing to someone.
The addition of Artificer makes the spell a bit weird, but performing spells in weird and unconventional ways is also their whole schtick, so I’d say the burden of how the spell happens is on the player, but an example could be that they make a little magic drone friend that follows the character around and helps them with a task.
The rest of the article makes good points, though I’m lucky to have a PC group dynamic where Guidance is regularly unable to be used when it matters most due to various reasons (already concentrating, group is split, or extended checks), so it actually ends up making a lot of situations *more* interesting through its absence.
I usually roll a check for random encouter when my players cast a spell with verbal component during an exploration turn. In this way they have to choose between a bonus on the ability check with a chance of random encounter or just the ability check without bonus. The same about the use of light spell instead of a torch.
In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, a target can only receive Guidance once per hour, eliminating spam. Another fix would be to increase the casting time.
I usually ask the player who cast guidance to describe how they guide (motivates / bless) the other character. One of them likes to invent false proverbs, while another see this as an opportunity to sell his religion to the party. It usually brings light roleplay to the table that is appreciated.
As a cleric character, I also only guide actions I approve of.
A mechanic that creates roleplay and also helps the party succeed? I like it.
Guidance also interacts poorly with ability checks that sum up long periods of preparation and effort. If you pull an all-nighter checking the records of the Dorglow Mining Company for irregularities, can I come in at 6am with a cup of coffee and a Guidance to help you on the Investigation check that determines what you find? If we spend the weekend entertaining and flattering the Pasha at our country villa, will you benefit from a shot of Guidance at 8:59pm on Sunday night, just before you make your heartfelt appeal for his support in our upcoming coup?
Yeah, I’m playing a cleric right now and I’ve always assumed that I could not help via Guidance if the check was one of those longer-term effort ones. (When I do use it, it’s developed into a shorthand of “here, have some guidance” and clicking the d4 button in Roll20. But yeah, it feels like an obligatory thing rather than something that’s actually interesting.)
I played as a Cleric and I had to spend all the time remembering to cast Guidance and reminding my teammates they have Guidance, because everyone always forgets about the finicky little bonus dice.
Now I’m DMimg and the group’s Bard has to do the same + Bardic Inspiration, but at least BA has limited uses.
Honestly, I’ve half a mind to remove that spell from the game and save us the hassle.
Guidance is also not a reaction/interrupt. So you can’t interrupt another player’s action (the one attempting the skill) to get guidance in place.
I actually took a sharpie to my PHB and crossed out cantrip and wrote in 1st level because I was so tired of the constant interruptions. Every time another character is having a cool moment, along comes, “I cast guidance”, like a fart before the guitar solo.
Now that I’m reading your frustrations with it, I wonder if there would be a benefit to making it an always-on 10-ft aura for Clerics that is turned off for combat or relies on concentration. It still allows the Cleric to have their broken ability but stops it from being declared like an interruption.
Other possible options:
1. Make the modifier d4-2. Usually you get a small bonus, sometimes you get nuthin, and a quarter of the time you get a penalty. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
2. Make it a 3rd level spell.
3. the caster suffers damage equal to the bonus every time it is cast.
4. Make it loud. The recipient of the spell shouts as loudly as they can for the next 5 minutes, every time it is cast.
There’s lots of other weird stuff you could do with it. Random effects, fires, explosive diarrhea, hallucinations, anvils falling from above, old gods appearing…
The more I read about 5e, the better I feel about my decision to not buy it.
“So is there a way to fix it?”
Just a random idea (I am not playing or DMing 5th edition DnD, so I am not an expert in rules and can not test this idea):
1. Change “+1d4 to any ability check” to “advantage to any ability check”, so guidance represents some sort of magical luck.
2. Change duration from “one minute” to “until the first ability check”, so spellcaster do not have to cast this spell every minute, but the bonus becomes mandatory and can not be saved for later.
3. Add limitation “can be cast only once on each person per day” (or “can not be cast again on the same person until this person takes a long rest”), so now spellcaster shoul be carefull in decision to cast this spell.
Totally agree. Though I don’t think “12.5% worse on ability checks” is the right math for this. If you say that people are rolling 10.5 on average without guidance, that means 10.5+2.5=13 on average with guidance. So without guidance you’re doing 2.5/13 = 19% worse.
Well now I’m wondering if the situation couldn’t be improved by changing the casting time of Guidance to 10 minutes, which seems to be the way they discourage constant spamming of ritual spells like Detect Magic. Guidance would still be useful, but only in situations where you’re willing to pause for ten minutes before making the ability check.
I think is hard to salvage a cantrip like Guidance.
One cantrip that could be up there is Keith Baker new take on magecraft
It takes 1 action, you can only cast it on yourself, it requires concentration and last 1 min.
The spell gives you advantage on an ability check using a TOOL you are proficient with
I don’t really disagree with anything you said, but your main point seems to reflect the mindset that if your PC doesn’t always behave optimally, you’re playing “wrong”.
In my group, sometimes the artificer casts guidance before another PC makes an important ability check, and sometimes he doesn’t. Nobody gets mad at him when he forgets.
Meanwhile, I’m playing a lore bard, and I *could* have learned fireball as one of my magical secrets — other players suggested it, since nobody else in the party has access to that spell. However, I chose not to because it didn’t fit my character concept, and I don’t feel bad about that decision.
I do wish that guidance could somehow be limited to cases where the PC is preparing to do something “active”. It just seems metagamey to me to cast it right after the GM asks a player to make a Perception check, or some sort of knowledge check, etc..
“Nobody is going to waste a 1st level spell slot on a single die roll if you merge it into the Bless spell. That seems like a non-starter for me.”
I don’t think that’s what he’s suggesting. I’d assume that if you changed the bless spell to allow it to benefit ability checks, it would work on *any* ability check for the duration of the spell, just like it does for attack rolls and saving throws.
Of course, if you upgraded bless that way, you’d need to make the equivalent alteration to bane.
How about making Guidance burn 10gp of treasure per invocation?
Another possible solution: when a player takes “Guidance” as a cantrip, make them choose ONE ability that Guidance works on. (They could theoretically use multiple cantrip slots for multiple abilities — “Guidance (Dex),” “Guidance (Wis),” etc.)
That way you can’t spam it on everything — but you can make your party consistently better at one particular subset of skills appropriate to your god.
Theoretically, you could also let it be cast using an L1 spell slot to affect other abilities.
I love your solution at the end, definitely going to try rolling Guidance and Bless into one spell.
Gotta say though, as a player I love RPing with clerics who abuse Guidance. “Hey, I appreciate the help, but could you maybe stop touching me and invoking your foreign god every time we round a corner? It’s getting creepy. Or rather, it was always creepy, now it’s annoying.”
I’ve always played and ruled that Guidance is can only be used to support checks that are both ‘physical-ish’ AND that the caster is aware is about to be attempted.
i.e. if you’ve called your rogue across to pick a lock, you can give them guidance on their attempt. If your wizard is trying to recall where they left their favourite slippers though, you couldn’t give them guidance to help them remember (because that’s a thing in their memory). You can give guidance to the person about to haggle on prices, but not to the person who just told a lie and now needs to make a deception check.
It does require quite a lot of cooperation from players, and the occasional ruling in edge cases by DM’s (e.g. a spontaneous perception check from the opposite end of the marching order is a no go; but being sent up the mast to make a perception check from the crows’ nest is all good), but works reasonably well in my experience.
This feels like it does a pretty good job of keeping to the spirit of ‘May the Force be with you [in this specific thing you try to do]’ that I like to believe Guidance lines up with.
That is not how maths works hon.
Getting the equivalent of +2 can also be achieved by eg having someone else there to help so it’s not how levelling works either
And as a final problem, look up what “ability checks” actually covers.
@Semele: Oh, sweetie. I understand you’re struggling with the rules and I want to help.
Can you explain why, exactly, you think the guidance spell precludes all other bonuses to the skill check? This might help us figure out how you can avoid similar errors in the future, but you should know that it does not, of course, do this.
Also, the Help action doesn’t grant a +2 bonus. It grants advantage on the check. Easy mistake to make, but, of course, completely wrong.
I’m afraid you haven’t given me enough information to really diagnose where your misunderstanding of what an ability check is, but I’m more than willing to help if you’d like to elaborate.
My suggestion, for anyone who might care: keep Guidance as a cantrip, remove the concentration requirement and make it last 24 hours; however, any character may benefit from it only once per day.
This way, you can still encourage RP – the caster prays for the party’s success – and curtail spamming.
I ruled that you could only be use it once every scene, so casting it is more ocasional and players start strategizing where to use it or not. I also tell the casting player to describe how their god helps their ally in their task.
I agree it has the potential for abuse. Even under the guise of “we can roleplay it,” because I think just about anything that can be abused can also be dismissed as roleplaying.
That said, I agree that it could be fixed to make it still usable and less prone to abuse. There’s a lot of good ideas here. I’d suggest making it a feat (maybe call it Mentor) that does the same as the guidance spell, usable either three times -or- 3 times/day/person (meaning a given person can only benefit from the “guidance” three times per day) . Or something like that. Maybe it also grants increases your Wisdom or Charisma score by 1 also. That’s what I’d do, were it me.
Is this not an issue for other cantrips, and isn’t the problem their “at will” nature? I understand why the change, so that casters could have a damage effect to use in combat like a weapon, but for anything else, isn’t spamming inevitable without some limit somewhere?
I’ve added orisons (clerical cantrips) to my 1e setting, and realized right away that there had to be limits on some things I thought about making “at will”. I finally decided that “at will” means once per caster level per target (effectively unlimited) per day, and even here I have to accept that higher-level casters can cast LOTS of cantrips and orisons and take this into account.
Hmmm.. Good points and ideas. I’m thinking perhaps make Guidance be a d4 you can give out (like divine inspiration). You get 1 per tier plus one per Will bonus point (ignoring that the Will stat is just silly as it’s more about perception than ‘willpower’ or anything similar in how it affects the game mechanically – other than Wiz / will saves). Dice reset on a long / short rest (time spent praying). Unused dice given out are lost when PC rests. Yes, you could stack 2 short rests worth on a player/group, but you still have a 24 hour limit on d4s to give out. Max one die used per skill check, but in theory now players can have say 3 dice to use on a check that takes 3 rolls over a few minutes of activity, which seems kinda cool, and better narrative wise.
I’m also in favour of limiting checks that resolve with a single roll due to the high level of randomness. Best of three, or roll three and determine the narrative effect. You have an easier to judge ‘bad / not great / good / real good’ result based on how many pass/ fails they roll. They may only have a Guidance die to use on one of the rolls (this is true even for standard Guidance of course).
Guidance on self gives 1d6 (more efficient)?
The Caster basically has a pool of divine energy (or whatever Artificer have) and they can transfer some to others. God’s don’t have time to listen to every prayer, so this low level stuff is on the judgement of the caster as to if it’s worthy. As a DM I would however question/punish a cleric that keeps empowering players who behave against the cleric’s morals/beliefs.
I can see it being abused in theory, but in practice I’ve never seen it occur. In my games it is never used retroactively or on the fly.
If the players are sitting at the bottom of a cliff and the Fighter says to the DM : “I am attempting to climb the rocks”. Guidance does not get to be cast. The moment is past. It’s not a gotcha, it just didn’t happen.
If the players are discussing amongst themselves on the best course of action : “What do you think guys? Should I attempt to climb this thing?” “If you try it I will assist you with guidance”. That’s when guidance gets cast. Always. It usually comes around maybe once or twice every session, which really isn’t that bad. It never takes us away from the moment and it always feels natural.
“It’s not a gotcha, it just didn’t happen.”
That’s 100% a declaration gotcha. “Whoops! You said you were trying to climb instead of saying you were THINKING about trying to climb! You screwed up and now you get a penalty on your check!”
I don’t like requiring material components, but I considered making guidance burn gold to cast. Even better is the suggestion above of limiting the number of times a recipient may be guided per hour. Also perhaps roll a percentile die where there’s a risk of misguidance.
After reading this, I think that for sure I wouldn’t allow guidance to be used on any skill check that takes more than 1 minute to complete. But I don’t think I agree with scrapping the cantrip entirely and rolling it into a first level spell either.
Two simple ideas that came to my mind as possibilities would be:
1: Adding a footnote to the cantrip that states a creature cannot benefit from this spell more than once per long rest, to avoid the spammy aspect and with the intent of making it more narrowly focused toward clutch, time sensitive “we need to throw this hail mary and it HAS to work!” type scenarios.
or 2: Adding in some mechanic by which there is a chance of the god in question punishing the cleric for constant petitions for divine intervention, and have that chance increase per use of the cantrip but resetting on a long rest so that again, there is an disincentive to spam cast it, and an incentive to hold it for those clutch moments when a plea to the divine would make narrative sense.
I have an idea how to mitigate the problem, but the last time I ran D&D 5e was in 2020 — so I may be missing something. Do you think it would work?
The player who can cast Guidance gets a prop: an amulet in the form of a small card with arcane text on it. Something like, “Oh, great Azathoth, bend reality around this mortal! May they feel the flow of the Cosmos supporting their hands and feet, may their minds catch glimpses of the true nature of the Spheres”.
When you cast Guidance, you give the amulet to another player. If you feel like it, keep a fancy-coloured d4 on the prop, so the player remembers to roll it. If players are into that, the amulet can exist physically in the game world, and Guidance can be cast by giving it to someone.
Unless specified otherwise, you cast Guidance every minute on the person holding the prop. You don’t need to say anything — it’s enough to establish, once per game, that your character mumbles some prayers every now and then. If you want to Guide someone else — move the prop to another player.
If this works, hopefully:
– by reading the text on the amulet, players can imagine how being Guided feels.
– casting Guidance takes no game time, so players are free to come up with other ways to help each other.
– we add a tactile interaction to the game, making the experience a bit more immersive.
– Guidance is still an overpowered auto-include spell, but if we squint, this creates a theme of heroes being much more powerful when they’re supported by divine beings, and that may feels right in a game partly inspired by Ancient and Medieval epics.
On top of everything else, 1d4? Really?
Randomization is a useful tool when you want to add suspense to a roll and make the outcome less certain. But here I think it is super annoying. You’re going to cast this a LOT if your group favors it, and every time you have to find and read a d4. But there is hardly any suspense, because the difference between the minimum +1 and maximum +4 is not that big given that you’re modifying a d20 roll. It’s just a slowdown in play with very little payback. You could make it +2 (or +3 if you prefer) and cut out a whole die roll, and who would notice?
My group’s word for things like this is “twiddly.” I am vehemently opposed to twiddliness in game rules; I think it sucks time and energy from more interesting things, like actual decisionmaking or roleplay.
The poster child for this was one version (I forget which edition/system) of dispel magic where you had to roll d% individually for every spell effect on every character. Of course many of those spells were buffs, so you then had to recalculate every buffable parameter on every character. It literally reduced me to tears mid-session once, as all interesting play came to a halt for thirty minutes while we resolved this one spell.
Guidance is of course not that bad, but its faults can stack with other forms of twiddliness and contribute to bogging the whole game down.
I’d like to be clear that I am not opposed to complex rules or tactics. But the complexity should buy you something. In my opinion the d4 here does not. (And really the whole spell does not; I’m with Justin that it does not add much to the game, and the arguments here about exactly what it can/can’t do don’t help with that at all.)
I find the “1-minute” constraint helpful for constraining this in-session. It doesn’t impact passive skills, and the “guide” has to know another PC is actively leveraging a skill. These constraints tamp down its use quite a bit, perhaps leveling out the “proficiency” bonus equivalence. That said, yes, I agree it’s still broken and would suggest rolling into a class feature, limited in number, because as you say, it’s already ubiquitous in character design. Simply nerf it’s power a bit and let the class pick a more interesting cantrip.
“If the players are sitting at the bottom of a cliff and the Fighter says to the DM : “I am attempting to climb the rocks”. Guidance does not get to be cast. The moment is past. It’s not a gotcha, it just didn’t happen.”
The problem is that unless the Fighter has a magical power that forces the rest of the party to T-pose helplessly the moment they start moving, this is the kind of situation that makes no sense in-world.
Imagine it: a group of adventurers is at the bottom of a cliff. One takes out his climbing gear and prepares to climb, walking up to the cliff with obvious climb-y intent. Why could someone *not* step forwards to cast Guidance at this moment? It’s the difference between the at-the-table “I say I do X, I roll a die, 5 seconds pass and it’s done” vs the in-world “I do X, it takes 5 minutes” that creates this dissonance – because outside of a world running on absurd game logic, there is *plenty* of room for what is at the table a last-moment injection of “wait! I Help/Aid Another/cast Guidance/hand him my Magic Climbing Gear before he does that”.
Wholeheartedly agree. Guidance is bad design all around, and there’s one more problem with it: the 5e designers can’t even keep their bounded accuracy meme in check from the very first level. +1d4 on a d20 roll is a big bonus, and it stacks with everything else. A wretched, wretched spell.
“Let’s start by pointing out that it’s actually difficult to explain what guidance actually does.”
However, I disagree with this part. The idea of guidance, in my mind, is that it’s a divination spell that subtly alters his ability to act in a way that he is more likely to succeed.
But it’s awful, awful design.
The only mitigating factors are that it requires verbal component, so it’s noisy, but most GMs forget that part. If you’re wandering through the dungeon and chanting loudly, you can’t sneak and you’re likely to encounter wandering monsters. Other than that, every party should hire a cleric to wander about with them casting guidance every few minutes.
Heck, I don’t even like bless because of bounded accuracy.
Another aspect of what makes Guidance questionable is the lack of worthwhile alternative ways to buff. If one actually wants one’s party role to revolve around a particular sort of action, it helps if there’s a few different things one can do in that general category. (This, by the same token, is why the Battle Master Fighter is cool.) When it comes to a reusable support action, unfortunately Guidance is the only game in town. There’s no other cantrip/orison you could be using instead — Blade Ward is self-only (though if it could be used on others it should work on only one physical damage type per casting, not all three), Resistance requires a foreknowledge of the specific foes you’ll be facing in the next minute that you won’t have the majority of the time, and… that actually exhausts the list.
If one wants to account for a category of action in a game, it also helps not to penalize actual investment in diversity of options. The concentration mechanic means that even if one does have a lot of different buffs, one can’t use more than a single buff at a time, with very few exceptions (Aid pops to mind). Worse, Guidance’s outsized effect combined with its interaction with the concentration mechanic means one is incentivized to interrupt whatever more specialized, non-cantrip buff one may have put up to make sure your party’s as strong as they expect to be. Overall, I get the sense that Guidance existing at all in 5e is a grudging concession on the part of the designers that people who want to play a support role would theoretically want a magical thing to do every turn too… without thinking about how that interacts with the rest of the game.
(I do disagree with the flavor fail assertion, though. At that point one might as well throw away any magic that wouldn’t require a special effects budget in a movie…)
I do like having Guidance as an option for my support players (if only because the quality and utility of the various buff spells is…variable) but I have always ruled that it can only be used where there is a reason the caster would have known that it was necessary. IE, if we’ve been standing around talking about how to open the door, then guidance makes sense. If I’ve called for a persuasion check mid-conversation with an NPC, then it doesn’t make sense for your character to know that a skill check was in progress – and also, if you lean across, poke your friend in the shoulder and start praying, that’s going to affect the DC of the check by more than 1d4.
I’d not be averse to making it a 1-minute casting time.
Guidance, Portent, Bardic Inspiration, and Lucky all fall into the category of features that I once loved and very much question their value because of the conflict they create with storytelling and optimization. These sorts of abilities slow things down and take from the spotlight of a character moment while not adding enough value to justify distraction they’ve caused. You are incentivized to do them because of the game mechanics over them narratively adding much to what characters are doing.
I’ve grown to believe that if the game is balanced you should be able to have epic and interesting character moments without these buffs. If it is true that you don’t really need them to be mechanically balanced, then their value would be in doing them more than the mechanical benefit they provide. In the case of your bard, your bardic inspiration adds mechanical benefit but really is a tool to show how inspiring you are, this is fun and this is good. However, in the case of guidance and bardic inspiration if you do it wrong and lucky in general, you often aren’t describing much and as such doesn’t highlight the coolness of your character doing using an ability.
The interesting part is making the skill check, not adding an additional die or modifier on top of the d20 you’re rolling. Every time your roll a skill check there is uncertainty in how things will turn out and what that moment will look like for what your character is doing. When you use an ability that doesn’t have a roll or unpredictable outcome, you don’t need to think or have any suspense for what it might look like and so it becomes less relevant to the story we tell in our heads. It is the active things we do with chance of failure really become the reality of what happens in the fiction.
This is why I love magic systems that require you to roll for casting spells like Dungeon World, the act of doing magic feels magical because you aren’t completely sure how it works or how it will work out.
I agree with James’s first suggestion. Just make a rule that any specific creature can only benefit from guidance once per long rest (or per short rest, or per hour, or whatever interval you think works best). Having to choose which roll to spend the bonus on makes the spell a lot less broken and a lot more strategically interesting, and removes the declaration gotcha.
> Warning: This is a rant about game design. Ye have been warned.
as a 5E-hater (more like “disliker” but w/e) i say “hey, don’t threaten me with a good time.”
and yes, i haven’t played enough 5e to notice it but now that i’m spending some hours in Baldur’s Gate 3, i came to detest this cantrip. i hate it everytime game makes me click a button for that +1d4, and i hate it even more when our cleric is not in the party.
i also don’t understand 5E’s avoidance of flat bonuses. what is the point of giving +1d4 and not a +2 bonus? if it’s to avoid bonus inflation, it’s not solved but merely given new shape. if they’re after the tactile feeling of cleric player giving the guided player “The D4 of Guidance” (i had a special d6 for my bardic inspiration) –which i really doubt– they could just default every bonus to +2 and let us substitute any token as a “token of +2”
Re: gyik wrote about flat bonuses …
It feels like both Guidance, Bardic Inspiration, and Expertise are all out of synch with their decision around Bounded Accuracy and Advantage. The goal of Bounded Accuracy seems to be to prevent the escalation race between modifiers and difficulty numbers for rolls (to keep things simple among other reasons), and Advantage does work with that in that it doesn’t add additional modifiers into the roll and yet gives a perk for getting it.
Then they went and added at number of ways to actually increase modifiers anyway. It makes the design feel very sloppy that weren’t able to stick with consistency around a core mechanic for the system.
Sorry, typo on my part. It’s what geyik wrote…