I don’t like vicious mockery.
It’s a weirdly dissociated mechanic. If you kind of squint at it in the right light, you can almost see an association. Magically enhanced insults so utterly devastating that they can literally kill you with psychic damage seem like a thing you put your thumb on.
But can you actually describe in character what the spell is doing? If a bard casts vicious mockery and kills a dolphin, what actually happens? If you’re targeted by the spell, what does it feel like?
Your mileage may vary, but this is one of those mechanics that, when the players trigger it, I’m completely uncertain how to describe what actually happens. That’s a red flag, in my opinion. (See, also, non-divine guidance.) More often than not, it feels like casting the spell means we all disconnect from the game world for a bit, do some dice stuff, and then reconnect to the game world with no clear description of anything actually happening (except maybe someone keeled over and died).
Alternatively, you’ve got the issue where players feel like they need to improvise the insult they hurl at the target of the spell. (Or, often, the DM will demand it of them.) That, too, seems fine. But, if we can be honest for a moment, how easy do you find it to improvise an insult so withering that someone falling over dead after hearing it seems like a reasonable outcome?
What actually happens most of the time, of course, is a sort of comical mismatch:
Player: I call the dolphin “fish-face”!
DM: This insult overwhelms the dolphin, who instantly dies!
Yes, I understand that the insult has been “laced with subtle enchantments.” But, again, what does that actually look like?
The mechanics of the spell — first introduced in the Player’s Handbook 2 for 4th Edition before being adapted for the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook — are also getting more dissociated over time. In 2014, for example, your target had to hear the insults, “though it need not understand” them. (Which kind of raises the question of why it needs to be an insult at all.)
In the 2024 Player’s Handbook, however, this requirement is dropped. The target of the spell is now “one creature you can see or hear within range.”
So we’ve gone from insults that drive your foe into a blind rage to a spell where the target doesn’t even need to understand what you’re saying (I guess they can just tell from your tone) to, today, your target standing in a silence spell while unable to see you, but still being completely wrecked by how mean you’re being to them.
Mechanically speaking, though, there’s nothing wrong with “Wisdom save or suffer damage and disadvantage on your attack roll.” It also provides pretty core functionality for bards, so I don’t want to just nix it from my game.
So can we tweak the presentation of vicious mockery to achieve the same or similar mechanical effect without the issues?
ETHEREAL SONATA
With the aid of subtle enchantments, you pitch your voice so that it vibrates through the Ethereal Plane instead of through air. As these ethereal tones resonate with a target you can see and who can hear you, they psychically damage and discombobulate them.
VICIOUS MOCKERY (REDUX)
You utter an epithet from the primal ur-language which was used by the gods to carve the minds of the first sentient races in the multiverse. Infusing the curse with magic, you precisely tune it to a target you can see and who can hear you. On a failed Wisdom saving throw, the target’s mind momentarily rewrites itself, shaking them with the sudden belief that your disparagement is utter truth.
SONIC BARRAGE
Weaving your magic, you tune and focus the perfect pitch of your choice into a killing word directed at a target you can see and who can hear you.
Note: This version would be an evocation cantrip dealing thunder damage instead of psychic damage.
FURTHER READING
Guidance Sucks in 5th Edition
The way I see it, as with any other Enchantment spell, there is a subtle thread of the weave that connects all creatures. Pull on the string, and you might get creatures to do what you want them to. Pull too hard, and you may damage the creature’s resolve (or physically harm their brains!). Pull *way* too hard, and you may snap the cord entirely and kill the creature.
What kind of language is best used not to influence but to damage, if not insults? They’re more likely to pull hard on the strands of the weave and cause mental harm, even when not influenced with magic. Imagine a caster who is able to diffuse into those insults a magical echo of mind-shattering energy, and watch the enemies’ brains melt behind their eyes…
The second and third ones combined are a kind of Dune “Voice”, I like it!
My head-canon is that VM, regardless of the specifics of the insulting words that carry it to the victim, works by enhancing their self-awareness to a crippling degree. They recall every time they’ve stumbled in front of others, every playground taunt, and every romantic disaster. And the magical contempt from the caster assures the victim that they fail again. So when it is part of a larger combat, it’s not that it causes damage per se: rather, the ego damage opens the victim to deadly mistakes, enhancing subsequent physical damage.
Of course, if VM causes killing damage, it just means they cringed themselves to death, and the only people who believe that’s impossible were never in junior high.
It’s going to be hard to “fix” a spell like that. Psychic damage already is a weird thing to begin with, maybe you could change the name and describe the spell as an intense “grief”
Most people who choose Vicious Mockery aren’t doing it because they want to do 1d4 damage and impose disadvantage. They’re doing it because they want to insult the macaroni and cheese recipe of a whale. It’s rarely the best tactical option, but it is very often the funniest.
Fighters attack the body, but bards attack the mind and soul. Your words, powered by magic, strike an insecurity the target barely even knew they had. You break their focus, and break their heart at the same time. Hit them enough and their will to keep going just… Stops. They welcome death, and death arrives.
Yeah, it sounds ridiculous, but so does insulting an enemy instead of stabbing them.
Agree about Vicious Mockery, disagree about non-divine Guidance…though I take every opportunity in worldbuilding to decenter pantheons and gods and such, so I’m used to searching for non-divine explanations for divine spells.
Off the top of my head, d6 nonmagical guidances!
-Searching alternate timelines for the successful outcome
-Calling up past lives’ knowledge
-Autonomous action, like planchette writing, revealing deeper connections
-A boost of adrenaline spurring instinctive success, like a micro-Haste
-A semisentient “concierge-style” AI or spirit that offers best practices
-A slight time dilation, allowing extra effort to be expended.
If you want to keep the spell focused on the insult (in some way), IMO, then you need to change the targeting mechanic so that the target must understand the language in which the insults delivered.
“It’s too bad we don’t have some kind of divine guidance – that we can trust,” [Rhurrinore] said, voice crisper than the wind.
Another Harpsire attack, though subtle. Arethkayn attempted to deflect it, but such a thing is easier said than done.
The Eastclan Harpsires had come up with a devilishly sneaky sort of magical attack—one that exploited a clever loophole in the ‘Laws of Claiming’ governing what a practitioner could affect with magic. Harpsire insults were never direct, never named
their targets, always came at the target obliquely. But that was by design: If you recognized the insult was about you, then you implicitly claimed the insult as yours – and then suffered the physical harm that had been wrapped up inside it. By swallowing the bait, you took the poison.
And that was the trick: How do you pretend an insult isn’t about you if you’re also trying to be alert to attacks or aware of enemies? Defending against the Harpsire strategy required a weird kind of double-thinking: Recognize you’re under attack, but believe the attack isn’t about you. At the same time.
Arethkayn gave it her best, but she felt a lash, like the tip of a knife, against her thigh. ‘Damn’, she thought.
—
This was in a story on Ludus Ludorum about a decade back called For Gods Dethroned, though its ‘Laws of Claiming’ are definitely homebrew.
Vicious Mockery *in concept* is cool and iconic enough that I actually backported it to 3.5, though it’s significantly nerfed to suit the limits of 3.x 0-level spells, what a Bard can pull off in that edition, and of course make actual sense.
I suspect the “though it need not understand you” part from the original 4e spell comes from the same balance-over-association impulse that has worked to whittle away the limits on Sneak Attack (“but it’s not fair that I’m useless against undead and oozes!”). Thus, I went with the Mind-Affecting and Language-Dependent descriptors. In Pathfinder 1e in particular, it would also have the Emotion descriptor.
Adding a better damaging cantrip to the 3.x Bard than Sonic Snap wouldn’t really suit its balance or flavor in that range of editions, so I compromised by leaning on a common mechanic of Enchantment spells as the edition wore on: nonlethal damage.
Thus, translated out of my house rule for 0-level spell damage in general (which is a whole other discussion), it looks like this:
Vicious Mockery
Enchantment (Compulsion) [Emotion, Mind-Affecting, Language-Dependent]
Level: Bard 0
Components: V
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: One living creature
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Will negates
Spell Resistance: Yes
You unleash insults or similar verbal bullying at a creature you can see within range, in a language the target can understand. The spell amplifies the effect of your words on their mind to the point that on a failed saving throw, the victim takes 1d3 nonlethal damage from an unnaturally strong burst of self-loathing, depression, grief, or similar negative emotions.
I would kill for a whole series of “Back to the Drawing Board” articles, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me checking this website every day to see what’s new. The one about Guidance fits this mold too
I would phrase the spell as a sort of sympathetic resonance of emotional impulse. The caster insults the target in order to set up their own feelings of hatred, contempt and so on. Even if the feeling is already there it must be framed and crystallised. That feeling is the “ammunition” fired psychically at the target. The target doesn’t need to hear or understand it, per se, as it’s not important to their experience of the spell. The target just feels like they’re hit with a psychic hate bullet. In theory, if the caster already hates the target enough, merely saying their name aloud could serve the purposes of the spell. Of course, in that instance the target’s name *would* be a deadly insult from the caster’s perspective.
I like all of the ideas you gave, though I suspect they wouldn’t jive with the Guybrush Threepwood fantasy many players have. The problem there comes from trying to reconcile the players who want to play something resembling a “regular dude” in a setting where “regular dudes” are eclipsed by the supernatural abilities available to everyone beyond the very low levels. I think it’s probably better to do something like you suggested and just accept that your supernatural bard is doing supernatural things, rather than trying to play a Dread Pirate Westley when other people at the same level are playing League of Legends characters with automatic grenade launchers built into their prosthetic clockwork arms.
(not trying to yuk anyone’s yum on D&D, of course! I just feel you have to go into it with that League-of-Legends like aesthetic and expectations of power level or the players are going to have a mismatched expectation of what a character looks like).
It’s really weird to me how much 2024 dialed back the restrictions on viscious mockery when I’d say the main justification for it is “Bard’s need SOME basic damage cantrip to fall back on if they’re truly desperate!” Which would have made sense if they didn’t also give bards mroe attack cantrips in the same revision.
I guess maybe it’s meant to support new players who would pick viscious mockery because it’s funnier than the alternatives and don’t want to risk them having a disfunctional “basic attack”, but like, a new player is not gona read the rules thoroughly enough to notice and intuit they can cast viscious mockery on someone through a silence spell, because they jsut internalise it as savage diss does psychic damage which would presumably not work in silence.