Thanks to the prevalence of roleplay-first campaigns like Critical Role, many tables favor playing games where talking is often an option. This build will aim to be perfect for that style of play, giving you plenty to do even if initiative is never rolled.

The night holds many terrors, so why not become one of them yourself? This is a build meant to literally strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, all while dealing great damage and keeping ourselves and our allies safe.

Grappling, on the surface, seems like a relatively weak alternative to simply attacking. We can replace one attack from our attack action with a grapple attempt, where we make a contested Athletics Strength check (both roll a D20, add proficiency and modifier, winner is the highest result), and if we win that contest, the target is grappled.

The Monk advertises a skirmisher playstyle, attempting to move into melee, smack an enemy around for a bit, then dip out and away from danger all in one turn. It also utterly fails to deliver this fantasy in every conceivable way.

Clerics, the holy folk who carry out their god’s will and bring hope and joy to the common man. Alternatively, servants of dark lords who care little for the struggles of the peasantry. That last one sounds fun, let’s run with that!

The Thief Rogue is a fairly unassuming subclass on first read, but contains one interesting line of text in their Fast Hands feature gained at level 3: the ability to take the Use an Object action as a bonus action. So what the heck is the Use an Object action? Well, it’s a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural.

Recently released in Bigby Presents: Glory of Giants, the Path of the Giant Barbarian initially left me feeling a bit underwhelmed, though I still thought it was easily in the upper half of Barbarian subclasses. Then, my eyes were opened to a new build. A darker, more devious build.

It is every Bard’s dream to kill an important enemy by insulting them. The thought of walking up to Strahd, calling him a simp, and the vampire lord dying on the spot from sheer embarrassment alone is so tempting to try. It is a shame then that the main spell to facilitate this fantasy: Vicious Mockery, is so underwhelming.

This build is so cool, we get to be a support for our team, a hassle for our enemies, and then transition into a great damage dealer at high levels, all while being so hard to hit that our enemies will be celebrating every hit they manage to land like they just won the lottery. We’ve got a ton of options for what to do on every turn of combat, and we can cover a huge variety of encounters.

There is a subset of players who have no regard for their own safety or consistency. Players who love this game based on the dice rolls alone, who live for that moment when those polyhedral plastic (or metal if you’re fancy) shapes hang in the air. In that moment, anything is possible.

Shillelagh is a strange little cantrip, allowing us to make attacks with a quarterstaff using our Wisdom, bumping the damage slightly, and making it magical if it isn’t already. On its own, it’s a difficult cantrip to use effectively.

But what if we took this spell and saw how far we could run with it? What would a build that pushed it as far as possible look like? I present one potential way of accomplishing this, and it’s all thanks to the way a certain Wizard subclass interacts with temporary HP.