Pacting with the Party and other ways to keep your soul

[moonfly7]

So I was thinking about it recently, and there's no hard restriction on what a warlock can make a pact with for powers. Yes your restricted by subclasses to an extent, but you can pact with a magic sword from Bob rarely the male Bimbo if you wanted too.
So I came up with an interesting idea, you'd need DM approval but it's mostly harmless and promotes good role play and some genuinely fun stuff, not to mention it could provide an interesting break from your standard warlock pact of "yeah Cthulu, you'll get your madness spread so long as I get my magic"(not that there's a problem with this method).
Here's the idea: pact with a Caster. A simple, non-litch, living and breathing wizard, sorcerer, or the like. Perhaps your patron is a level 20 archmage, or maybe you made a deal for magic with the Party Sorcerer who likes the idea of a servant working and not getting paid from their wallet.

I think it actually could work pretty well since it makes it easy to have your patron be actively involved without to much DM effort or fiat, and could he lots of fun to plan characters around it together with a buddy.
It would also explain why the Warlock has so few spells and slots in game, the Party wizard only has so much magic to spare for an assistant.

[Hellpyre]

I mean, Undying Patron already shows that a sufficiently powerful mage can grant pact-based magic in theory, so there's that going for it. But overall, forming a pact with someone who is a major part of the party has some serious mechanical implications.

If you have the sorceror from your example as a Patron, you have the issue that they A: can't reasonably provide power that they themselves can't exercise; B: Hand a major lever for control of your character to another PC with a far narrower scope of objective than the typical Patron; and C: Run the very real risk of your character being ruined by the normal interactions of the game with someone else.

If your Patron dies, your pact is gone. That's sort of the biggest threat you face as a warlock, but the typical offscreen and inscrutable Patron types avoid that by not being in the thick of major battles all the time. If your warlock is flying along, but suddenly she drops from the sky and can't use even basic cantrips - plot has happened! Go find what has interrupted the flow of pact magic, and fix it. If this sort of thing happens, it's because the DM has (hopefully) worked through what is happening, what outcomes are available, and how to offer you the ability to continue playing as your character. If this all takes off because the party mage took one crossbow bolt too many to the spleen, the game goes into freefall for a bit.

You also lose a lot of autonomy by giving control of your entire suite of character class abilities to someone who is constantly involved in your day-to-day buisness. An Archfey Patron doesn't tend to care if you go through the front door or the rear. They've got other things taking most of their attention, and you may be only one of several pacts they have formed. If Bob the Sorc wants the party to go via the back, he can just turn off your ability to engage if you disagree. That's a lot of power to put into the hands of someone without a view behind the curtain as to what you will be facing.

In short - generally, I recommend sticking to the distant Patron who occasionally asks a quest of you than someone running around on ground zero with you.

[TigerT20]

All of the above is great, but there's also the fact that patrons are inferred to be their warlocks' teachers. In the case of the GOO, it seems to be some form of knowledge osmosis.

Surely because of this, your warlock couldn't learn any spells that your patron can't? An even stricter DM might enforce it down to spells known. Then there's the question of pact boons and subclass... What patron would 'ordinary wizard' fall under? How can this wizard teach you to summon imps with find familiar when they typically summon ravens?

Better to just ring up your neighbourhood unicorn or coatl, methinks.

[Chronos]

Unicorns can cast even fewer spells than party members, though. And couatls, despite being one of the better spellcasters as celestials go, has Greater Restoration, Dream, and Scrying as its best spells, and nothing else over 2nd level.

That said, two things that the game never states about warlock pacts: First, it never says what the nature of the pact is, or what the warlock offers: It could be your soul, but it could have been your noble birthright, or a big pile of coins, or an agreement to do the sort of thing that your character likes doing anyway. It can be completely paid off at the time you start adventuring, and it can be something totally non-onerous.

Second, it's never stated whether it's a continual flow of power, or a one-time grant of power, or some combination. If your patron dies, maybe that means you lose all of your warlock powers, or maybe your patron gave you the powers when you made the pact, and so those powers are yours now, not your patron's. Or maybe somewhere in between: Maybe, with a dead patron, you can keep using the powers you already have, but you can't gain any more, and hence can't level up further as a warlock. Any interpretation is within the rules.

[TigerT20]

Second, it's never stated whether it's a continual flow of power, or a one-time grant of power, or some combination. If your patron dies, maybe that means you lose all of your warlock powers, or maybe your patron gave you the powers when you made the pact, and so those powers are yours now, not your patron's. Or maybe somewhere in between: Maybe, with a dead patron, you can keep using the powers you already have, but you can't gain any more, and hence can't level up further as a warlock. Any interpretation is within the rules.

I figured that as they pull from the Arcane spell list (their spells are part of the official Arcane spell deck), their magic does not stem from the actual being in question but are transferred as part of the pact every time the warlock gains a level. This makes me think that not only (a) their power doesn't go away at their patron's death, but also (b) if they could locate another patron of the same type, they could replace their past pact with a new one.

Of course a spell deck is hardly RAW.