Quote Originally Posted by Yakk View Post
Some rewording:

College of Blade Dancing
Blade Dancers are artists who have learned to become one with a sword while dancing. As a the result is that they are able to channel their spells through their swords in a way that pierce their enemies defenses. Their art is both beautiful and deadly. They can be seen entertaining crowds of people, blade dancing for their Gods, selling their skills or simply helping others with their protective support.

Performance Training:
When you join the College of Blade Dancing at 3rd level, you gain proficiency with scimitars.

Partner in Show:
Starting at 3rd level, you learn the dancing lights cantrip. When you use the cantrip, as a bonus action you can control the dancing lights and make it blade dance against you.



This is really awkwardly worded and I'm having problems fixing it.

The natural language of 5e requires that abilities have a certain amount of elegance. Your rules are really difficult to express without the point-form/list format you are using, or long and twisted paragraphs.

As part of that natural language requirement, you probably need to change some of the mechanics and remove some exceptions and corner cases somehow.


Does this cost a use of bardic inspiration? If not, this is "you are nearly impossible to hit"; at level 13 20 dex + expertise(performance) + 1d10 bardic inspiration is 1d20+15+1d10 is average 31 AC (SD 7, 95% confidence interval 17 to 45).

If you have (say) enhance ability (dex) up, the SD shrinks and the average goes up to like 34 or 35.

So I'll assume you expend a use of bardic inspiration to use this? Now the only problem is that it is a fussier version of the "add bardic inspiration to your AC" features other subclasses get.


This duplicates a feat, which is something you should avoid I think.

Burning a use of inspiration for an attack is a strong move. On par with Whispers's inspiration-smite. A 3 level Bard dip on a Hexadinlock would be tempting for this.

Better just to restrict what spells can be used. The ability to cast a single target fireball is cute, but not worth this many words and exceptions.

The core idea here is burn a bardic inspiration to deliver a spell using a sword, right?

"As an action, you can expend a use of bardic inspiration to cast a spell that targets only one creature within reach of your sword. The melee attack roll replaces any attack rolls the spell would make on your turn. If your melee attack roll hits, the first saving throw the creature makes against the spell has a penalty equal to your bardic inspiration die roll. If your attack misses, the spell fails."

"targets only one creature" means you can use this with a barrage of scorching rays, but not with a fireball.

I replaced disadvantage with "subtract bardic inspiration die", because otherwise this doesn't use the die.



A problem is that your "blade dance" is increasingly "just always on". In fact, if you are walking slower than 25' per round and can have your sword out, there is almost no reason not to be in the blade dance all the time.

This ability (turn it on as a reaction) is a mixture of useless (why aren't you already in the form?) and doubling down on always being in it.

You probably need to strip out some of the benefits of blade dance form from the form itself (like, AC), and make some of the others a real decision.

The "special form you are always in" is mechanical cruft.

This breaks bounded accuracy.
Thank you for in depht analysis.

I really like:I replaced disadvantage with "subtract bardic inspiration die", because otherwise this doesn't use the die.

Originally my unarmored defense was just while holding a sword but I received the complaint of having too much feature at level 3.