I have read the book a bit and found out a combination to exploit. This will be a bit of a guide that will walk you through your first tier levels. By Tier 2, your character will have proficiency in a slew of skills. When people ask for an intelligence or wisdom based roll, they may look to you, and maybe some other things too.
However, there is a few things to note. Throughout the adventure, you must keep a note of all the monsters you've encountered and how many times you used each skill. This will be important later.
The first thing to note is that your starting class will be a Bard with the College of Lore archetype. The three additional skills will help you in the long run. As for race, it depends on what your DM allows. If he allows
Human Variant, take that, and for the feat, take Skilled. This gives you four bonus skills. If he doesn't allow Human Variant, then take
Half-Elf, so you can take two. If he doesn't allow that either, that's okay. Focus on races that will give bonues to the desired skills listed below.
Color code:
- Red = Avoid
- Cyan = Keep at all costs
- Green = Okay at best
- Blue = Ideal
For the attributes to allocate your stats to. For this build to work with best results, you need, at least, 13 in Dex and 13 in Wisdom:
- Strength: Consider this your dump stat. Strength only applies to one skill and most of your weapons will be finesse or ranged. If you wind up with athletics as a skill, your proficiency at later levels will keep it from being a bad skill.
- Dexterity: Dexterity is pivotal to the later phases of the plan. At best, keep it at 13 or over.
- Constitution: This is where your health will be important and why when choosing between Strength or Constitution do you throw Strength under the bus. This stat will help keep you alive.
- Intelligence and Wisdom: These are necessary stats for your build. Without them, it all falls apart. However, you choose which of the two skills will be the most important to you and your skills. This will be important. Choose an attribute. From this point forward, the guide will split between Bards who focused on Wisdom and Bards who focus on Intelligence.
- Charisma: This is the stat your Bard will base his powers off on, so it's best to keep it fairly high.
Next, you'll be choosing what races you'll have. Refer to this list in case Human Variant or Half-Elf are not acceptable.
- Hill Dwarf (For Wisdom Bards): The bonuses to Constitution and Wisdom are good, but there are better. If anything, having one additional hit point helps.
- Mountain Dwarf: This race has beef, but you're looking for a skill monkey, not a fighter.
- High Elves Or Eladrin (For Intelligence Bards) and Wood Elves (For Wisdom Bards): If not Half-Elf, you can always go full Elf. Elf races give you Perception, which for Intelligence-based Bards is perfect, as it knocks a step off their list. However, for the Wisdom-based Bards, it disrupts the first step quite a bit, but otherwise you won't have problems.
- Drow: While they don't give you the boost to the skills you need, it does grant you a small boost in Charisma. However, the sunlight sensitivity might be problematic for you.
- Halflings: The only benefit you're getting is Dexterity and either a small bonus to your talking power or your health, and that's only if your attribute number is an odd number.
- Human: Normal humans are average at best. Yeah, you get a +1 to all stats, but other than that, it's nothing to brag about.
- Dragonborn: Yes, you benefit from Charisma, but this is a more combat focused race. Especially since it has a combat move unique to itself in the form of the breaths. We're looking for skills.
- Gnomes (For Intelligence Bards): The +2 you get from intelligence will help you out. It is very ideal for Intelligence-based Bards, since the two subraces help support the intelligence and the Gnome Cunning means there's no chance for you to fail three of six Saving Throws.
- Half-Orc: Aside from the Skill of Intimidate and the ability to survive a killing blow, there's not much for the Half-Orc to contribute for a Bard.
- Tiefling (For Intelligence Bards): The Charisma helps, but compared to the Gnome, you could fare better with Intelligence.
- Aasimar (For Wisdom Bards): The Charisma helps, and the Wisdom Bonus doesn't stick out more than the Wood Elf.
Don't worry, that's all you have to worry about for color-coded picking. The next few phases will be instructions based around what stat you prioritize first, Intelligence or Wisdom.
- Bard Skills you take on Character Creation:
- Investigation, Nature, Religion (Intelligence)
- Insight, Medicine, Perception (Wisdom)
- Background you take on Character Creation:
- Sage (Intelligence)
- Folk Hero (Wisdom)
- Skills you take upon entering the College of Lore:
- Medicine, Perception, Survival (Intelligence)
- Arcana, History, Religion (Wisdom)
- Skills you take upon multiclassing:
- Animal Handling (from Ranger), Insight (from Rogue) (Intelligence)
- Nature (From Ranger), Investigation (from Rogue) (Wisdom)
As you can see, you
will be multiclassing. So level up your character like normal until Level 3, in which you choose your College of Lore skills as well as two skills to be expertise in. The problem is figuring out which skills. The solution comes in the tracking down I asked you to do earlier. Choose the two most used skills that you are proficient in and make them expertised skills.
At Level 4, multiclass over to the Ranger and pick the designated skill. You will be asked to name a favored enemy. This is where the tracked list of monsters you encountered. Because the games' monsters are played out depending on the campaign, such as the Tyranny of Dragons storyline, it's best to wait out and see who you encounter more. It'd suck if your favored enemy is seldom seen.
Level 5 seals the deal with the Rogue. Take the last skill from him and pick from the list of your most used skills of which additional skills you'd be better at. If you picked the Elf race, then choose a skill from the skill list you prefer. After that, sail however you wish. The skills you gained in your Race selection can go to either a purely Charisma-based Bard or a Strength and Dex-based Bard. Depending on how many you get. You want to level up your other classes? Go ahead. You want to boost up your stats? Go ahead. This guide is done, and if done with the right party, this Bard's going to be seeing a lot of use in skills.
