For the duration, you’ve got the advantage on all Charisma checks directed at one creature of your choice that isn’t hostile toward you. When the spell ends, the creature realizes that you just used magic to influence its mood and become hostile toward you. A creature liable to violence might attack you. Another creature might seek retribution in other ways (at the DM’s discretion), counting on the character of your interaction with it.
Use friends on an enemy to calm them down and obtain a truce with an advantage on persuasion. Your party basically gets 1 minute to organize and reposition to continue the combat from more superiority.
Use friends and persuasion to convince somebody to not run away or put them comfortable before your party ambushes and restrains them.
5e Friends
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: Self
- Components: V, M
- Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
- Scales: No
- Casters: Arcane Trickster, Bard, Eldritch Knight, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
Use friends for the advantage to intimidation and while they’re scared of you, you’ll interrogate briefly or cast a Fear spell – you’ll ask DM that the conventional intimidation grants disadvantage on the saving throw. Even once they become hostile they’re too frightened to try too much about it.
If a battle is becoming difficult because the enemy is just too strong, use Friends to undertake and switch that hostile into a non-hostile. You get to travel past or run away without risk and obtain a 1-minute headstart before it wears off and that they chase you.
If an ally has become hostile and upset with you such a lot they are not letting you tell your side of things then the spell is often won’t to more easily have your say and convince them you’re using the spell because you would like them to concentrate to you. They’ll return to being hostile and upset after it wears off but they’re going to also still remember what you said and after a short while which will sink in and you’ll make amends – i.e. an excellent way to smooth things over, just not directly.
For the duration, you’ve got an advantage on all Charisma checks directed at one creature of your choice that may not hostile toward you. When the spell ends, the creature realizes that you simply used magic to influence its mood and become hostile toward you. A creature susceptible to violence might attack you. Another creature might seek retribution in other ways (at the DM’s discretion), counting on the character of your interaction with it.
If no (a second casting functionally extends duration), the cantrip is beneficial for extended social sequences, as long as you’ll sufficiently conceal or justify the Somatic component in order that people don’t know you’re influencing them. Maybe you’ve got to reapply the makeup and perhaps you don’t – the spell doesn’t consume the makeup, but the Components line calls out that you simply apply the make during casting.
We can imagine a setting during which casting friends was a socially-required a part of courtly manners – it’s presenting yourself as charmingly as possible, regardless of how literally artificial it’s. Favoring this answer puts rulings over rules-as-written (sorry, Adventurer’s League players!), but I find the thought fairly compelling. On the opposite hand, without a further clause, a player could be ready to keep them within the dark for an extended time, hours beyond the encounter’s end, by casting the spell once per minute.
Friends appear on the spell lists of bards, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards, which re-emphasizes its “underhanded diplomacy” theme – otherwise, it might have also gone to clerics, since judging by their skill lists, they’re expected to be capable party faces. Sorry, Trickery clerics.