New player friendly? How? You already get to choose like 5 different skill proficiencies during character creation of a bard, as is. And you DO get to select which two abilities you gain expertise in, which if I'm being honest, is much more confusing, as it doesn't clearly explain that you're choosing expertise, or what expertise even is (unless you hover your cursor over this one very tiny little picture above the column, that's easily missable). I already was aware, due to knowing a bunch of random D&D 5e stuff, and looking it up "College of Lore 5e" beforehand.
In my case, I was already proficient in Arcana. So certainly, if this was by design, they'd give you expertise instead. Nope. It was just wasted. And I read some people who really wanted to go Lore had some of those proficiencies via either race or background, so they couldn't even fix it via respec (which was 100 gold I'd have rather spent on magical gear, rather than having to undo Arcana via my original character creation selection). They'd just have to eat wasted skill bonuses, which is a huge part of the appeal of Lore bard. It lead to them playing other subclasses.
I also am not playing (roleplaying, if you will) an intimidating character. She is small and cute.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RemtsIOewcEWVFw_9CC4IKvlTzTHBSil/view?usp=sharingShe has expertise in persuasion and proficiency in deception. That's all she needs, socially. Having her waste a proficiency in Intimidation is so disheartening. I'd much rather have her have History or Nature, which matches more with the "Lore" theme.
