Alternative Oracle Homebrew

[Tio Croc]

As an alternative oracle, your access to divine magic has granted you great powers, but it has left you permanently cursed. Instead of choosing when you want to be affected by the minor stage of your curse via casting revelation spells, your curse is locked at its minor stage and it cannot be decreased by any means.

However, your greater degree of curse brought you greater control over your revelation magic. Whenever you cast a revelation spell, it does not affect the advancement of your curse in any way.

Furthermore, you gain the advance curse action (costing a single action). Whenever you use the advance curse action, your curse advances by one stage. Immediatly after using the advance curse action, you are able to cast one of your revelation spells without expending focus points.

As with other oracles, after refocusing you may return your curse to its minor stage and when overwhelmed you can only lose such condition after taking a long rest. However, as you wake up stil feeling the effects of your minor curse, you are reminded of the big price you paid to obtain your powers.

[Teridax]

I like the core idea here, which is to give Oracles more agency over when to advance their curse. The main issue I'd take here is that spending three actions to cast what is often just an okay focus spell may itself not feel amazing, and I don't think the issue is necessarily that the Oracle needs to cast more focus spells -- they already get 3 Focus Points as part of their class progression, which is plenty, it's just that their revelation spells are really variable, with some being really good and others being really weak. Some kind of bonus to their revelation spells could work, or some other benefit, e.g. stronger benefits to the more intense curse stages.

Another, more minor criticism here is that under this version of the Oracle, there would be no need to keep the overwhelm mechanic: because you'd have perfect control over how much your curse advances, and being overwhelmed locks you out of using revelation spells, advancing your curse to the level where it'd overwhelm you would do just that, with zero benefits. Thus, I think you could just get rid of that mechanic entirely, particularly as right now it just punishes the Oracle for using their focus spells like any other class.

[LordVanya]

Sounds like it could make for an interesting Class Archetype maybe.