Your post about the confusion spell is incredible and I'd like to present my favorite 5e spell, being magic mouth. It lasts until dispelled and you can just make it shout a 25 word or less message so you can just use it to mess with NPCs, alternatively some person went through the effort to figure out you can use it to make do a bunch of silly stuff like cheat zone of truth or make an alarm to detect things within its short radius. It's called The Arcane Programmers guide, bit long but hilarious
True, there are a bunch of spells with loads of uses outside what they are designed for, this typically comes as a result of the combination of contingencies.
If something is activated by <x> then you can always find interesting ways to use <x> to help you get around certain other obstacles.
Clever uses of spells allow for all sorts of silly nonsense pretty consistently, confusion is an example of a spell that only serves one purpose, it’s just *always* good for that purpose.
If you want another spell that can be used to interesting effect, consider “Conjure woodland beings” which can be used to conjure 8 pixies. There is an *awful* lot you can do with 8 pixies.
On the other hand if you just wanna fuck with npc’s, I recommend the spell “Dream”. You invade the dreams of just...anyone you’ve seen. Just, do the spell, wait till they sleep, boom. You’re in their dreams now.
Now this has the use of causing nightmares, and this is fun and all, y’know, make someone unable to rest, do some psychic damage, if you have some of their hair/whatever they have disadvantage to the save, it’s cool.
But the real use of it is just making it a regular dream, which means they don’t get a save.
This is fun, because it can be targeted at anyone. You can, if you have any spare 5th level spells at the end of the day, just harass someone (for example the bbeg) on the other side of the plane.
Just invade their dreams and surround yourself with some sexy gyrating moose people in lingerie as you go into detail about the obvious and also easy to miss practical and aesthetic benefits of fishing in assless chaps.
As they sit there, trapped in their sleeping state, you don’t rob them of rest, you don’t hurt or fill their minds with horrors unknowable.
You’re just talking about wind resistance and hydrodynamics of a good pair of Assless while reverse-mermaid people fuck in the background, giving them something worse than a bad night sleep: The most uncomfortable boner they’ll ever have.
Does this really hurt the bbeg? No, not really.
But isn’t it about time that a bbeg had an actual personal, tangible reason to hate the party?
And don’t you deserve to be that reason?