One Page Bard

I know I've been harsh on them before, and their treatment in 90's D&D can stir suspicions of April Foolery.  But damned if last week one of my players didn't want to play a harmonica-toting bard. Thus, this class for the 52 Pages rules:

The original idea for the AD&D bard was a kind of multi-classed jack of all trades, and as you can see I've kept that approach. With "character hit points as morale" it makes sense to give the bard a wide-beam "healing" power that complements the prophet's. Magic spells, like the healing, are slow; the bard works best between or before combats. Add to this a halfway decent fighting statline, with chain armor and missile weapons, and you have a class in the same range as the elf but with a much different feel. I've also kept a little bit of the "bard as hireling" idea, in that the healing depends on the level of the target as well as the bard.

Don't You Just Want To Slap the 90's ...

in its smug, bard-lovin', Next Generation, Wheel of Time-buyin', Renfairin' face?

Thanks to Internet Archive and its cache of Dragon Magazines, I've been pondering this entirely unremarkable table of contents from #180, where the big big feature is a preview of trading cards, and other articles tell you ...

to have your campaign make sense, to give magic weapons backstory, to intentionally play a low-intelligence character dumb, to haul off your party cleric to perform weddings in his home town, how to raise funds for your gaming club, and please make the acquaintance of this four-horned giant battering ram - get it? - and six-legged earthquake-making dinosaur.

The real posts will resume soon, hopefully with better content than that. I'm back from an extended professional/vacation trip where real gaming took precedence over game posting.

The Bard as Hireling

So ... if all a bard character does is strengthen your morale and make you feel at home in the wilderness and know lots of semi-useful trivia, maybe you're better off having a bard as a retainer instead of playing one?

Think of the precedent. African kings with their praise singers ... Brave Sir Robin's bard. Xena's sidekick Gabrielle was a bard, and it's hard to think of the roles being reversed, isn't it?

The bard, then, can be seen as a luxurious accessory for a pretty accomplished party of adventurers. Wages for a bard are a base 100$ (gp) a month, with an additional 50$ for each bonus point the bard's Charisma and Intelligence scores give. What do you get for all this? Well ...

• The bard can sing in a wilderness or dungeon camp. This increases the natural healing rate by 1 for characters 2nd level or higher. (I houserule that you only heal 1 hp/night in camp, but 1 hp/level/night in a safe location such as an inn).
• The bard with exceptional Charisma, can sing and play at any time to give all other hirelings and henchmen a Morale bonus on 2d6 equal to Charisma bonus; if no bonus, a bard's playing still negates 1 point of any morale penalties in effect. 
• Some bardic traditions instead give enemies a like Morale penalty. These are the ones that come equipped with bagpipes.
• The bard can create a spectacle of entertainment as the party enters or wanders around a settlement. This creates a certain notoriety, both for good and bad: urban encounters are twice as likely to happen, and the party is twice as likely to come to the attention of local authorities. This also gives +1 to reaction rolls in situations where a song is appropriate and the audience is receptive to the bard's style, but -2 if the style is disliked. Finding out the king's tastes is very important.
• The bard can sometimes act as a sage on matters of history and legend for the cultural tradition he or she knows. This translates to a 50% chance of answering a general question in that field of history or legend, 20% of answering a specific question and 5% of answering an exacting question, plus 5% per bonus point in Intelligence the bard has. Chances are cut by 1/5 for a cultural tradition that only borders on the one the bard knows. 
• If using the carousing rules, the bard increases by a factor of 1.5 the amount of money that can be converted to experience, as people flock to the party trail.

Mere musicians can also be had for 50$ a month, with none of the "sage" or "morale" abilities, and thus no bonus for exceptional scores. Musicians, however, often show poor morale when heading into danger (2d6 morale score 1d6+1) whereas bards are more inquisitive and made of sterner stuff (morale score 2d4+2).

Why the Bard is Meh

Great PC games, shame about the class

The Bard character class, currently being considered by J-Mal and FrDave, is a notorious target of fantasy adventure jokes. Despite perennial efforts to reboot the class, it carries a heavier burden of affliction than Marley's ghost. Let me count the chains:

1. First and foremost, when bards use their bardy powers, the player says something like "I sing away your cares and worries!" or "I strike up the lute with an epic lay that sets the foes to flight!" The thing is, when any other class casts a spell, the other players don't care what the mumbo-jumbo is. With a bard, though, you expect to hear an actual song, against all reason, and that creates a nagging itch.

NO, bard player, do not sing at the table. Not even if you're good at it - not unless everyone signed up for an adventure game that every now and then becomes an awesome singer concert. Nor should you specify that you are singing some made-up fantasy song like "The Ballad of the Owlbear and the Hive of Bees." That's still way too damn twee. It's embarrassing, like having two players describe how their characters are making out.

2. Wizards can cast a spell, clerics pray, and the effect happens. But a song should last longer than a one-minute combat round and especially longer than a ten-or-six-second one. So fire-and-forget bards are unsatisfying and need-to-stay-on bards are no fun to play.

I wish you'd prove me wrong...

3. A cleric can bash while brandishing the holy symbol, "a Dios rogando y con el mazo dando" as the Spanish saying has it. A wizard isn't supposed to fight. We imagine the bard as being able to fight, although in a kind of effete way, all with puffed breeches and a feathered hat and a jaunty little Robin Hood sword. This compensates for magic abilities that are less versatile than a wizard's ... perhaps. But the fact is, you can't fight very well while strumming a lute. Especially considering that ...

4. That lute is also as sensitive as a baby's bottom and with one misaimed blow, one dunking in cold water, there goes the bard's meal ticket. Unless you go all munchkin and demand to play a cast-iron vuvuzela bard, a triangle bard, or the ultimate in powergaming: an acapella bard.

5. At the end of it all, if I go back to my analysis of miracles, the bard's most characteristic powers just make him or her a secular cleric. Dispelling evil ... calming storms and savage beasts ... swaying minds ... even the fortifying effects of music can be seen as healing if character hit points represent some amount of confidence and morale.

So maybe the bard works best after all as a cleric? Oh, and not to forget this decidedly historical version of the bard class for Old School systems, envisioned as a kind of rogue/faceman/sage hybrid by Dave Baymiller. Yeah, I stumbled across it while searching for embarrassingly effete bard pics online, what of it?

Anyway, I've said my piece. If anyone wants to stand up for the bard, let's hear it!