The Funk Bard David Snell: Giving the Party Bonuses to Certain Activities

Thinest Spawn McSays:

I was minding my business about Bards recently, since I got sort of burned out on the 2d6 Bard, and I think Beedo and Carter are onto a good thing with the LotFP Specialist Bard. And I'm not against bards fundamentally. I started up a new character in the ConstantCon session the other night, Chundarr the BardBarian. He's an S&W fighter, and since he had no cash he doesn't even have an instrument. But that's the fun. How do you have a Bard when there's just no such thing as a Bard in the system and you're not going to make one up? What a quandary!

No quandary at all, says I! I'm just going to play him as a Bard and be as bardly as possible in every fight and the bonus is not in PC morale or to-hit bonuses,  but in human-being player morale, a.k.a.: fun, laughter, camaraderie, nonsense, a good time. I spent a great deal of time in the last session thrusting a giant bat carcass on a stick in the faces of our foes, which is in-game barbaric and meta-game hilarious nonsense. I daresay it was BardBaric. Chundarr is learning to be a taunting monster puppeteer. We don't need rules for that. I don't anyway.

At any rate, there's this outstanding question in the blogosphericon about how a Bard playing a harp (or lute or whatever) can inspire anybody in a fight. Well, this may not be fight music, but this guy David Snell has the range that your classic Bard Harpist would need to be a real bad-ass. Check it out:

Maybe this works better at the tavern than in the dungeon, but even so he's not messing around with that harp.