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.

LotFP Specialist = The Future?

Inspired by Beedo's excellent take on the Bard, I have lately been oohing and ahhing over the LotFP Specialist class (described on pp. 10-11 and pp. 30-42 of Grindhouse Rules and Magic).  As Spawn of Endra comments on Beedo's blog, the latter's graft of Bardic skills onto the LotFP thief-substitute "points the way towards using the LotFP Specialist in new ways."

Indeed, to me the implications are quite clear: we should use LotFP's Specialist as a "conversion kit" for any custom class (or so-called "Advanced" class such as those in the Advanced Edition Companion) that we want to bring into our Basic D&D-ish games.  As Raggi himself puts it on p. 71 of Referee,

"Assassins and Bards are Specialists.  If the adventure or supplement text mentions specific power that these classes might have in other games, just grant it to the particular NPCs."

What Raggi suggests we grant to particular NPCs could be used, as Beedo has ably demonstrated, to streamline the process of bringing oddball PC classes like Rangers, Bards, and Jongleurs into the mix of our campaigns.  Need a sea pirate with sailing skill?  Make Sailing a Specialist skill and make Sailors Specialists.

Using this logic, I could port the Delving Deeper Bard over to the LotFP Specialist paradigm -- or, I suppose, simply steal Beedo's Bard.  I would also like to graft Ranger skills* like Tracking onto the Specialist chassis:

Tracking - "Familiar with the signs left by humans, humanoids, and various other creatures as they make their way through the wilderness, rangers can discover and follow the trail of those they are pursuing -- sometimes even in the worst of conditions."

So the standard Ranger (according to Brave Halfling) would have points in Tracking, Move Silently, Hide in Shadows, Bushcraft, and Hear Noise. Any Ranger wanting to take the "Damage Bonus" option instead of the "Additional Skills" option (see Delving Deeper: Ranger) -- I've been using the former to represent northern Achelonian monster fighters -- could simply spend one of their initial allotted skill points to gain that ability, maybe swapping out Hide in Shadows and/or Hear Noise and instead spending a point to get that damage bonus vs. evil humanoids and giants.

Under this system, the standard LL thief would simply be a Specialist who spends points on Pick Locks, Find and Remove Traps, Pick Pockets, Move Silently, Climb Walls, Hide in Shadows, and Hear Noise.

After chucking in the Bard and Ranger skills, and changing some of LotFP's thief skill names back to their Labyrinth Lord equivalents,** my custom Specialist Skill List would look like:

Architecture
Bushcraft
Climb Walls
Find and Remove Traps [EDIT: Tinkering in LotFP]
Hear Noise
Hide in Shadows [Stealth in LotFP]
Languages
Lore [described here]
Move Silently [Stealth in LotFP]
Open Doors
Performance [described here]
Pick Locks [Tinkering in LotFP]
Pick Pockets [Sleight of Hand in LotFP]
Search
Sneak Attack
Tracking [see Delving Deeper: Ranger or description above]

It is too late for me to make the LotFP Specialist conversion in my current Labyrinth Lord campaign, because it would seriously change the nature (and , I think, potency) of our home-brewed 2d6 Bard class, currently active in play.  But one day, after the current party retires or dies (TPK!), maybe I will run my NEXT Lands of Ara campaign using a more lean and mean ruleset, mostly using Labyrinth Lord but with the LotFP Specialist thrown in to replace all non-core custom classes including the standard LL thief. I would also be ditching all the AEC crap as well, except, perhaps, the expanded spell lists. But that is for . . . the future?

Labyrinth Lord is my lover. . . from Hell!

--
* I am stealing these Ranger abilities straight out of Delving Deeper: Ranger. Raggi's Bushcraft skill already covers foraging/wilderness survival (p. 33) as well as direction sense (p. 34).
** Thanks to Mr. Raggi for providing skill name conversion guidelines on p. 70 of Referee.

J for Jongleur

[Note: Any non-gamers tuning in to this series of posts are invited to consult my New Reader Introduction for some RPG-specific definitions and a general introduction to the Lands of Ara blog.]

When the current Arandish Campaign started in early 2010, one of the participants came to me during the character generation phase and asked if he could play a juggler in the game. Being the sort of DM who likes to let players run with their ideas -- my games have always benefited greatly from the creative contributions of the players -- I of course said "yes."

This player, who is a juggler in real life, showed me some ideas he'd found in the AD&D 2e Complete Bard's Handbook and explained how the abilities and skills therein jibed with his concept for the class. Based upon these discussions, he and I constructed a juggler class based upon the Delving Deeper Bard, with a couple skills borrowed from The Complete Bard's Handbook "Jongleur" and "Blade" classes. Uncle Junkal the Rodian Jongleur was born.

Note, however, that the 2d6 Jongleur presented below (and available as downloadable pdf here) does not exactly replicate how we have been running Uncle Junkal in our own campaign play. The Jongleur Bard variant I'm making available herein has been somewhat standardized, that is, power-balanced with the Arandish Bard (downloadable as pdf here). Being a prototype, Uncle Junkal is unique, a special case, a slight deviation from the typical Arandish Jongleur.

In time, once he finishes his PhD dissertation in a couple of months, I will persuade Uncle Junkal's player to write a guest post about how he came up with the juggler-as-PC concept. For now, you'll have to make do with my take on the Arandish 2d6 Jongleur for Labyrinth Lord.

The 2d6 Jongleur

for use with 2d6 Bardery by Carter Soles and Spawn of Endra

Jongleur for Labyrinth Lord concept by "Uncle Junkal"

Jongleurs are a non-magical Bard variant that specialize in juggling, sleight of hand, and other forms of small object manipulation. Jongleurs are loosely based upon the French entertainers of the same name. They are masters at manipulating small items with their hands. They can catch and juggle almost anything. They are experts at throwing small items (like knives) with great accuracy.

Requirements: CHA 15, DEX 14, STR 9, INT 12
Prime Requisite: CHA
Hit Dice: 1d6
Maximum Level: None

Jongleurs may wear leather and studded leather armor only, and may not use shields. Jongleurs can use all hurled weapons, i.e., any weapon that can be thrown (daggers, hand axes, spears), but not including bows, blowguns, or other missile weapons that are fired or shot. Otherwise, Jongleurs are restricted to the following weapons: polearm, quarterstaff, and sling. All of the weapons usable by Jongleurs can be used in their performances. For example, they can juggle daggers, pole vault with polearms, and balance with spears or quarterstaffs.

Jongleurs begin play with the standard 3d8x10 gold pieces (gp). They use the Cleric Attack Table (LL p. 60) and the Thief Saving Throw table (LL p. 55).

Jongleur Skills: In Ara, Jongleurs use the 2d6 Bardery skill system based upon Dyson Logos' 2d6 Thievery mechanic. In addition to the three standard Bard skills -- Charm Person / Monster, Legend Lore, and Read Languages / Arcane Scrolls -- Jongleurs get one additional skill, Weapons Display, plus a special ability (no skill roll required) called Multiple Object Throwing. Like standard Bards, Jongleurs only get ONE "Favored Skill" -- all other skills roll on the "Other Skills" column on the Table below.

Weapons Display
By whirling a melee or hurled weapon about his body, a Jongleur can affect the morale and courage of others. Such a display of skill, precision, and deadly grace lowers opponents' morale by 2 (but it does not require an immediate morale check) and inspires allies, giving a +1 bonus to allies' attack rolls. The display must occur for a full round without interruption. During this time, any successful attack upon the Jongleur, or failed saving throw by the Jongleur, disrupts the display.

The Weapons Display ability requires a lot of room; it cannot be done in a narrow corridor. The observer must be close enough to the Jongleur to see the display (e.g., a darkness spell negates the effect). The display has no effect upon those already engaged in close combat, as they are too busy to pay attention to the show. Also, Weapons Display works only on those who can either use weapons or have seen them used. Weapons Display may be used only once per encounter.

Multiple Object Throwing
The experienced Jongleur may throw multiple objects (including thrown weapons) per round. This ability improves with level advancement:
Level 4: throw twice per round
Level 8: throw three times per round
Level 12: throw four times per round
Level 16: throw five times per round

2d6 Jongleur Skill Chart - Roll 2d6:

Jongleur Level	Favored Skill	Other Skills
1	10+	11+
2	10+	10+
3	9+	10+
4	9+	9+
5	9+	9+
6	8+	9+
7	8+	8+
8	7+	8+
9	6+	7+
10	5+	6+
11	4+	5+
12	4+	4+
13	3+	4+
14+	3+	3+

Note that a roll of "2" always fails.

Optionally, you may grant a Jongleur his or her CHA modifier (i.e., the absolute value of the Reaction Adjustment modifier, +1 for CHA 13-17, +2 for CHA 18) to all Jongleur skill checks, including Weapons Display, Legend Lore, and Read Languages and Arcane Scrolls skill rolls.

2d6 Bardery (Towards a B/X Bard Part 3)

As Spawn of Endra has so elegantly outlined over his last two posts (here and here), our Arandish campaign experienced a minor crisis over the interaction between the Bard's Charm Monster skill and our d30 house rule. These two systems together produced a situation in which Uncle Junkal had a 70% chance to charm one up-to-ogre-sized creature per week at first level. This he did in Session 11, charming a rock troll, which has been with the party ever since. The presence of this regenerating rock troll has made it difficult for me as DM to kill, or even significantly damage, the PCs in most combat situations. That rock troll is just too damn powerful. Any monster I can send at the party that would be capable of taking out the rock troll (a red or black dragon would do the trick, for example) would likely overwhelm the PCs, catalyzing a TPK -- or would have until quite recently. In short, a rock troll is a bit too badassed for such low-level characters to be leading around.

I think I would feel better about the charmed rock troll situation if Uncle Junkal's player had had to pull off some incredibly improbable roll in order to charm the deadly creature, but instead he used his nightly d30 roll, which made it nigh impossible for him to fail. A completely legitimate move, but one that made me feel as though we had encountered a dangerous loophole created by the d30 house rule.

Obviously, by embracing a once-per-session d30 rolling rule in the first place, I am to some extent endorsing and encouraging (or at least tempting!) players to find unique applications of the d30 roll, and I should not be too shocked when game-changing results occur. But the rock troll feels like a limit case, a d30 exploit that has led to a long-term imbalance which in turn has deflated the stakes of a good many of the combat encounters the PCs get into. Call me a stodgy old DM, but I want combat to feel more dangerous and threatening for the PCs.

How to cure this unforeseen imbalance?

With Dyson Logos' 2d6 Thievery, of course! I am a big fan of Dyson's system, since I dislike d% skill mechanics in D&D to begin with. For me, 2d6 skill rolls just feel more appropriate to B/X / Labyrinth Lord than d% rolls do, so as soon as I saw Dyson's 2d6 Thievery article in Dyson's Dodecahedron Issue #1, I knew I would be adopting it into the Arandish Campaign.

It did not take long for me to realize that what works for thieves could easily work for bards. I started talking this idea over with Spawn of Endra, who additionally mentioned the cleric's "Turn Undead" mechanic, which also uses 2d6 to do what it does (see LL p. 8). Thus it would seem there is strong precedent for a 2d6 skill system embedded in certain aspects of LL / B/X.

Spawn of Endra then used his substantial statistical knowledge and graphing ability to create that bad-ass chart he posted yesterday -- I love it so much that I'm going to reprint it here:

As you can see, 2d6 Bardery does indeed reduce the impact of the d30 rule, and generally follows a similar curve of success probabilities as d% Bardery. Admittedly, it makes using Bard skills a wee bit more difficult than under the d% system, but given how potent that Charm Person / Monster ability has turned out to be in the course of game play, I do not feel too badly about slightly decreasing Uncle Junkal's chances for success in his skill use in general. Furthermore, given Uncle Junkal's high CHA (15+, a Bard class requirement under the Brave Halfling template) he will always get at least a +1 to his Charm Person / Monster skill, as I use (and strongly endorse) the optional CHA Attribute bonus rule (see below). This attribute bonus factor is reflected in Spawn's chart.

As I mentioned, we have been using Brave Halfling's Delving Deeper: Bard supplement as Uncle Junkal's basic Bard template, and for the most part I have been very happy with it. My favorite part is that it makes clear (as Spawn also discussed yesterday) that the Bard is not magical, an interpretation I favor. While his Charm Person/ Monster ability functions a lot like two certain spells, and while his Use Magic-User / Elf Scrolls ability allows him to fake his way into some quasi-arcanery, ultimately, the Bard is a non-magical class whose skills are mundane abilities, NOT spells.

[In a related note, Brave Halfling does the same thing for the Ranger in its Delving Deeper supplement on that class -- it takes away those pesky Druid spells and instead appends a mundane d% skill mechanic. I like this. Can 2d6 Rangery be far behind?]

So now Spawn of Endra and I proudly present 2d6 Bardery, hereby declared Open Gaming Content and available as a pdf here. You will probably need Brave Halfling's Delving Deeper: Bard to make best use of this system, but at the low low price of $0.75 for the pdf, this supplement is surely a must-have for those folks wishing to include Bards in their campaigns.  A free sample version is available here.

2d6 Bardery

Using the Brave Halfling Delving Deeper: Bard template as a baseline, we have established that Bards have three basic skills: Legend Lore, Charm Person / Monster, and Read Languages and Arcane Scrolls. The latter is a conflation of two Delving Deeper skills, the former of which (Read Languages) has no set parameters or roll associated with it in the Delving Deeper template.

Instead of using the d%-based skill chart in the Delving Deeper supplement, the Bard chooses one of the first two of those three skills (Legend Lore or Charm Person / Monster) to be his or her Favored Skill; the remaining two (ALWAYS including Read Languages and Arcane Scrolls) function as Other Skills on the table below.

2d6 Bardery Skill Chart - Roll 2d6:

Bard Level	Favored Skill	Other Skills
1	10+	11+
2	10+	10+
3	9+	10+
4	9+	9+
5	9+	9+
6	8+	9+
7	8+	8+
8	7+	8+
9	6+	7+
10	5+	6+
11	4+	5+
12	4+	4+
13	3+	4+
14+	3+	3+

Note that a roll of "2" always fails.

Optionally (and strongly recommended), you can grant a Bard his or her CHA modifier (i.e., the absolute value of the Reaction Adjustment modifier, +1 for CHA 13-17, +2 for CHA 18) to Charm Person / Monster checks. No attribute (INT) modifiers are permitted for Legend Lore or Read Languages and Arcane Scrolls skill rolls: exposure to lore during his or her training is the basis for the Bard's being able to decipher languages or arcane scrolls.

Endnote: Although much of this 2d6 Bardery business has been inspired by the presence and deeds of the Arandish Campaign's resident rodian bard, Uncle Junkal, it should be mentioned that Uncle Junkal himself does not completely conform to the rules given above. 2d6 Bardery as presented here should be considered a "Basic Bard Template" applicable to most bards; however, Uncle Junkal himself is a juggling specialist, and as such has a couple of skills / abilities not outlined here. A future post, perhaps?

Towards a 2d6 B/X Bard ... Part 2 of 2 (or 3, maybe)

Spawn said:

In the first part of this epic Bard post, I recounted the problems that Carter's Ara campaign was having with the version of the Bard class we were using (Brave Halfling's), and the d30 rule, which led to maddening results that were messing up the game. Carter was pissed, because Uncle Junkal at Level 3 could Charm very powerful monsters automatically. We then began to work out how to apply Dyson's "2d6 Thievery" system to the Bard, and went down the first of several Bard-mechanic rabbit holes. Now we rejoin that story.

So, in the previous exegesis "How the Hell Does a Bard Do What it Does?" I established (take it or leave it as you like) that even though the Bard does magic-like things, for the sake of 1e PHB consistency, those skills refer to the arcane spells for a common description of the effects, not as an indication that the Bard is doing arcane magic. S/He is not. It's a trick. Okay. That had to be clarified to determine what if any attribute bonuses would apply to the use of Bard skills in a 2d6 system. I needed to know that to know what to plot up on this chart:

To plot that out, I first figured the probabilities of success, and so I had to look closely at the data. Plotting up the Legend Lore chart, I saw it went up to 125%, and I changed the scale of the graph to deal with that. Whatever, no biggy, I've seen that before with some thief skill, there's modifiers ... wait, what? Legend Lore? What modifies that up to 125%? 

Get a load of this:

So, the Brave Halfling Bard has copied some skill charts from Lab Lord. But the asterisk by Pick Pockets tells us that there's a 5% penalty against the roll for every 5 levels the target is above the thief, hence the +100% numbers. Fine, but what does this have to do with Legend Lore? NOTHING! There's no similar mechanic. So I started grumbling about a bad cut-and-paste job and sloppy DIY and blah blah blaggity blag blug blog. I looked at Zak's DIY Bill-of-Rights (having already decided I can do my DIY BoR myself, but wanting another point of reference) and confirmed that according to him I could be pissed off about this.

So I decided to just cut that off at 100%, and assume it was an honest mistake (that distribution is what's depicted in my chart). Then I made some observations about the chart. First the 2d6 pretty much removes the automatic d30 Charm outcome right away, at least until Level 11 (Favored Skill+2), or Level 13 (Fav+1). And that's a good thing. Next, even though Uncle Junkal at L4 still has a good chance of charming with the 2d6 (say ~40% if he's +1, and ~60% if he's +2), he's only getting an ~80% chance of charming with the d30. This margin of advantage decreases as he levels up, and as that happens, the use of the d30 for Charm probably will decline, or it will be reserved for the Other Skills. Even though some d30 weirdness remains, there is still some strategy involved in its deployment. Sounds like we've reached a not-perfect solution, but one hinting at the ringing vastness of a fair settlement.

As delighted as I was by that, and Carter being really enthusiastic about the chart (here it is again), it made made the following evident to me, which I described to Mr. Soles [fyi, DD=Delving Deeper=Brave Halfling]:

'Here's a potential problem/concern: the Other Skill (in green) lags behind the DD base curves (as does the unmodified Favored Skill, not depicted). Maybe this doesn't matter all that much for Legend Lore or Read Scrolls, since they aren't used that often anyway. But consider that since these are derived from thief tables, and the two most favorable skills at that, it means that thieving is harder under Dyson's 2d6 than under Lab Lord. In general it might be a couple of percent, but 10% offsets are common, and some go as high as 20% (e.g., at Level 8). Maybe this is offset by DEX modifiers. Is there any thief without at least +1 from DEX? Probably not. But Uncle Junkal would be taking a hit on Legend Lore and Read Scrolls.'

'I don't want to house-rule the house-rule to the house-rule to the house-rule-version of the merely Appendix-worthy bastard class, but ... ugh ... we already are.'

That being my OSR epitaph, by the way.

But this came out as well: 'And what's with the Read Languages skill? No mechanic for it! WTF Brave Halfling? Does it work like the thief? Bah!'

Carter had been using a 1-2 on d6 roll up to this point in place of no mechanic, and the Thief's 80% chance seemed too high a success rate for him. But the d6 lagged behind all the curves. For a moment we considered leaving it that, but then I realized that pretty quickly you'd have a situation where the Bard would be better able to decipher Arcane Scrolls than read hobgoblin, which is nonsense. Carter suggested we just combine Read Languages and Scroll into one skill. Hmm. Does that make sense? I threw caution to the wolves and asked:

Why Can a Bard Read Other Languages or Arcane Scrolls? (Thine Spawn of Endra's personal take on it.)

Let's say there are no unusual modifiers due to INT.  Exposure to lore during the Bard's training is the basis for being able to decipher languages or arcane scrolls. This is no different than the way I can sort of decipher modern Greek writing based on my math/science familiarity with the letters, my knowledge of English etymology, and my tendency to use ingredient listings on European products as Rosetta Stones. Thus, my ability to decipher the Greek alphabet helps me to decipher maybe 40% of Cyrillic characters, though I know few Russian words. Sometimes they are similar enough to English I can figure it out. Or having watched Clockwork Orange enough times I know moloko is milk and bolshoi (bolshy) is big [Mr. ze Bullette, please believe me, I wrote this several days before your Korova bar comments! For true!]. This is what a Bard is doing for any kind of reading languages or deciphering scrolls. Again, not magic, just knowledge.

Huzzah Part 2! That makes more sense before 9am than most people make all day. And so we ended up unifying Read Languages and Read Arcane Scrolls as a skill, gave Legend Lore a proper level progression, and came to understand that the Bard is not magic even though s/he charms and does magicky looking stuff. Alright. Now we have a workable Bard that isn't totally over-powered by the d30 mechanic.

This exercise taught me a lot about working through mechanics and probabilities, and the importance of trying to identify unintended consequences before you bring them into play. I guess that's what play-testing is for, and we've been play-testing the BH Bard for a year and have found some problems with it. But the real stumbling block for me is "What the hell explains a bard's powers?" It's not that I wanted it to be realistic. That's stupid, I'm playing D&D. But I want it to have a consistent internal logic. In Carcosa you can gain access to arcane power by murdering and raping. That's not realistic (Charles Manson is not known to throw fireballs around, nor is Donald Rumsfeld), but it makes sense within the setting and mechanics of the game. The Bard so far has not, and the unease everyone has with them is partly due to this.

Maybe my version of the Bard's logic doesn't jive with yours, but I hope at least it seems coherent, and maybe gives you some ideas for how to approach a B/X Bard for your game. Tomorrow Carter will conclude this Bardic saga with his own comments, and provide, after all the blood and guts and struggle, a nice clean pdf with the simple 2d6 Bard mechanics to graft onto the BH Bard class.

Rock on.

Towards a 2d6 B/X Bard ... Part 1 of 2

Spawn crunch-ed the numbers long and hard, racked his brain, and then wrote, in the first of two long parts:

Bards. %$#^% bards. Many people have written about Bards in D&D, and many have felt pretty ambivalent about them: a class with no specific purpose; a hodgepodge of a fighter, thief, and maybe a druid; underpowered or overpowered; sort of magic-using but not actually magic most of the time; not really clear what the nature of their power is. I never really cared much about the class, and back in the day no one I knew played one (i.e., the PHB Bard). But now in Carter's Ara campaign, we have a Bard, Uncle Junkal, and so I've had to think about this. UJ is a Brave Halfling version B/X Bard with some 2e abilities like being able to throw two knives (or similar) per round. Like most Bards he can do some things like Charm Monster, Legend Lore, and Read Arcane scrolls ... and the rub is that these are d% rolls that basically are copied from Lab Lord Theif skill tables.

This becomes a problem because we have the d30 rule, which means at Level 1 he can Charm, say Ogres, Trolls, etc. ~70% of the time, and from Level 3 on it's an automatic Charm. To wit:

So, as it stands, since pretty early on we've had a Rock Troll in our party, which is nearly indestructible (certainly in the first couple of levels of Stonehell), and worse yet, UJ is ready to form a menagerie of all sorts of high powered monsters. This has been pissing Carter off, and he's started saying how he needs to send in more bad shit to kill us, and create deadlier wilderness encounter tables, or take away the Charm ability ... a whole bunch of stuff I as a player don't like the sound of. He doesn't hate us as players, but it's an unintended consequence of the d30's interaction with another set of rules and it's messing up the game. And as players we're starting to feel like we're getting away with a lot of stuff, even though we're just playing with the mechanics in the game. What to do?

Carter suggested, why not adapt Dyson's "2d6 Thievery" skills system to the BH Bard skills? (This is a feature within Dyson's Dodecahedron vol. 1, check it out! He says it's "d12 pages of Awesome", but you can ignore the d, I say.) Carter liked the idea of not having any d% rolls in a B/X game and the peaked rather than flat probability distribution of the 2d6, just as Dyson does. What would that do? Well, I decided to plot out the chances of success for different skills as is, and then as Dyson's Favored Skill with attribute modifiers, as well as Other Skills. Then these are plotted as d30 rolls as well (above). In the process of making that chart, I learned a lot of stuff about Bards ... and why some people vehemently hate them. I came to hate the Bard class we had very quickly. It made me angry. I will now begin to explain why.

So, we've got the three Bard skills. Let say one is the favored skill, player's choice. Dyson says you could give the attribute modifier to the Favored Skill if you like. For the Thief, that's DEX. Cool, makes sense that high DEX helps the thief. For the Bard, CHA is the prime req, so let's say we'll apply the bonuses for retainer reaction (made positive) to the 2d6 Favored Skill roll. For Charm Monster/Person, that makes sense. But Legend Lore? Read Arcane Scrolls? Why would CHA apply to that? Hmm. These mimic magic-user spells, so maybe INT bonuses apply to those. For that matter, Charm mimics a spell as well, so maybe we apply INT bonuses to all of them. Or only if they are the Favored Skill. Here's the problem: Is the Bard doing Magic or not? If the source of the power is arcane then the Charisma stuff doesn't matter. Why doesn't the Brave Halfling Bard explain any of this? So we wobbled on it, and then I finally distilled this:

How the Hell Does a Bard Do What it Does?

The Bard is -- if we take the folklore about them, the PHB version, the Brave Halfling version, and whatever blog-baggage it has accrued -- a figure that is iconic but poorly understood. We all know what a Bard does, but we don't know how the Bard does it.

1) When they Charm, they seem to work magic like any spell-caster, but it's difficult to say precisely whether it's arcane, divine, or not even really magic. People are captivated by performers, and it's inexplicable. W.S. Burroughs agreed with Jimmy Page, after attending a Led Zeppelin concert that they were literally absorbing, manipulating and redirecting the power of the audience as in ritual [Zak pointed us to this superb 1975 article]. Is Jimmy Page a magic user or a shaman? What about Jim Morrison? He thought he was a shaman, and so does he stat up as a cleric or what? Or, are they both Bards (along with Robert Plant, Syd Barrett [but maybe not Roger Waters], Mick Jagger, and of course the dreaded Paul McCartney ... and Stevie Nicks, Madonna, Prince, Henry Rollins, Johnny Rotten, Lady Gaga, Jello Biafra, etc.). Maybe CHA modifiers apply, seems appropriate given the performance-dependence of the skill.

2) Reading Arcane Scrolls .... Bards do tricksy things, and so they are like present-day magicians/illusionists.

But they are also like thieves, in that they rely on misdirection and light-of-hand for some of their powers. Seemingly Uncle Junkal Charms by juggling. So the thieving aspects make sense in that respect. They aren't really doing "magic". Even when the thief reads an elf scroll, s/he is tricking the scroll or the Vancian Magic Universe into thinking the thief is properly able to use the scroll. It's a trick. Period. As it is when the Bard does it. No modifiers for DEX (Thief) or INT (MU/Elf) apply.
 

3) Legend Lore. They are trained in lore, whether it's folklore, legend, history, oral tradition, etc., and they LEARNED all of that stuff by studying it. They did not acquire it by a magical or innate process. They belong to colleges, they have mentors, etc. They have knowledge because they were exposed to a hell of a lot of knowledge during their studies. So, there's no magic in their Legend Lore, it's just book learning. For convenience, for this ability and for Charm, PHB and Brave Halfling refer to the existing mechanics of those spells, but (I submit) neither are magical when the Bard uses them. Even if they were, no INT modifier applies to MUs when they cast the spell. And all of this learning happened (at least with the Brave Halfling version we're using) before the PC was even created, so an argument than INT bonuses should apply afterward is suspect. No modifiers for INT, because you're already assuming with this skill that they might be able to read a language they don't know (and knowing additional languages is the generic INT bonus).

So, bottom line: Charm Person/Monster for Bards in a Dyson Logos-based 2d6 system accrues the absolute value CHA bonus (wrt Reaction modifers), but Legend Lore and Read Scrolls accrue NO attribute modifiers, period.
 

Huzzah! There's some crunch and some analysis that gives us some relatively clear ideas about what the Bard does and how. I'm feeling like an Old School Blogger now, wading through the dreck, salvaging some logic, presenting a coherent ruling, knocking down the pixels like shots of cheap bourbon. But, that's just the start, we're not out of the woods yet! We merely have made a small Heideggerian clearing in the vast and tangled Bardish thicket. "Delving Deeper" (as it were) Carter and I will endure more perils before succeeding in our quest to bring our readers a not-totally-jerry-rigged ass-can B/X Bard. More on that, and the final resolution, tomorrow!