Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
Aside from a roll vs. Musical Instrument or Singing being needed to use Musical Influence (so you might want at least a 16 to avoid critical failure on a 17): - DF 1, p. 20: Bard-Song abilities operate at a level equal to the bard's skill with Musical Instrument or Singing, as applicable, plus his Bardic Talent.
- DF 2, p. 4: Musical Instrument and Singing can earn a little extra cash for a poor bard.
- DF 2, p. 11: Musical Instrument and Singing can be used with the Trickery rule (p. 10).
I guess all of those applications would be classed as "subtle" by most players, who are more into smashing stuff in dungeon crawls. But a canny bard could use all of his Bard-Song abilities at a very high level, earn money, and distract some fairly scary foes early on in the campaign, when high skill at many abilities is harder to get, money is scarce, and nobody is buff enough to kill every foe. |
How are the Bard powers supposed to work with Trickery?
DF2 says that Captivate, Hypnotism, Musical Influence, Persuade, Suggest, or Sway Emotions can be used as old Bardic mind tricks. But...
Captivate takes 30 mintues of talking before it will take effect, Suggest is 20 minutes, and Sway Emotions is 10 minutes. So, none of those seem like they would be applicable to that moment when you run across the Orc guards and need to do something before a fight happens. And Persuade takes a minute...so that doesn't really seem like it would work either. Hypnotism...that only takes 5 seconds...so seems like it might be more useful if you have five seconds before the fight might start, but only effects one person. Musical Influence, since you'd only have a few seconds, only allow a +/-1 to the Reaction roll...which is doubtful it can do much to shift a hostile group of baddies in a more positive way.
So, when your group of delvers come across a group of bandits in the dungeon and they are about to reach for weapons...how exactly are these Bardic skills supposed to be helpful?
Or, are we adding a completely new, immediate option...that would go something like:
GM: You come across the bandits, Combat starts! They reach for their weapons!
The Bard, shouldn't use Terror here because it has just as good a change of Frightening his allies as well as the Bandit Enemies, since it is not selective, correct? So instead the Bard says:
Bard: Um...I try Trickery using my Musical Influence to try and stun them.
GM: Okay, since your Leader is Arthur the Knight (who has the Leadership skill), it is his IQ 10 -5 for being on the verge of combat, vs the IQ of the smartest individual bandit, which is their Wizard with an IQ 14. You play your lute, but they ignore you.
This is going to be better than the alternative...which is that the Bard would have to try and get their attention for 20 minutes. Though...it seems that it would generally not be successful.
Am I missing something about Trickery?