If you want to play a bard but don't want to have your character break into song all the damn time, you can use the same rules for bards but play as either a Journalist (if you want to be investigating things and reporting them to a newspaper somewhere in the game world) or a Dime Novelist (if you're out looking for thrilling adventures that you will be turning into pulp books for semi-literate people to enjoy). Because honestly, most journalists should know how to pick locks and sneak around if they want to be any good at what they're doing.
Small to massive XP bonuses for people who actually write up stories or come up with plot synopses of their dime novels.
How exactly are bards a thing? Do they magic? Can they fight? The bard in Gamers: Dorkness Rising just died a lot. And kept seducing barwenches.
ReplyDeleteBards are kind of a jack-of-all-trades character for people who want to play a support class but don't want to steal stuff all the time. And yes, occasionally they got their armor from a gum machine and use their communication skills for less than honorable purposes.
ReplyDeleteDid I ever throw the Silver John stories by Manly Wade Wellman at you? He's a wandering drifter in the mid-1950s in the Carolinas, fighting evil with his Christian faith, a silver-strung guitar and an encyclopedic memory of folklore and myth. They're not quite like anything else I've ever read and they're pretty damn amazing. That's the Platonic ideal of a bard character. The guy in Dorkness Rising is how things tend to work out when the dice hate you.