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Bardic Instruments
My suggestion is to rework the role of instruments in bardic abilities so that they do more than sit in one's inventory to gate abilities from other skillsets. Why not allow the bard to choose which instrument (or instruments) to play for a particular song, with each having a slightly different effect?
For example, why not have each ability in Thespia that currently requires a particular instrument (or two) instead just require any instrument (or two). Then the corresponding artistry skills can be adjusted as follows:
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Mandolin
The musician's first instrument, years of practice allowing them to coax beautiful melodies from it as naturally as breathing.
Effects:
- Reduces the cost of your Thespia abilities, and adds a very tiny mana regeneration to everyone in the room in which it is played (ally & enemy)
- Lute (reduced mana cost of songs),
- Viola (slightly reduced equilibrium cost of beneficial songs),
- Fiddle (slightly reduced equilibrium cost of harmful songs)
Flute
A beautifully gentle instrument whose layered vibrations carry the unending song of the wind.
Effects:
- Extends the duration of your Thespia abilities, and has a chance to draw additional vermin or other small creatures in the room in which it is played (very infrequent chance)
- Flute (songs last slightly longer)
- Oboe (your songs are more difficult to end or remove)
- Piccolo (ticks of your songs have a small chance to extend the remaining duration)
Drum
The pounding percussive rhythms of the drum add force and impact to your music.
Effects:
- Increases the effectiveness of your Thespia abilities, and grants an extra movement step to everyone in the room in which it is played (rarely, like every 10 sec or so)
- Tabor Drum (increased healing/protection from beneficial songs),
- Conga Drum (increased damage/weakening from harmful songs),
- Slit Drum (small chance for extra ticks of music effects that are not damage/healing)
Panpipes
The complex and layered harmonies of the panpipes can be used to evoke depth and shade once mastered by the skilled musician.
Effects:
- Adds secondary utility effects to your Thespia abilities, and has a small chance to cause additional herb growth or blossoming flowers in the room in which it is played
- Panflute (chance for songs affecting allies to cause the next damaging attack to have 30% of its damage deflected, lasting a few seconds only)
- Syrinx (chance for songs affecting allies to reduce the mana/willpower cost of the target's next ability by 75%, lasting a few seconds only)
- Harmonica (chance for harmful or beneficial songs to add a random statistical buff or debuff, lasting a few seconds only)
Harp
The golden-stringed harp is the trademark of the maestro bard, who can coax the most exquisite and beautiful music known to mortalkind from within it.
Effects:
- Improves the effects of your Thespia abilities, and adds a very tiny health regeneration to everyone in the room in which it is played (allies & enemies)
- Golden harp (Harmful songs have improved individual effects)
- Silver harp (Beneficial songs have improved individual effects)
- Lyre (Utility songs have improved individual effects)
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Note that the minor passive room ability that is associated with each instrument would not cause a message line (otherwise it would be way too spammy), and these room-wide effects are intended to be more flavourful than directly useful. Also, it would be impossible to play two varieties of the same instrument at once.
So for example, as soon as I learn Restoration in Thespia I would be able to use that ability as long as I am playing any instrument that I have - but as a novice I might only be able to craft a lute (meaning it costs slightly less mana to play). As my skill grows, I might decide that I prefer to use a tabor to get bigger ticks from Restoration instead, but pay a little extra in mana now that I'm not using a lute anymore. Alternatively, I could choose whichever instrument best suits my play style, or possibly some combination of them once I am skilled enough to play two at once. I would also suggest that the effects of instruments only apply as long as the bard continues to play them - while the same song may persist after I've unwielded or started to play a different instrument, the bonuses that apply to the song are derived from what I am playing now and not the original instrument that started the song.
It would also be really wonderful if somehow I could pay a woodworker for designs that allowed me to make different looking instruments - maybe that already exists somehow and its just not clear from the AB descriptions.
Anyway, just a suggestion that I'd personally like to see! ^_^
Comments
On the topic of reworking instruments - I would rather see Imperian's Bards get the axe at some point and be remade. Every attempt made by admin or players to prod or poke them in to the right direction, balance-wise, tends to blow up in our faces (see: my Cruel Lament change, the beta-less Bard 'revamp', the Words of Power and the Voice Word: Myried in general). I prefer Achaea's "swashbuckling guy" Bards, even though I hear they are, oddly enough saddled with some of the same issues in combat.
In an ideal world, the ideas you brought up would have already been thought about and very likely had seen the light of day in some fashion - namely requiring specific instruments for songs is kind of stupid, and instruments should have been a utilitarian (and roleplay) choice of some fashion instead of being ingredients in a recipe. Sadly, Bard is caught somewhere in the middle of "legacy design philosophy" (which was pretty awful, in retrospect) and "intelligent, thoughtful class design" (or as close to what we have today - I think most classes Garryn gets his hands on look pretty good, honestly).
I did wonder if you could just use the instruments of other bards - but seems to make those skills even less useful or well designed as standalone abilities (given they last for what, about 4 RL months?).
I can understand the desire for a 'slash and burn' approach to a whole new class, but I definitely wouldn't want to play a swashbuckler/rogue myself. I like the idea of music as serious magic, not as a part of cheap tricks and boyish entertainment (although the current bard skills seem a bit of the way down that path already).
A full rework would be great too, but in lieu of having the desire or resources for that, I think this suggestion takes what we already have and makes it much more intuitive and hopefully a little more interesting.
I really like your ideas for instruments, and you're enthusiasm for one of my favorite classes.
More generally, any time you see yourself using words like 'random' and 'chance', stop and think very carefully about why you feel that it is necessary to randomize the effectiveness of the ability you are proposing. Often, what emerges isthat either a) it is too powerful in its current state, and either needs to be toned down or given some other necessary condition for operating, or b) it is fine as it is, and the chance can be turned into a certainty.
When you introduce mechanically mandated elements of chance into a skillset, you are creating an enforced range of incertainty in balancing discussions. If the difference between 'getting lucky on the ticks' and not is the only thing that makes the class viable, then I can promise you that it is the type of class that no one wants to fight as or against.
1. Instant kantae will be gone.
2. Nuarinyu won't have it's double masked afflicting.
3. Myried will be uncomboable.
4. There are 4 ways bards makes afflict, so adding any random or chance mechanic will complicate things further with the nearly unstoppable offense bard has.
On the actual concept: The Magick circles doesn't need more stationary abilities. We are deleting/remaking Crystalism for this very reason. We deleted Groves for this very reason. An illustration being a stationary, powerful skill will only serve to root the class down and then we have to give it something to prevent people from fleeing - which is another nightmare to consider. Not to be insulting, but I don't believe that the actual meat of your idea supplies what the game - and the class - currently needs for Bards to stay functional within the Magick circle. The balancing point of 'SMUDGE', as well, sort of makes a momentum or tempo mechanic (there are good and bad tempo/momentum classes - Bard is currently a bad one) that we want to draw AWAY from - what is the cost of smudging? What is the cost of storytelling? Comparably, are you creating a point of pressure that an opponent is forced to do nothing but smudge illustrations instead of attacking back? If SMUDGE is costless (in which case every single one of my commands will be truncated with SMUDGE ILLUSTRATION#;), why give it to players in the first place? Why not just make illustrations do something weaker and make them uncounterable? These things are things you, as a person with little PK experience, likely don't think about day to day. That's fine, absolutely, but it should also illustrate that class design and concepts aren't all just ideas. There is a muscle behind every piece of skin, and that muscle needs to function in an effective and fair way.
Excuse my ranting: The Bard class is a steaming pile that should be utterly revamped - but I said that 10+ posts ago. While it might not 'suit' some people's RP, we definitely endured Canavas' whining when we took away his reflexed-bow-level 3 'RP' and the game is better for it. I wholly endorse the existence and propagation of RP in Imperian, but you don't need a set of guild skills to be a precise way to RP your character how you want. The class is schizophrenic mess of 'themes' and the mechanics. To continue on this, I will say that our Bards are probably the worst out of all three available Bard classes in IRE - Lusternia's Bards entirely embrace the fact that they are meant to be a team-centric support class with 'RP tools', and Achaea's Bards have a simple, elegant theme and kit. No amount of theoretical 'revamping' can beat just razing the class and remaking it ground up with autocuring in mind and the design philosophies Garryn seems to subscribe to (considering he has yet to really do us wrong). I guess my point is that I don't hate your ideas - I just hate the idea of spending more time 'fixing' Bards when we'd be better served axing the class with a rewrite in mind.
I love RP, and I also like PvP, but even with a lot of credits and lessons, it's a bit annoying to learn through something and figure out which are ones I can use in combat and which ones are more flavour things. The newly designed skills with Hunter and Druid seem to not have these sort of issues, though.
Having read all these posts and skimmed over your suggestions, I think that the best way to sum this thread up is: "I really liked the idea of Bards, but I liked the idea of Bards that are nothing like these Bards, so here's some awful ideas!"
You want to remove all their mobility and tie them to pseudo-sketches with crappy effects that you've anchored to rooms. You want to add a whole bunch of fiddly things to it like "Count song ticks and time your attacks to fall after certain ticks."
What exactly is your goal with this suggested change? Because there HAS to be a better way to go about it than "awful it up a bit."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
A bit of bard history is in this spoiler to start with , since I don't know where you're coming from. If you already know this, well. Skip it if you want. If not, this is how sketches have progressed through the years.
[spoiler]Back 'in the day', when Bards were first created, a Bard could sketch damn near any creature in the world, including players(player sketches were terrible, though). So Bards were walking around with sketchbooks filled with all sorts of amazing creatures and they could unleash them on you in combat.
The problem with this is that while you might think this resulted in fights full of pictures of orcish warriors swinging axes and manticores doing manticore things and giant poisonous spiders and chimeras and wolves and such, you'd be wrong. What it actually resulted in was a picture of a large creature called a drelith tailwhipping you in the head every few seconds for a hundred odd damage and an effectively permanent blackout while the Bard did literally anything he wanted, because the sketch was going to kill you for him anyways.
And so this got a nerf somewhat. The thing is, though, the fact that Bards could still sketch almost any creature in the world made every new bashing area released was a possible upgrade for Bards, due to giving them new sketches. In fact, I am 100% certain that there are mobs out there that were designed by mortal builders specifically so that they'd be able to to be sketched after the area was released. And this was ****, and it made balancing the class stupid, because every new area was quite possibly a new combat skill that had never been tested as a combat skill.
And so, eventually, we came to the state we're in now. Sketches were pared down to the point where Bards can only sketch magick-circle players,, and the sketches only use certain abilities on command. This is the inevitable and logical progression of the original idea to a sort of balance.[/spoiler]
Now, if your complaint is unique Bard flavor, I would have no problem with reskinning things.
You've got a ship in an example up above. I'd be completely okay with, say, turning the Hunter sketch into a sailing ship sketch. Fireblast and Iceblast turn into cannonfire, Mark Return turns into sailing away on the boat, Sting turns into a barrage of poisoned arrows from the rigging. I'm 100% okay with that. In fact, it's kind of awesome. You want to be able to customise your ships so that you can have some sleek elven frigate while I have a bulky ironclad? I'm okay with that, too, provided that there's some static message on the attacks to make them easily recognizable and triggerable, and provided that there's some kind mandatory descriptor in the shortdesc so that I can easily glance into your room and discern that you've got a ship sketch.
Runeguards to customizable warriors, etc, etc? A sketchemote command to make them do things? Sure.
If you want to change the flavor, you'd be better off just asking to change the flavour and avoiding changes to major combat mechanics.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
EDIT: Oh man, or my mist tendril sketches that aeoned, blacked out, and flung you from the room? Ahhh, the good old days. Sethren got so pissed when he saw those the first time.
Oh, the good ol' spider sketches with earthquake stun and behead.....
Or even tossing down three troll sketches to wipe a room...
Or tossing spider sketches on EVERY person in the room, allowing you to effectively fight 5v1 and win....
Yeah, bard is slightly, very slightly, better than it was before.