Building Bhakashal - Bardic Inspiration

Image by Jesper Ejsing

Inspired by a thread on bards on Twitter.

I had a 1e AD&D bard in my game, one of my after school kids played one for 2 years. Total of 160 hours at the table got him through his fighter and thief levels and to 6th as a bard before he stopped. A few observations based on that experience, and the experience of a player in my current game.

I find that the bardic abilities in 1e AD&D fall short in a predictably 1e way. 

First, charm requires a roll to “cast”, and the target still gets a save. Dual rolls like this reduce your odds of success precipitously. 

So BTB bardic charm is unreliable until high levels.

However, there are caveats.

First, if you use it against low level monsters, then when the bard makes their percentage roll it has a much better chance of working, and the duration is permanent with checks every week. For up to 2 HD monsters it’s only a 5% chance of breaking free of the charm per week. 

So that means that the bard has good odds of charming a group of 2-8 low level monsters and having them by their side for 1 week minimum, and then they only have a 5% chance of breaking the charm, so it could last longer. That’s pretty helpful. 

That “1 week minimum” depends on how you read the spell entry, for 0-2 HD creatures, it says there is a 5% chance per week of the monster breaking the charm, I read that as you get 1 week if it fails the initial save, then at the end of that week and subsequent weeks you roll to see if it breaks the charm.

Also, bardic charm can be used on 0-levels to get favorable treatment, information, that sort of thing. It has so many non-combat uses, when the party bard was on a ship for an extended voyage, bardic inspiration helped with morale when pirates were spotted and bardic charm helped at various ports along the way, as well as with at least one sea monster. Just one example, the party was slowly docking at a new city so the bard took out his instrument and played to the approaching officials, he made his roll, they failed their saves, and he managed to get their docking fees dropped, a choice berth and recommended lodgings. 

It’s also role playing gold, play for the bandit leader, cast charm, if successful, make new friends. Who doesn’t want some music after all, even without the charm magic, adventurers, caravan merchants and soldiers all love music, it’s a great icebreaker.

Against high HD monsters the charm was less impactful because the saving throw is easier to make, but when it worked, the bard had a charmed monster for a week guaranteed, if they ended the enchantment before the week was up there was little risk. A monster in your service for a week is pretty helpful on an adventure. The aforementioned bard at one point managed to charm a fire giant, boy did that make the next few sessions super fun. A charmed mid to high HD monster can also make a great mount. 

Lots of AD&D is like this, low thief percentages for example, bad odds but high reward if it works. Most DMs I know who house rule, house rule these odds. It’s a place where I think Gygax was wrong, if the odds are too long it’s no fun, not for a primary class ability. A low level thief hardly ever makes their rolls, and a low level bard will only be able to charm the weakest of monsters and humanoids if at all. This is why I would recommend augmenting the bardic charm odds, I added the bard’s CHA bonus to the roll. It wasn’t a slam dunk or anything, but it helped.

Same comments could be made about legend lore, its scope is restricted, and the odds are terrible, but if they come up, it could be a crucial advantage for the party. 

This is a pattern in 1e with exceptional abilities for many classes, low odds but big payoff when they hit.

Outside of that though, the bard has a lot going on. 

First off, bards get Druid spells, and lots of them. The 6th level bard in our group had 3 1st level and 3 2nd level spells per day.

Spells like Pass without a Trace, Entangle and Speak with Animals, combined with thief stealth and a fighter punch make a bard in the outdoors quite formidable. So the bard became valuable for wilderness adventures too.

This is yet another area where referee judgment matters. In 1e Charm Person or Mammal is required to charm an animal, bards get Charm Person or Charm Monster with their bardic charm, so technically they can’t charm animals with their music. But they can cast Animal Friendship. That strikes me as an error, and we let bards charm animals as well.

Outside of the druid spells, the main advantages I saw were related to stats and HP. 

Bards need crazy stats, so if you qualify, you get a range of bonuses

Due to stats: 

Minimum +1 WIS save bonus

Min  +1 on every HD

Min -1 to AC

Min +15% loyalty/reaction

AD&D is a game of accumulating bonuses, so this stuff matters long term. And those are all minimums.

But the biggest contributor to bard durability is the XP system and it’s interface with the dual classing system. A bard is essentially a tri-class PC.

AD&D’s XP system means that a 7th/6th/6th (Fighter /Thief /Bard) requires 115,000 XP, that’s the XP range of a… 7th level fighter. In other words, while the 7th level fighter is accumulating XP to get to eighth level, our man of music burns through 6 levels of thief and 6 levels of bard!

That’s a quirk of the XP system, because XP requirements more or less double per level in most cases, the time it takes a single class fighter to get from 7th to 8th is long enough for another lower level PC to level up a lot. The only caveat is the party has to be patient and return to town repeatedly for training to allow the bard to level up. 

But back to our 7/6/6 bard and 7th level fighter. The bard hits as well as the 7th level fighter, and that fighter has an average of [d10 average = 5.5 x 7]38.5 HP, max of 70. 

Remembering that a bard has a minimum of 15 CON…

Fighter 15 CON - Average [6.5 x 7] 45.5 HP - Max HP: 77 

Bard 15 CON - Average fighter [6.5 x 7] 45.5 HP + Average Thief [4.5 x 6] 27 + Average Bard [4.5 x 6] 27 = Average 99.5 HP - Max HP [77 + 42 + 42]: 161 

Fighter 18 CON - Average [9.5 x 7] 66.5 HP - Max HP: 98 

Bard 18 CON - Average fighter [9.5 x 7] 66.5 HP + average thief [5.5 x 6] 33 + average bard [5.5 x 6] 33 =  132.5 HP - Max HP: 98 + 48 + 48 = 194

The bard more than doubles HP compared to the fighter in every category, and a bard with the 15 CON minimum outperforms the 18 CON fighter in HP. 

Now, HP aren’t everything, lots of things bypass HP, but their saves are comparable, as are attack odds and number of attacks, and the bard gets a mountain of extra HP. Bards are typically not tanks, to maintain access to their thieving and druid spell abilities they wear leather armor, so from an AC perspective, they are significantly worse off, even with a DEX bonus. 

Still, they are still pretty awesome at 7th level of ability, 3/2 attacks per round and 7 attacks per round against 0-levels. That’s not too shabby. 

And HP make a difference. When our bard did get into melee he was hard to beat as he could outlast his opponents in almost every case. Yes, his AC was terrible, but he hit as well as a 7th level fighter, and he could take far more damage. So he was never the point guy, but he was often the finisher.

This actually created some problems for me as I had to continually narrate how this bard, who had sustained much more numerical damage than his peers, was somehow still alive. So even when he got hit it was narrated as a near miss, luck, a light blow, a blow he rolled out of, that sort of thing.

Returning to our example, when that 115,000 XP fighter hits 9th level (135,000 xp later), due to the vagaries of the XP tables, the bard will be 11th level, with a min of 22.5 extra HP, and casting 3/3/3/2 druid spells per day. Since players wait so long to be bards, I guess Gygax softened the requirements for progress once they became bards. That means they level fairly quickly.

I’m sorry, fighters are awesome and all, but a 7th level fighter with 3/3/3/2 druid spells per day, animal companions and a bag of HP against a straight up 9th level fighter is not a cake walk for either. Not to mention that our 7/6/6 bard also had 9 weapon proficiency slots. That means they can be proficient in many of the major weapons that appear on the magic weapon table. That’s a nice bennie for the class and increases their odds of having magic weapons. 

Really the only martial downsides are the AC and lack of progress in two original classes after switching to bard.

Our bard was the face of the party, he negotiated a lot for them, used his charm on groups where needed to smooth things over, and otherwise operated as a thief with spellcasting abilities. The bard was NOT the party tank after he switched to thief, I think that contributed to his success. If you play a bard like a straight up fighter they won’t be as useful. When he HAD to fight he represented, and his ridiculous HP buffered him to the point where regular melee combat was not a challenge in many cases. But the other fighters, rangers etc. in the party took point.

Things like poison and paralysis and such were a problem, high HP doesn’t help with that, but they were a problem for everyone else in the party too, so that didn’t matter much comparatively. He was the party leader and did as well as the single class PCs. 

I think the efficacy of any given PC class is enmeshed in the campaign setting, play style, and the match between player and PC. 

Our setting is heavily factionalized and navigating those factions is crucial to success. This means that intelligence gathering and alliance formation are absolutely key. This made a high charisma bard with magical charm and legend lore a game changer. Also, our players meet a significant number of 0-level opponents, bandits, soldiers, mercenaries, that sort of business. A high charisma bard with inspiration, charm magic that works well on 0-levels, and 7 attacks per round against 0-level opponents is going to be a big benefit to the party.

From a play style perspective, we use reaction rolls a lot, and the players have learned to eschew combat except where necessary. If you are playing in a game where combat is front and center, the mechanical differences between the bard and other classes are magnified, with our playstyle, they matter, but not as much. The fact that the bard is good at many things but not really good at one thing is actually an advantage. Sandboxes require flexibility. 

And of course the player matters too, in my case the player was outgoing and talkative outside of the game, and it translated well to playing a character like this. He wanted to be on point negotiating and inspiring the troops, so he leaned into it. But he also leaned back from being a front line tank, choosing stealth, surprise and spell casting as his primary contributions to combat.

Good fun.

And as mentioned above, how you read the rules and how you house rule will make a difference, I explicitly bumped the odds of bardic charm (by adding the CHA bonus) and allowed them to charm animals as well (when I feel the text might not support that reading). I also came up with rules for what happens when a charm breaks, and whether or not a target realizes it when a charm attempt fails. These things are NOT specified in the rules, and this can make a significant difference to the utility of the class. Finally, I allowed bard-to-be PCs to advance more than 1 level at leveling if the XP were sufficient, Gygax restricts you to one level at a time, no matter what the XP. Otherwise the bard was constantly needing training while his compatriots were working to level up, and it became unwieldy. If you run XP BTB on this I think the bard would be untenable as they would be completely out of sync with the rest of the party on leveling.

Finally, I’m not going to discuss the textual dissonance in the descriptions of the bard’s charm magic in the PHB here, as this has been pretty long already, but it is a healthy reminder that Gygax is a lot of work to decode. Worth the effort for sure, but it is still effort!