Three suggestions for bards who don’t sing

The bard has been a part of fantasy roleplay games since almost their beginning. She is the jack of all trades, she can do anything and dare to try everything. In some systems, that means most of her abilities are just lessened versions of the abilities of other classes. However, there’s always one ability which is exclusive to the bard: Performance.

Whether thanks to musical magic or an understanding of social psychology, the bard can encourage her friends and help them work better together. This ability isn’t  unique to fantasy settings; although modern or sci-fi settings don’t usually have bards, there are still characters devoting themselves to increasing cooperation within the group.

Each of the following suggestions includes two sides of the same coin: How the performance can help us, improving our efforts, and how it harms them, weakening our rivals. When describing an action, you can easily emphasize one side over the other. For example, you can say the bonuses the party gained are a result of the confidence the bard instilled in them, or you can say it’s not actually the party who gets better, but the enemies who get worse. One can imagine a character who combines several elements from the suggestions below, using different approaches for different reasons.

Includes two variant bard moves for Dungeon World.