Introducing Information - Bard and Scholar Class

Suggestions
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Hello all. I was hoping to present an idea I had for two new classes in the tech tree; the Bard and the Scholar.

The idea behind the class is that by having a bard or a scholar in your town, you can have them create songs or books and give them to the citizens of your town to gain small buffs to various attributes.

Bard

The bard would the the tier one version of the information classes. He would compose songs and play them around town to give small buffs to the citizens of your town. This could include things such as +10% building speed, -5% to material cost, +10% damage to goblins, etc. The idea of the buffs would be that they are small in order to not make the bard too important, but at the same time still be helpful to your citizens.

Scholar

The scholar is the second tier of the information class. His purpose is to write books and then print copies on a printing press for the citizens to read. He would provide better buffs than the bard (such as a +15% instead of +10% for building speed).
Also, the scholar could have the ability to do research, which would allow for new benefits to be given to the citizens, such as new recipes for craftsman, or even research into magic and the arcane for your mages. (I recall it was planned that magic would be hard to gain access to. If your adventures found ancient tomes on their travels, perhaps the scholar would be the one to decipher them)

Idea for Progression

For the bard and the scholar, I imagine they would take the same steps to create new information:

Step One: Research

You can’t create ideas from nothing. Your bard or scholar would talk to the citizens in order to get a new idea to write about. I imagine having more citizens, having a tavern to visit, or having travellers visiting your town would make this process go by faster.

Step Two: Compose

The bard and scholar would sit down at their desk and create a new work. The bard would compose his next great ballad, and the scholar would write a new book for the citizens to enjoy.

Step Three: Distribute

Information is no good without people to enjoy it. The bard would play his song for the people to listen to and the scholar would print numerous copies of his book at a printing press.

I hope you like the idea. Let me know if you think of any improvements to the design or if you have any ideas of your own with the class. I hope to start experimenting with making models in the near future, so I’ll try my hand at making the citizens and their tools as well.

Thanks for reading!

4 Likes
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Hi!! Your idea looks really nice!! But in my opinion, i will wait a few months until we know the complete class tree that the creators will implement, maybe they have their own plans for a bard :p.

As an example, i have a ton of ideas for magic classes, but i’ll wait until we see some magical official classes so i can focus my ideas in a proper way :D.

Anyway, as a suggestion for your bard, the idea of a buffer class it’s good, but i wouldn’t give a buff to reduce materials cost, instead of that, morale, quickness or strengh buffs fits much better because are things influenced by music!!

Also this class can have synergies with the tavern, so if you have a bard singing/working in there, he’ll increase the amount of heros that stay in the village, or he can have another synergie with the carpenter so the bard can become an aweome crafter specialized in instruments… There are infinite possibilities!!!

In the other hand, the scholar looks pretty cool the way it is, and i think that it should have it’s own class tree. The bard can be more focused in entertaining your people, while the scholar looks more into an education role (so the higher tier of the scholar it’s a Sage for example).

EDIT: Errors and mistakes corrected :stuck_out_tongue:

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@Jackknave you certainly have given the classes some considerable thought… i’ve always felt bards we’re the red-headed step-children in RPG lore (more often than not)… giving them some more practical/tangible benefits is good in my book… :wink:

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Thanks for the responses so far everyone!

@SteveAdamo
Thanks a lot! I had the same thoughts as you, which is why I wanted to make a useful bard character. I remembered D&D bards gave your party buffs, so I thought it could work the same here. Plus taverns will be more fun with music!

@Raistlin Those are some good ideas. In terms of suggesting classes, I figured it would be easier to suggest things sooner than later since they might still be planning things like classes.
I agree with the suggestion of everything the bard does is a morale boost. It makes more sense with music. One the other hand, maybe the decreased cost would make more sense for the scholar, since he could publish books like Advanced Carpentry
I also thought it would make more sense for the scholar and bard to be in the same tree since their effect is pretty close. I also didn’t want to get too complicated, though having an education tree/ system would be awesome as well! I like the idea of a tier three sage though. It would be a cool addition I think.
And I agree with you about the tavern idea. I figured that the bard’s workbench/desk would be located in the tavern. Plus it would make the tavern all the more festive!

1 Like
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I think a bard would be awesome as a buff class chilling in town. Especially if you could animate music notes and such above his head and make different instruments. I do agree specific abilities are hard to come up with until we see the full system and how it works, what kind of benefits classes in the game have etc. I don’t think classes will have like 30 abilities like some MMO characters get. If theres only 2 or 3 max spells it would have to be setup way different like a “combat song” with several bonuses and a “worker song” with building bonuses and crafting maybe? Perhaps like a song to make plants grow better?

Similarly if theres some sort of recipe research system in the vanilla game you could tie the scholar to it in some way vs having to make a separate system. The basic ideas seem solid though.

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@Darken_rahl I agree, I think that it’s a but hard to figure out the best abilities when the game is so early in development. I’m also not sure if it would be best for the buffs to be temporary or permanent. I think that if they are temporary, then general buffs would be good like you proposed. However, if they are permanent, then I think more specific buffs, like bonus when fighting goblins, or faster sword crafting, would be better since it would assure the class has a use for a long while.

Also I like the idea of songs to help the plants grow. That’d be very cool and useful as well.

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Traditional bards don’t really do permanent buffs solely because the people are listening to the music and inspired in a certain way so when the music stops the buff leaves. However, nontraditional bards have abilities such as singing magic into items imbuing them with powers so it could go in other directions.

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@Darken_rahl: Traditional bards don’t really do permanent buffs solely because the people are listening to the music and inspired in a certain way so when the music stops the buff leaves. However, nontraditional bards have abilities such as singing magic into items imbuing them with powers so it could go in other directions.

First, it’s there a button to directly quote??
Second, I love The Sword of truth :p,
Third, non-traditional bard that sing magic into items?? do you mean recording magic music to be played later?? like a potion but with 1 use??
My idea it’s that only wizards (or geomancer or the magma BS) can imbuy items (amor/weapons, furniture etc), Bards can craft really good and refined musical instruments, but i think that they lack the required studies to imbuy their magical songs into them. Also, those magical instruments would be auto-playables? any other villager could use them? they grant a passive Charisma bonus?? they only usable once? how would they work??

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Traditional bards with singing buffed are far more common and mostly based on like a D&D style class. Many RPG games drew mechanics from D&D or MUDs from back in the day. Nontraditional bards I have seen a few varieties in different MUDs that worked very different. In one that was heavily based around enchantment you would find locked boxes which have to have their traps removed by a thief class and then picked by thieves as well with differing qualities of lockpicks for a fee because traps could kill you or do other nasty stuff and broken picks cost money. Then you would need to find a good blacksmith to create a weapon from mats out of good magic metal to get a good base quality gear. Then a magical class could enchant weapons with elemental effects like fiery or icy and give a damage multiplier. Then bards could sing magic into gear providing different bonuses like maybe haste or vorpal or ultimately the animated singing sword. Its definitely not a standard style.

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Yes, i think that it will depend on the world and lore that @Tom and @Ponder will create, and that will give us some starting guidelines to work on the classes;
But, we have to remember that it’s a game mainly based on how to manage our city properly, and i think that the skills of the classes won’t overlap at all.

So… we’ll have to wait until we heard more about the class system, i think.

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if you highlight text in an existing post, you will see a “reply with quote” option… :slight_smile:

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See what he means? That’s all you have to do.

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Eh I dunno Raistlin. Im gonna go on a limb and say that bard is probably a pretty unlikely class for the vanilla game. If its a player mod creating the class you can pretty much go anywhere you want with it. Heck even if they have one type of bard you can make another type and make it a Dirge or a Troubadour. Infinite mods means do whatever you want :wink:

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Hey a Bard class would work great in this game, either for helping the workers out or the soldiers out. An idea for the Dev’s or Modders :stuck_out_tongue:

This is just a basic idea.

Bard:

lvl 1- Melody: They walk around and sing keeping the happiness of villagers up.

lvl 2- Inspiration: They inspire workers to work faster and longer.

lvl 3- Battle Song: They sing, giving a buff to soldiers for damage and speed.

lvl 4- Heal Song: They heal the wounded.

If y’all have more ideas, throw them out.

1 Like
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I like the dwarf fortress setup where scholars/record keepers do actual work like keeping track of resources and managing work orders