Musings: Creating the Skald

 Skalds

 When you think of a skald what comes to mind? From asking around a lot of people consider it to be like the bard, but instead of a frilly and flamboyant personality a skald is metal and hardcore. According to the internet, skalds are just poets, they're not even warriors. Historically, bards had a wide range from telling stories to music, and general entertainment that fell just short of plays and acting. It's always interesting seeing the disconnect of history and fantasy. The paladin is another such interesting disconnect: paladins served a lord, they didn't act independently, they were more like samurai that served someone of a higher status. Which segues into another misconception: What people think of lone wandering samurai are actually called ronin. So you could play a paladin as a samurai. Which may be a great alternative class idea! (Writing down notes)

So where do we go from here? A historically accurate skald would be boring, as would most accurate tropes of fantasy. So let's go ahead and go with the expected case and make a bard, but hardcore.

Class Skeleton

First thing first: Inspiration will be mandatory for the class. For our skald we'll be building someone who inspires other through stories of old while aiming to become a part of those stories.

Second: No spells. I want to challenge myself and make something that doesn't use spells.

Third: Some type of performance. I see this almost as a channel divinity like feature where you can further inspire allies. For now we're borrowing from pathfinder. Their version of the bard is a 3/5th's spell caster, casting spells up to 6th level. They also inspire themselves and allies to enter a battle frenzy that improves their general morale and gives them a rage effect. I think I can replicate something similar that's better for 5th edition.

Inspiration

Inspiration for skald will be slightly different from bard. We'll use our reaction to give someone their inspiration rather than as a bonus action when they fail something they need to succeed. It feels better - you're reacting to something happening rather than preemptively guessing if someone needs it. It makes your inspiration less wasted and improves its power - we'll need all the power we can muster from a martial class, due to their lack of strength in late game.

Frenzy Song

I'm going to start calling our rage feature Frenzy Song for now. Another possible name could be Call to Arms but they feels more like a commander than a skald. Here's the initial idea:

• Allies under the effects of the song deal damage with their attacks at least equal to our inspiration die. This means if someone is using a sling then the sling damage is improved to a d6. Not bad. But this is to help people who rely on weaker weapons early game to do better damage with attacks.
• They will gain our inspiration die as temporary hit points at the start of their turn. But instead of rolling, they'll gain the maximum. This will act as our damage reduction and will be fantastic to protect weaker allies. The temp hp will be lost when the effect ends.
  
• Allies under the effects of frenzy song can't be frightened. Not a terribly common condition early game but its niche use will come handy later.
• Affected allies will get a d4 to attack rolls and saves. This will substantially improve their general performance
• This requires "concentration", as if concentrating on a spell, but you don't make concentration saves when hit. It just prevents you from stacking it with powerful spells if the player decides to take 2 levels for this.
• (Maybe it can make weapon attacks do magical damage, or perhaps that could be saved for 6th level?)
  

It will last for 1 minute, and will end early if the person falls unconscious. The subclass could potentially come in at this or next level. If we choose this as our subclass level then the subclass will do the following:

• Modify inspiration
• Add a new effect to frenzy song or give an entirely new song.

As I've said earlier, I feel this is close to channel divinity where you use it a few times per short rest. It makes sense for your subclass to modify it like how barbarian subclasses modifies rage.

Subclasses

I've already thought of a great name for these: Epic Verse. Your subclass will the named "x Epic". Instead of "5th level feature" for the feature tag it will be "5th level verse", like "5th level Divine verse". It makes a feature feel a part of the story itself rather than just being a feature.

Regardless if our subclass is 2nd or 3rd level, I'm thinking subclass features will come in at 5th level, 9th level, 15th level, and 18th level. We're only going to plan to 5th level until we have something really fun.

5th level

This will change how we perform combat. Let's say we have a divine epic, it would make sense to do radiant damage with our hits, so let's say for this subclass we do a bonus 2 rolls of our bardic die as radiant damage on a successful weapon hit. This will do something pretty cool: It will automatically scale our damage as we level, up to 2d10.

Alternative 5th level feature: Ensemble

There's probably a better word for this, but let's use ensemble for the moment. What if instead of extra attack our mere presence passively improves the damage of those around us like the paladin? Let's do some quick math to determine our budget.

5th level is extra attacks for martial classes. The average modifier for someone's primary ability score for this level is around 4. Luckily the average of our bardic die at this level will be 4. Most one-handed martial weapons do 4.5 average damage, so we're expected to do 4.5 + 4 damage around this time.

The idea of this feature is we inspire ourselves and others constantly. So then we form a deeper connection with people around us, creating an ensemble. Let's say we can have 2 people as a part of this group, and each time the skald and their ensemble hits with a weapon attack they can add one bardic die to the damage roll. That's 4.5 damage for each person, slightly more than extra attack. Then as we level we can include more people in our ensemble and improve the parties performance massively. For our Divine Epic example that extra damage could be radiant.

Our subclasses may take advantage of this. For example when you use Frenzy song you also always affect one of your ensemble no matter who you target. That's extremely strong.

Improving Inspiration

It would feel bad to spend one of your three bardic dice early on and have the roll a 1. The chance to roll a 1 is the same as rolling the maximum amount. So for 3rd level when you roll a 1 you treat the die as its maximum amount. We'll call this Explosive Inspiration. When you reach 11th level (A level after getting a d10) we'll treat a 2 or less as a maximum roll. Now your average for your die roll is 4.5 for a d6, a 5.5 for a d8, then at 11th level the average of your d10 will be a 6.5! Wow! You're absolutely getting your money's worth. This will ensure that your dice are never ever wasted, and it helps us keep up with the power of the stronger spell casters.

Musings of future features

This will largely be a mixed garble so parse what you can! Perhaps we can always add our bardic die to saves later on, or freely apply it to people making saves without spending any dice. Maybe our frenzy song can last 10 minutes and include immunity to charm. I think the last feature should give players goosebumps when they read it.