Let's Play: The Bard's Tale - Tales of the Unknown

The mortality rate for this group is astounding.

...will be the next to join our motley crew. And since Zithuan neglected to supply a name for this individual, I will be using Shivam's suggestion to name him or her after noted a noted Talking Tyrant. But which one will it be?

Stay tuned to find out!

NEVAR FORGET

Stop letting my favorite characters die!

It's making me sad!

BUT THOU MUST!

At least this magician won't die in battle (for now), since he's in the back row, and there is still some time until monsters attack ranged.

Wouldn't it be time for Grissom or Pants to be the first to advance in rank? I don't remember how many EXP you need to promote to level 2...

Also, I don't remember the other quantity you need, not to spoil something *g*

EDIT: The honor of joining the fellow ranks of Fight an 'eal should probably go to the one with the highest post count (only to be killed during a drinking binge in the night).

I humbly request that the next recruit following the magician be the dramatic return of Doctor Orpheus. It just isn't the same without him!

He could return as the product of NECROMANTIC ARTS as an ABOMINATION!

Or just have survived his noble self-sacrifice.

There's precedent!

Everyone in FFIV, for example.

That was totally worth badmouthing Gnome Chomsky, excellent work Red Hedgehog. I would say its a shame he died so early, but that kind of seems to be the norm for this group. How much exp does it take to get a level up in this game anyways?

The Fight an 'eal brigade had lost a man,
But did not realize they'd gained a fan.
He'd followed their adventures by the by
And now worked up courage to say 'hi!'

Man: Gee guys, I'm really sorry for your loss.


The five in Fight an 'eal looked up to see
A sprightly man whose eyes twinkled with glee.
Though his appearance seemed to mark him old,
They knew not to make judgments quite so bold.

Alena: Uh, thanks.

Giacomo: We are grateful for your condolences.

The man continues to stand there, staring at them with a slight smile on his face. After a pause, he speaks.

Man: My name is Calorie Mate!



No one knows quite what to make of him.

Truckles: Do you… want something?

Calorie Mate: Well… you see… I've been following what you guys have been doing. You know, your whole plan to free Skara Brae from Mangar and everything and I just think that sounds keen! I would love to, you know, if you guys would let me, join you and go on adventures and quests and all that other swell stuff!

Truckles: Pfaw! You?!?

Grissom: Now, now, Truckles, his fashion indicates he is some sort of magic user. That may come in handy.

Giacomo: So, Mr. friend of calories, what can you do?

Calorie Mate: Ooh, lots of stuff! I can blow rings from my staff like this:




Despite the fervent mage finding this "neat"
The rest were unimpressed by his great feat.

Grissom: I'm sure you're trained as a magician or conjurer, right?

Calorie Mate: Yeah, yeah. I can do all the vorpal plating and scry site stuff, but seriously guys: Rings! From my staff!

Giacomo: Very well, we will… discuss… your membership.

Calorie Mate: Golly!

The five current members of Fight an 'eal step away from Calorie Mate

Alena: This guy is crazy. And also seems to be about 12 years old.

Pants: I like him. He seems to have a great, care-free attitude that our group could use. And... he seems to appreciate my singing.

Truckles: He annoys me.

Grissom: Guys, think of the strategic possibilities he adds to our group. We'll finally be able to have all six members contribute to battle. I'm sure we can overlook his... imperfections.

Giacomo: I am bit... put off by his name. Isn't the point to avoid calories? Why would one want to mate with a Calorie? How is that even possible?

Truckles: Ah ha!

Giacomo: Still, he has a certain naive charm. And Mr. Grissom makes a good point about spreading the fighting around.

Alena: Yeah, I can't deny the benefit of additional magic users.

Grissom: Truckles?

Truckles: Fine. But if he gets too annoying, I'll smack him!

Pants: Excellent! Less smacking for me!

The group returns to Calorie Mate

Giacomo: Mr. Calorie Mate, we have decided to overlook your sexual fetishes and welcome you to our group.

Grissom: Not the way I would have put it...

Calorie Mate: Aw sucks, thanks. You guys are the best! I promise I won't let you down!

Next time: Does he?

hee hee hee hee hee

This guy gets it. I miss Doctor Orpheus so much. And I know I'm a bit late, but I was glad to see Chomsky go. Easily the worst character so far.

Was he the Nikki and Paulo of Bard's Tale?

Work has been hell recently, so I haven't had much time to play in the game. In the meantime, I bring you:

Intermezzo: Building a party in Bard’s Tale

I won’t claim to be an expert on the mechanics of The Bard’s Tale, but I am pretty experienced in building a beginning party since, as you’ve seen, your party members die a lot at the beginning and you need to create new ones a lot.

Let’s begin this discussion by looking at a question posed:
The nice thing about Bard’s Tale and many other dungeon crawlers (Etrian Odyssey continued this trend) is that you can’t get stuck with a crappy party. If you find someone isn’t pulling their weight, just ditch them and add a new person. You’ll have to spend a little time leveling them up to get them up to speed, but it’s usually worth it. In fact, there is one class that I (and all guides I’ve read) recommend for starting parties that is worth ditching at some point.

In regards to the second part of the question above, Ruik has the basic idea right. Since only the front three can attack (and be attacked) you want those to be fighter-types (Warrior, Hunter, Paladin, Monk). Since you want the back row to help you win your fights, you want them to be magic-using types (Bard, Conjurer, and Magician). Where does this leave the thief? Where, indeed. Let’s take a closer look at each class:

In my experience, Warriors and Paladins are fairly interchangeable. Both can use some of the best weapons and armors and end up being great damage sponges. The Warrior gains its extra attacks faster than the Paladin, and it isn’t clear to be just how much affect the Paladin’s increased resistances have, but both are solid throughout the game.

Monks are fragile in the beginning, amazing in the mid-game, and equivalent to Warriors or Paladins by the end. In the beginning of the game, Monks can’t equip as good armor and weapon as the other fighters. This makes them not great fighters who die easier. However, as they level up, their armor class starts dropping like a rock making them the first class that can get to the lowest possible armor class. They also start doing great damage with their bare hands, which is at least equivalent to whatever the other classes are doing with the new weapons you are finding. By the end game, Warriors and Paladins have great armor and great weapon making their armor class and attacks equivalent.

Hunters wait until the end game until they become really good. While at the beginning, they can equip everything a Warrior or Paladin can, they soon get left behind because they don’t get the multiple hits of those classes. By the end game, though, their chance for doing a critical hit is so high that they become the most useful fighter. Especially because the other fighters can’t match the damage done by magic in the end game.

That last sentence is a lie. Bards are great when you are first starting out because they can equip all the weapons and armor that the best fighters can. This means that you can put them on your front line, possibly instead of a Monk and they will fight as well as a Warrior, Paladin, or Hunter. You can also leave them as your fourth member, ready to take the place of anyone who falls in combat. Bard songs, unfortunately, just don’t go very far. As you’ve seen, they can provide relatively cheap healing early on (though it requires you to get into a combat), and their song that decreases everyone’s armor class does help your party survive. But even relatively early, they just become outclassed. The true fighters fight better than them and the true magic users have better effects (though I do seem to remember that their songs become better as they gain levels). Every guide on Bard’s Tale that I’ve read recommends (and I agree) trading a bard for a third magic user eventually. As for the last sentence in their description (and the name of the game), there are certain puzzles that are solved just by having a bard. But a magic user of the right type and level can also get past them.

Once again, the last sentence in a total lie. As I attempted to make clear in Philliam’s brief stay in the party, thieves in The Bard’s Tale are useless. They aren’t very good fighters. In battle, they have the ability to hide in shadows which means that they cannot be attacked. But they also cannot attack while doing this, so it doesn’t help you at all. Their other ability is that of disarming traps. Whether they disarm a trap is dependent on their Luck attribute, their level, the difficulty of a trap, and a random factor. Meanwhile, Conjurer’s have a level one spell that disarms any trap with 100% certainty. Trap Zap costs 2 spell points, which is expensive for a low level character, but a trap at that level will likely decimate your party so you’ll have to do it anyway. Once they become high enough level, 2 spell points is nothing. So stay away from thieves unless you want to give yourself a challenge.

Conjurers are the best magic users to have in a beginning party. They have the aforementioned Trap Zap spell as well as Arc Fire which can damage enemies. They also get a healing spell at level 3 which makes the game a lot easier.

At low levels, Magicians mostly have buffs and debuffs. They help and should certainly be used, but more useful may Scry Site which is of great help in mapping dungeons. As they gain in levels, they gain useful damage dealing spells and one of the last spells they learn is as good a healing spell as the best one a conjurer learns.

That covers all the classes, but what about races? The race of a character reflects the distribution of ability scores they get when you create them. Like most early RPGs, The Bard’s Tale took its cue from D&D and you “roll up” your characters. Once you choose a race, you are presented with the attributes generated for that character. If you don’t like them, you can press Escape and re-roll. Which you totally should do if you don’t get high enough numbers in the appropriate stats.

There are going to be, at most, three stats you care about for your character. All characters want a high Dexterity – it determines how quickly your character acts in battle (as well as lowering their armor class if it’s high enough). Acting before the monsters in battle is, of course huge. To a lesser degree, all characters want high Constitution. Constitution determines how many hit points you get when you gain levels. Since the three on the front line take most of the hits, constitution is far more important for them than the back three. The third statistic depends on the type of the character. For a fighter, you want high strength as it affects how much damage you do to enemies in combat. For a magic user, you want high intelligence as it affects how many spell points you get when you gain levels. For bards, go with strength since intelligence has no effect on their songs. Having high luck is nice for the boost in resistance to certain effects it provides, but it isn’t worth rerolling to raise it. (You’ll notice most of the characters I’ve created have pitifully low Luck.)


What I meant is similar to what I think of in D&D and other RPGs: You want to pick the race most suited to the class you are going for. Given you want 2-3 high attributes for your character, you want to pick the race that maximizes those. This is tough, as the instruction manual rarely outright tells you what attributes a race is better or worse at, and I haven’t found a strategy guide that mentions it. So I rolled each race twelve times to see what their attribute tendencies were*:

• Human: Good Str, Above average Con, Below average IQ, Above Average Luck
• Elf: Above average IQ
• Dwarf: Great Str, Below average IQ, Good Con, Below average Luck
• Hobbit: Awful Str, Above average IQ, Great Dex, Below average Con, Great Luck
• Half-Elf: Above Average Dex
• Half-Orc: Good Str, Poor IQ, Great Con
• Gnome: Good IQ, Poor Con, Poor Luck

Given these findings, fighters are best being Dwarves or Half-Orcs. They are really fairly interchangeable as it is easy for both to get 17s and 18s in Strength and Consitution and high Dexterity scores as well. And between the two of them, you can cover all fighting classes.

The determination of which race makes the best magic user is…inconclusive. While elves would seem to blow away gnomes due to their slightly higher dexterity and higher constitution (gnome have slightly higher intelligence), in the twelve elf rolls I did, not one had three good numbers for the important attributes. At most two of those would be good while the other would be poor. I’m not sure if this is random noise or some way the game generates characters, but as it stood, Gnomes and Elves were actually equivalent in term of how good they were as magic users.

Hobbits would make the best thieves if thieves were ever worth having.

Since you mostly only care about dexterity for Bards, a Hobbit might seem to be the best choice. However, since there’s a good chance your bard will get into some fight, a Dwarf is probably the best choice since you can get their dexterity pretty high and then have a high constitution as well.

Tl;dr Final Advice:
A beginning Bard’s Tale party should consist of:

• Any three of Dwarf Warrior, Half-Orc Warrior, Dwarf Paladin, Dwarf Monk, Dwarf Hunter, Half-Orc Hunter. But probably not more than one Monk.
• One Dwarf Bard
• One Gnome or Elf Magician
• One Gnome or Elf Conjurer

Work should hopefully lighten up tonight so I can play some and maybe write it up on Friday.


*Another interesting thing I found is that all characters, regardless have race, have the same starting hit point distribution. The min seems to be 14 and the max 29 with most characters fitting right around the average of 21.

wow. this game is more D&D than even official D&D games.

No, seriously. Look at them.

I smell a change of avatar...


Red Hedgehog, I hope you're constantly working towards a

Warrior/Paladin
Hunter
Monk
Bard
Conjurer
Magician

party. At least this combo would show all aspects (well, apart from the thief, but he only gains importance in the third Bard's Tale).

Carry on killing ;-)

I need John Locke.
"DON'T tell me what I CAN'T do!" *whacks Mangar unconscious*

EDIT: Me like Truckles, so Giacomo the Ladies Man could fall prey to a most unfortunate accident...Let's see if I can bribe some monsters into target practice. There aren't any ladies to begin with in Bard's Tale. I remember not seeing any breasts in this game.

Thanks for the writeup on the classes Hedgehog.

Confession time: I never did make it more than 1 or 2 floors into the first dungeon. So I'm looking forward to mid and end game parts quite a bit.

I talked about this LP with my brother, and he told me that monsters you encounter during searching houses are a bit tougher than monsters you encounter just walking in the streets.

That's an interesting hypothesis. It is definitely the case that encounters are much more common in houses than on the streets, but I haven't noticed them specifically being tougher. I ran into groups of 7 enemies on the streets as well as in houses. As I play, I'll try to keep track of whether the enemies in the houses really are more difficult (the walkthroughs and even the official clue book I can find have very little information on actual game mechanics).

I think he meant that while the types of enemies you encounter on the street and in houses are the same, it's just that you are more likely to face barbarians in houses than outside. Maybe...

I'm curious what Mangar the Dark's plans for Skara Brae are. On the one hand, he hasn't just wiped out everyone, it's still a quasi-functioning town, but on the other hand he's made the city pretty nasty, with the rampaging bands of monsters and the abandoned houses and the dungeons, for no discernable reason. You'd think he'd either kill everyone or keep the city in a reasonable state to serve as a power base for whatever it is he's planning.

In short, he doesn't seem to have done much except get Skara Brae taken off the list of the Top 20 Most Livable Cities, between the hobgoblins and the lack of rail access to airports.

Glad to see this thread alive and kicking, and it's been a blast so far catching up

Are you at the point where you're actually going to visit somewhere yet, or still grinding for that second level/$ for gear?

Well, due to my friend canceling on me tonight, I finally got a chance to play some Bard's Tale. Hopefully I can write it up by tomorrow night.

So I kept track of what type of enemies and how many I found on the city streets vs. in abandoned houses and it looks like your brother was right. One group of 4 skeletons and one group of 2 barbarians was the worst I found in the streets. Meanwhile, the houses seemed to have significantly more enemies both in terms of numbers (on the streets it was at most one kobold or 2 hobgoblins - in houses up to 5 kobolds and 5 hobgoblins) and types.

Ha! That's hilarious. I wish I thought of it as I totally would have used it as dialogue. Mangar did set himself up in a big castle, so maybe that's all he really cared about.

The next update should be the last set of in-city grinding. After this, we go places.

Yes folks, that means it looks like we've finally gotten a party to stick! All six members that began the session alive also ended it that way.

By the way, what kind of enemies do you fight at night? Are they really that much worse than what you find during the day?

*wishes so hard for Red Hedgehog to be able to update again*