Making Tools Useful in 5e: Musical Instruments
Back with more tools, and this time, we are looking at one of the last official tools provided by WotC and how we can improve them. Musical instruments are pretty self-explanatory for every musician: you play them, and noise comes out. For some people, they enjoy that strange noise, and for other people, it’s awful. Well, guess what! When I was in the marching band, pretty sure most people thought the strange noise I was making was just awful.
But with this tool, I’m going to change that all on its head! In fact, this tool is more than just musical instruments but rather a way for your performer to accrue popularity and spend it. This can be a great way of adding in more roleplay elements if they have a high popularity score, you can describe people walking past the performer asking for autographs or asking where they will perform next. Makes a player feel special.
Musical Instruments
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
It’s been a while since I've cracked this book open and looked at its tool section, and I can’t help but look at that trap section. That’d be a good tool… the Trapmaster’s Set… just allows players to build Rube Goldberg-esque traps to murder their enemies. Of course, that’s not what we are doing here today. Instead, let’s check out page 83 of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and see what I can do with my beautiful musical instruments!
Musical Instruments
Proficiency with a musical instrument indicates you are familiar with the techniques used to play it. You also have knowledge of some songs commonly performed with that instrument.
History. Your expertise aids you in recalling lore related to your instrument.
Performance. Your ability to put on a good show is improved when you incorporate an instrument into your act.
Compose a Tune. As part of a long rest, you can compose a new tune and lyrics for your instrument. You might use this ability to impress a noble or spread scandalous rumors with a catchy tune.
Well, at least it’s brief, I guess. It seems weird that they couldn’t think of any other skills to go along with musical instruments than just the two above. You could easily use a musical instrument for stealth! Your party sneaks on ahead, and you pull out your handy tuba and begin blasting the beautiful, dulcet tones of the greatest love song ever written. Once the guards hear that, your party gets advantage as they easily escape detection of the guards, and you get the shit beat out of you for playing your tuba at 2 am on a school night.
But that’s fine. We don’t need a narcissistic beholder to tell us how to use our instruments. If you don’t know anything about beholders, check out our deep dive into their lore and history! It’s pretty fascinating.
For those that don’t care about the how of my tool:
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Popularity
Let’s start by reviewing what our musical instruments can do. First, I’m going to begin by discussing popularity. See, playing an instrument shouldn’t be difficult for a character with proficiency in it. I can’t make it a skill challenge to actually play an instrument because, at that point, what’s the point in being proficient? Instead, this tool helps support a popularity system that allows the performer to play at larger establishments, get paid, and influence how others react to them.
Really, all I did was create a popularity system influenced by musical instruments. This has given me several ideas that I could expand on to create a more interesting social interaction pillar for D&D that actually helps a DM determine how the world is responding to a group of murderhobos… I mean heroes.
Popularity is a core component of this tool and helps drive our performers forward. Every artist, musician, actress, blogger, and composer wants fame, maybe not because they want everyone to know their name but because they want to expose more people to what they are doing. Popularity is important for everyone as it determines how much attention you receive and where you can perform and expect to make some money.
For us, Popularity is an important metric to track and directly affects how our performers make a living and interact with the world. The more popular a bard is, the more they can get things done for their party, especially if they get caught and are sent to jail for playing the tuba at 2 a.m. on a school night. When you are popular, you can spend some of that popularity and get out of jail for simple misdemeanors!
This brings me to the next part of popularity: you have to spend your popularity if you want to accomplish things. Want to meet the king? It’s going to cost you some of your popularity, just like getting a friend out of jail will cost you some popularity. Your ability to get things you want to be done in the world is going to cost you something and so you have to make sure you always show up to those taverns, music halls, and banquets and make sure your name is getting out there. A performer with no popularity is going to be sad when all they can get for their beautiful work are a few copper pieces.
The Performance
Now, let’s go over how this system works. When our performer wants to step on stage and blast you with a soulful rendition of Like a Virgin on kazoo, the performer will have to determine how long they will be performing at the bar. Certain establishments may not allow hours and hours of the same kazoo player, while other places might be more open to it.
Once you determine how long the performance will last, the performer must roll their Charisma (Performance) check. This result will then bring us to our next part. There are no set DCs for performances. A result of 5 and a result of 15 are perfectly fine; it just decides how many ‘successes’ you are likely to get.
So, our performer rolls their Performance check, and then they take that result, let’s say a 13, and then they are going to add 13 dice to their dice pool. The dice they throw into their pool are going to be determined by a variety of situations that the DM is in charge of. Are the people intoxicated? Do they like the style of music? Do they have other forms of entertainment more interesting than the performance? This will all affect the type of dice the player will roll in their dice pool.
Dice Pools always start with a d8 as the default size, the player’s dice are then increased or decreased in size. For our example, let’s say that the DM determines that the audience is very intoxicated, which decreases the size of the dice by one step from d8s to d6s. The player then grabs 13d6 (or rolls multiple times) and then rolls his pool of dice. To determine the number of successes, they will then count the number of 1s that appear in their pool.
The number of successes informs how successful they were in their performance, as well as how much they are going to make in pay, and increases their popularity. Going back to our example, let’s say that we roll 13d6:
Our result: 4, 3, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 4, 2, 2, 5, 6, 3
Based on the results provided above, we have 2 successes; this means that our performer gains 2 points of popularity, and they get to roll 2 dice to determine their pay! Their pay is based on where they are performing, assuming this is a mid-tier establishment, they will get to roll 2d8 sp for a few hours of entertaining the crowd.
That’s the system. It’s pretty basic. For those who are familiar with some of my other homebrew, you might recognize that the Hunting Mini-game has a similar setup… except there is no popularity added in.
Popularity and Performances
These two elements are linked. The more successes you get, the more you can increase your popularity, and the more you can do by spending it around town. I offer a few suggestions, but the player and DM should get creative with this. Players could spend their popularity on certain magic items, on getting paid more for quests, or on a variety of other things!
Of course, popularity is finicky, and traveling to new locations can be very detrimental to how important you are. Moving to a new city that doesn’t know you greatly can hurt your popularity score, limiting the places you can perform and how much you can get done with it. That’s just the problem with the cut off societies who don’t have an easy way of communicating about their favorite performers and how dreamy they are.
Finishing Up
And that is the basics of this tool! It combines a new mechanic you can use in your social interactions pillar of D&D, provides a way for your performers to make money off of their mad kazoo skills, and gives you a reason to pick up proficiency in musical instruments. There are several variant rules I provide at the back of the tool as well as a complications chart to help spice up your game and augment the difficulty of this tool.
I hope this tool can find a nice home with your bards, performers, and more, and if you come up with more ideas to use the popularity system, I’d love to hear them! I think this is a neat little system we can create something with that will allow us to make a more solid social interaction pillar and take away so much focus from just killing people in the combat pillar.
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