The mystery of the curse song

[scrappayeti]

So I am playing a bard with 40 odd lore, and 20 odd spellcraft. He knows the names of dragons, the delicate tapestry of the weave and the correct way to spell ‘Ghaunadaur’ without a dictionary. In short he has started to untangle the mysteries of history and touch the vaulted ceiling of general knowledge. How ironic, then, that he should have absolutely no idea what his own curse songs do!

The descriptions in the songbook are cryptic as best, and experimentation IC is very difficult. You cannot read the effects on the NPCs, and even PC experimentation is hard - how do you describe a drop in fortitude save compared to a drop in stamina, or hit points? So hard in fact, that it has only just come to my attention that the two curse songs I have are either bugged or have very obscure uses that I do not know either IC or OOC. I suggest that there be some way of working out what curse songs are supposed to do IG. I understand discovering that information is usually fun and a list of spoilers in the forums would be dull… but by the same token if you cannot find out IG it sort of defeats the purpose of having cool custom songs.  

Secondly, once a curse song is activated, one cannot sing a normal song to go along with it, as you normally would. This means they are mechanically almost useless compared to normal, non-curse songs. If I sing a custom, or even default song I get x advantage for my team, minus x for my opponents if I sing a curse song (custom non-curse songs seem to produce the default curse song when played as a curse). However if I sing a curse song, my opponents lose y, but my team get nothing. This would mean a custom curse song would only be useful if it were significantly stronger than a normal curse song, since in most situations where it matters, the bard will want to use both normal and curse songs. If he is only going to sing a curse song, it had better be an absolute ripper. Of course it may be that the curse songs are supposed to be staggeringly powerful, but are actually all bugged. The best solution would be to allow the default normal bard song to be played when the curse song is activated.

[VanillaPudding]

For starters you can sing your customer curse song (via bard song as you know) and then toggle to a normal song and sing that the next round and both work.

However, this is in line with how Wizards and Sorcers apparently aren't supposed to know what familiars do, or Druids / Rangers do not understand the perks of their shapes / familairs, and are to find out in game. To me it is silly, and really just a veteran knowledge bonus that makes little sense. Things like this should simply be posted as it only harms the play of newer players and bolsters the experienced players advantage.

[scrappayeti]

Toggling songs is tricky, because it cannot be done via the book, it has to be done by /c command. This means you need to have a hotkey for each song you plan to switch to. Secondly, you need to time it right, where you press one song, pause, hotkey, then the second key. Because of the latency from where I play, I often don’t get the song I expect due to poor timing, or miss a round of action making sure I get it right. It is a fiddly workaround for a nonsensical problem.

And curse songs are very different to familiars etc. I do eventually find out what my pet parrot does. I see his skills go up, what spells he can cast etc. It is revealed during play. I like that there is no EfU:Wiki so that I cannot just pick the most powerful mechanically without experimentation. The problem with the Curse Songs are that I actually cannot work out in game what they do at all, and not for want of trying. Experimentation leads to lots of undesirable OOC chat, like "sorry, when you said IC you 'feel more clumsy', did you mean dex loss or reflex save?". This is not a problem for any of the other IG custom mechanics I can think of.

[Bearic]

To the second point, if anything it's nice that they allow you to have both a curse song, a custom curse song, and a benefit song in three rounds by only taking up three quick slots. That would be a lot of singing. XD
 
 It's also not too hard to figure out what songs do with enough use, even if only a slight understanding.

[scrappayeti]

Here is my point, Bearic, despite being level nine, I only just found out today that curse songs are activated with normal bard song, not curse song, and I only found out in your post (if it is true) that you can have three songs up at a time. This is exactly the problem I am talking about - it is very hard to work out the bard song functionality ingame.