Comment on “All Right, With Feeling”

If I understand it right, the questions are:

1. what it means to succeed as a bard, i.e. an artist? It's not just fame.

2. how can we turn whatever-artistic-success-is into a playable concept?

Hmm ... if fame is the wrong thing to measure for bardic success, maybe we can get somewhere by considering that each class (in your rules) has ways to influence others.

Torture and murder for the assassin; theft and the consequent disruption of others' economic affairs for the thief; preaching to incite reactions, as well as being crucial to the community's physical/mental wellbeing, for the cleric; magical prowess and potency for the mage; skill at arms and at leading men for the fighter. What can the bard gain along these lines?

Maybe it doesn't square with what you brought up about some artists only having a few successes and then fading into obscurity. But that might be more a consequence of change in public opinion about the type of art those artists were good at, the particular style of music or what have you, and not a matter of the artist in question lacking prowess. No matter the artist's skill level, he or she will "get nowhere" (i.e. have no success) without a receptive audience.

So while the core bardic abilities are art-producing abilities -- music, sculpture, what have you -- there might be a reason to accord them some limited powers of persuasion, which work for the purpose of trying to get people to pay attention to the art in the first place. Only then can there be the possibility of someone being influenced to some greater action, due to the art striking them in a particular way.

Am I helping at all? I'm not sure I've actually said much.