Ultima Online Musicianship - the check that gates every bard skill, and the bonus above 100

Exactly how it gates the other three

The mechanic, stated precisely:

• Every attempt at Discordance, Peacemaking or Provocation is preceded by a Musicianship check.
• That check is non-difficulty-based. It does not care what you are pointing at. Barding difficulty governs the second check, not this one — which is why a bard can fail on a rabbit and on a dragon for the same reason.
• If the Musicianship check fails, the skill check does not happen at all, and the character must wait before retrying. The attempt is not a failed provoke; it is a provoke that never occurred.

Seen from the other side: every use of one of those three skills makes two skill checks, one on the skill itself and one on Musicianship. Two gates in series, and Musicianship is the first.

There is a number for where that first gate stops mattering: at 100.0 Musicianship [!], the first check always passes when Provoking. That is the practical floor for a serious bard — below it you are losing attempts to a check that has nothing to do with the target.

[!] No numeric value is published for the check itself at any skill below 100. uo.com states only that it exists and that it is not difficulty-based; there is no published curve, formula or per-skill success table for it.

Above 100 it becomes a success bonus

Past Grandmaster, Musicianship stops being purely a gate and starts buying success on the skills behind it. For every point of Musicianship above 100, the bard gains a +1% success bonus to Discordance, targeted Peacemaking and Provocation. uo.com’s worked example: 110 Musicianship gives +10% to provoke, discord and peacemake.

An unpublished figure gives the same bonus in the other currency — as a difficulty reduction of ( Skill − 100 ) ÷ 2 [!]. The two wordings are not the same statement, so both are recorded and neither is silently merged into the other.

This is what makes a Musicianship Power Scroll one of the cheapest upgrades on a bard: twenty points above Grandmaster is +20% success on every attempt at every other bard skill you own, at no cost in mana, items or tactics.

Range - the rule and the figure that do not reconcile

uo.com’s range rule governs every bard ability: “All bard abilities have a range. The bard must be within this range of the target to use the ability. Furthermore, the bard must remain within this range or the ability’s effect ends. The base range of all bard abilities is 8 tiles, with each 15 points of skill in the ability being used increasing this range by one tile.”

[!] uo.com also states a maximum of 18 tiles at 120 Musicianship / 120 Peacemaking. The rule and the stated maximum are not obviously consistent with each other — 8 tiles plus one per 15 points does not plainly arrive at 18 at those values. Both are published by uo.com. Both are recorded here as published, and no replacement figure has been computed from either.

The part that is unambiguous is the second sentence of the rule: staying in range is a continuing requirement, not just a condition for starting. Walk out and the effect ends.

The Fire Horn

The one thing Musicianship does directly, rather than through another skill. The Fire Horn is a bard-only item producing area-effect fire damage, and uo.com publishes its numbers:

Property	Published value
Minimum Musicianship to use it	52.6
Damage scaling	Scales with the total of all four bard skills
Reagent cost	4 Sulfurous Ash per use
Range	Must be used within 3 tiles
Chance to break	1% per use
Against players	Deals less damage than against monsters

There is also a small cooldown between uses, unquantified. 52.6 is an oddly precise gate and it is the published one.

[!] No Fire Horn damage formula is published — only that it scales with the four bard skills combined. The actual output at any given skill total is not on the record.

Instruments, durability and the crafting bonus

Musicianship is played through an instrument, and the instrument is a consumable with published numbers:

• Roughly 400 uses for non-exceptional player-made, NPC-bought and magical instruments.
• 700–900 uses for exceptional player-made instruments — which is on top of the success bonus they carry.
• The default instrument is automatically the last one you double-clicked; switch by double-clicking another.
• Types published: tambourines, drums, flutes, lutes, harps, and the fire horn.

The crafting bonus. uo.com gives an exceptional player-crafted instrument as +10% success chance; an unpublished figure expresses the same benefit as −5 to base difficulty [!]. Both describe the same advantage in different currencies. Carpentry is therefore a real support skill for a bard, or a real reason to know a carpenter.

Slayer instruments shift the difficulty either way: aligned is −10 difficulty [!] or +20% success in uo.com’s wording; opposed is +10 difficulty [!] or −20% success. Carrying the wrong slayer is actively worse than carrying none.

The named special instruments and their published charges:

Instrument	Slayer	Uses
Gwenno’s Harp	Repond + Reptile dual	1600
Iolo’s Lute	Demon + Undead dual	1600
Dreadhorn’s Flute	—	Self-recharging, maximum 700
Nature’s Tears	Fey	450
Primordial Decay	Elemental	450
Arachnid Doom	Arachnid	450
Flute of Renewal	—	Self-recharging, maximum 300, destroyed at 0 uses
Choral Crucible	Dragon	500 replenishing charges, shard bound

It has no mastery, but it feeds all three

Musicianship has no mastery of its own. The three bard masteries belong to Discordance, Peacemaking and Provocation. What Musicianship does instead is feed their numbers:

• Bard masteries require 90 Musicianship [!] plus a barding skill — so the skill is a prerequisite for a system it has no entry in.
• Tribulation’s trigger chance is Musicianship-based, running 15–60% baseline and up to 84% at 4 × 120 bard skills.
• Despair scales with Discordance and Musicianship.
• Song strength scales with skill above 90 [!]: Musicianship and the active mastery give 1 point per 10 skill points above 90, to a maximum of 8 points [!]; other barding skills give 1 point per 10 above Grandmaster, maximum 6 [!]. Weighting varies by song.
• Bard secondary skills above Grandmaster reduce mana upkeep slightly.

Two general rules that shape a bard’s kit: spellcasting does not interrupt bard songs, and the masteries page recommends Intelligence, Meditation and mana regeneration items for anyone running spellsongs. Evaluating Intelligence belongs to the same mana conversation.

In PvP

Indirect, and that is the whole of it. No Musicianship-specific PvP mechanic is published. What it does against players it does through Discordance: Musicianship is the gate on the player debuff that strips all item skill bonuses for 5 seconds — or 8 when the bard is “Focused Spec”, a term uo.com uses and never defines.

The practical reading for a PvP bard is that Musicianship is the tax you pay before your actual skill gets to roll. At 100 the first check stops costing you attempts; above 100 it starts adding +1% per point to the debuff landing. The Fire Horn is usable against players and explicitly deals less damage to them than to monsters.

In PvM

• Indirect but total. Without Musicianship no bard skill fires at all. It is not a supporting skill on a bard template; it is the template’s foundation.
• Past 100 it is the cheapest success chance in the game against high-difficulty PvM targets, at +1% per point, applying to Discordance, targeted Peacemaking and Provocation simultaneously. One scroll improves three skills.
• It gates the Fire Horn at 52.6, whose damage scales with your four bard skills combined — an area-effect option for a class that otherwise has few.
• Instrument choice is a real PvM decision. An aligned slayer is −10 difficulty [!] or +20% success; an exceptional crafted instrument is −5 [!] or +10%; and the 700–900 use durability on exceptional instruments is the difference between one and two instruments per outing.

For scale, two unpublished example rates: 50 Musicianship with 50 Peacemaking is roughly 25% success [!], and 100 Musicianship with 80 Provocation is roughly 80% [!]. Those are examples, not a table.

Caps, stats and training

Musicianship is on the uo.com scrollable skills list: base 100.0, raisable to 120.0 via Wondrous +5.0, Exalted +10.0, Mythical +15.0 and Legendary +20.0 Power Scrolls, which are not cumulative. Every point gained above 100.0 still counts against the 720 total skill cap. Power Scrolls come from Champion spawns in Felucca dungeons and the Lost Lands.

Primary stat Dex, secondary Int — Musicianship is the only bard skill with Dex as its primary, the other three being Int-primary.

Training is close to free:

Range	Method
0–30	Purchase from NPC Bards
30+	“Double-click any musical instrument to have a chance at gaining in skill”
Throughout	Passive gains while the other bard skills are used

The passive route typically brings Musicianship to the level you want before the other bard skills finish training — so in practice it trains itself while you work on Discordance or Provocation. The Guaranteed Gain System applies as usual, awarding a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] Any numeric value for the gating check itself. uo.com says it exists and is not difficulty-based, and gives no curve, formula or per-skill success figure for it below 100.
• [!] Any table of instrument gain rates, or gain caps, per instrument type.
• [!] Any Fire Horn damage formula — only that it scales with the four bard skills combined.
• [!] How the “8 tiles + 1 per 15 points” rule and the stated “18 tiles at 120/120” maximum fit together. Both are uo.com’s.

Where these come from

uo.com Bardic Skills · uo.com Bard Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.