How do you envision bards?

Skarp Hedin · Mar 15, 2002

Flouncing nancy-boys!

Heh. I generally envision them as entertainers, and most published stuff seems to take the "entertainer/poet-type who is adventuring to gather material" tack.. I dunno. No one's played a bard in any of my campaigns in years. There's a bard NPC with one of my parties in RttToEE right now, but I think he's gonna die, really.

Gossamerblade · Mar 15, 2002

I think bards are pretty good now, but there is definitely room for improvement. Bardic abilities such as "inspire courage" should become more powerful as the bard gains levels. A higher level bard should be able to "facinate" higher level or HD characters.

I'm A Banana · Mar 15, 2002

Jacks-of-all-trades.

I was surprised, in fact, at how easy it was to take the Red Magician from Final Fantasy (they get a bit of attack power, and curing and destructive magic of low levels) and basically make it a Bard.

IMHO, it should be under a different name ("Jack," for instance...), and the BARD should be the one that sings magical spellsongs to do miraculous things. They should, IMHO, be much more similar to wizards than bards currently are.

But, I'm gonna check out Monte's bards as soon as it comes to print, so we'll see how cool that is.

EOL · Mar 15, 2002

I think the bard is one of the most flexible classes, he can really be just about whatever you want, with maybe a minor tweak here and there. I personally have never and won't ever play a bard, but if that's your thing they can be incredibly cool.

mmadsen · Mar 15, 2002

I see the bard as an opportunity for two classes: a variant Rogue Class appropriate for a medieval minstrel, and a variant Sorcerer Prestige Class for a musician who transcends mere entertainment (e.g. Orpheus, Vainamoinen, Taliesin).

jollyninja · Mar 15, 2002

after having done some wacky complicated (sarcasm) math, i have found that an average bard as detailed in the DMG is the worst combatant other then the sorceror and wizard, narrowly being edged out by the rogue who had the crap cicked out of him by everyone else. his magic requires some creativity to be useful in alot of combat situations and might fail at a crucial moment because of his armor. he gets a good number of skills but if you are going to call someont a "jack of all trades" shouldn't they get more skill points then everyone else?

in short from the mindset of a powergamer (some days i am some i am not, depends on the stress level at work) the bard is crap, still i end up playing alot of them, something about the half elven bard will alllways interest me.

jmucchiello · Mar 15, 2002

I don't know.

Two out of three of my 2nd ed characters are a bard multiclass. But neither of my 2 3rd ed characters, not one bard. (Yes, there are 5 simultaneous games that I'm playing in. 6 if you count the 1st ed game with my dwarven psionicist. Not to mention the game I DM which recently became 3rd ed. But I digress.)

The 3rd ed bard class is all wrong for what I'm use to doing with the 2nd ed bard. Monte's bard is not bad in that it has more of the attack spell abilities that the PHB bard lacks. (I would miss lightning bolt.)

Actually, I think my problem is the 3rd ed multiclassing. My 2nd ed druid/bard 12/12 just is so cool in terms of spell casting ability. But you can't create someone like that anymore. I started a wizard-1/cleric-1 character and I am going to have to stick with one or the other classes eventually or I'll never see high level spells.

What does this have to do with bards? Bards never get the high level spells so I'm use to playing those types of limitations. But 3rd ed is too balanced to make that limitation any fun. Thus the slower pace of the bard is not as powerful as it was in 2nd ed.

Darklone · Mar 15, 2002

Bards

Bards are versatile. They can be whatever you want, use your imagination. If you don't like them, don't use them, they just don't fit into some settings if you are a bit narrowminded about how they should be

Chacal · Mar 15, 2002

Re: I don't know.

jmucchiello said:
Actually, I think my problem is the 3rd ed multiclassing. My 2nd ed druid/bard 12/12 just is so cool in terms of spell casting ability. But you can't create someone like that anymore.

Same problem here, in 2e we always played our bards multiclassed, and with kits.

It's really difficult to acheive this in 3e, especially at intermediate levels (for high levels, you can create a PrC )

Chacal

Paka · Mar 15, 2002

Their Bardic Ability gives them the ability to have information that would take the rest o the party months in an amazing library to have a chance of finding out. The Bard can figure this stuff out with a single roll on a table.

I like the Bard in my game because he allows me to impart so much information about the game world and he allows the players to go into so many situations better informed then that would have been.

The party is split right now, the Bard is off on a mission and although he is a wimp in combat, I think the party is really missing their little Jakc of all Trades.

They are poltiical role-playing oriented characters to be sure, but if a game is being run in a fleshed out world where knowledge can be power I dig 'em.