Paul Smart
Explorer
I hope everyone had a great weekend / long weekend if you are in Canada. Now lets talk about Bards. Well designed, not well designed? What are your thoughts?
D&D 5E Best designed classes in 5e
A Canadian thanks you.
I think bards are just adequate: they occupy a unique situation for me, where I like the class (great spell list; cool flavour), but not the subclasses; as a result I don't find them compelling.
There are, additionally, some major design flaws in small things:
a. classification of instruments (individual instruments rather than classes of instruments (strings, percussion); proficiencies not matching with magic items in DMG).
b. lack of intersection of tool proficiencies (3 instruments!) with magical focus (I as a bard can use a violin as a focus even if I am not proficient in it).
c. weak intersection of instrument-as-focus with the rules for what's-in-your-hand (using an instrument as a focus requires one hand holding it up (or some weird minority musical style)), rather than common-sense playing of the instrument.
As I have said elsewhere, for me, this breaks verisimilitude, and when I have played bards, I want to just use a component pouch, ignoring instruments altogether.
I'll add that while I feel the design niche of the valor bard is an important one, as implemented it's very, very odd. Worse yet if you want to go for a strength-based bard.
You spend the first two levels with relatively weak weapons and armor, then suddenly hey-presto! you can use all martial weapons and medium armor. And if you want to go heavy, you have to wait until level 4 -- you can't even edge around that as a variant-human, thanks to only getting light armor at start. It makes an odd narrative hitch when you suddenly hit level 3, gain your more martial features, and need to get back to town to equip with them.
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