D&D 5E Anyone else think the Bard concept is just silly?

[Thateous]

I loved the concept i was able to bring to life in 4e with the bard class. A female changling who used her voice as a weapon. So all the powers i used were sonic in nature and I used my wand a like mic. Worked put really well with the image of her screaming like a banshee at people to push/pull them.

 

[Brandegoris]

I maintain that the Bard should be renamed as "Adventurer", a generalist class that has picked up a variety of skills on the road. In old Final Fantasy terms, he is a Red Mage. He has learned how to wear armor and wield weapons, how to cast rudamentary spells, picked up a wide set of skills, learned a variety of languages and about different cultures, and developed skills to communicate with people from all walks of life. His "Bardic Inspiration" and "Countersong" skills simply relate to his Leadership abilities and inspire his companions.

I'm not a super big fan of the idea of someone strumming a lute to cast magic, but that is me. But I was always a fan of the Blade-Bard from 2nd Edition.

I will support that enthusiastically. As I said the class itself is great and very powerful. Its the visualization of a dude singing and crap. Even if you are trying to be serious it ends being hard to envision and somewhat goofy

 

[Tony Vargas]

Strangely, if you replace "bard" with "warlord", everyone wants it and posts lots of threads on forums.

It's a broader sense of aiding your allies, with inspiration being just part of it, sure. The 2e-through-3.5 bard inspired with music & song (not dancing as the OP implied), which, sure, in combat, maybe a little odd, one PH1 Warlord build focused on inspiration, the other on tactics (so that's twice the ground covered, right there), and the nature of the inspiration, beyond the 'source' being martial rather than magical, wasn't pre-defined. Prior to the PH2, you could have faked up a Bard using the Warlord or a Warlord MC feat, perhaps, even after the PH2, if you wanted a non-magical version of the concept, Warlord would still have been the way to go.

I think most of us in the western world associate "bard" with characters like "Alan a'dale" in Robin Hood, dressing in tights and playing a lute while dancing gaily around the battle.

Or Sir Robin's Minstrel, yeah. That's better covered by the Entertainer background (or one of a Noble's non-combatant followers) in 5e. (Preferably with variant rules for converting followers into rations included.)

Its just hard to visualize a dude acting like that in the middle of a fight

Ultimately, the 5e Bard is a spellcaster.

Picture anything it does the same way you would casting, and it should be fine.

 

[Brandegoris]

I can TRY to picture it as a spell caster but if it involves singing and dancing I cant LOL

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I think of the bard as a performance caster--performing in front of an audience is the point. In some ways, that makes the bard the anti-warlock, since the warlock is supposed to be sneaky, doing whatever he/she is doing without anyone knowing he/she is a warlock (look at the sword, just like a fighter; look at my spell book, see I'm a wizard; that invisible thing that just picked your pocket, totally not an imp--it is a spirit, behold I am a cleric).

As a DM, I am pretty open to players deciding how their bard performs, as long as the bard is doing something that draws attention to him/herself before the magic starts flying.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can TRY to picture it as a spell caster but if it involves singing and dancing I cant LOL

I don't recall anything in the 5e bard about dancing. You can sub in the verbal components part 'casting' (chanting, perhaps, is that less incongruous?) for 'singing' anywhere else.

 

[Charles Rampant]

Dear god man, do you have to post eighteen times in a row and say LOL every sentence?

Also: you're wrong. The bard is awesome, and so is the barbarian, and you should aspire to play a BardBarian multiclass.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I sort of glossed over this but this is exactly my issue. They are too powerful in a sense as it relates to magic. They do not have to do much fighting or hiding and could nearly just stand back and cast! I would prefer more limitation in number of spells and or reduce the flashy whiz bang....

For me, the problem came when they decided that bardic magic was its own separate thing from wizard magic. In 2E, bardic magic was just wizard magic that the bard happened to pick up in their travels, which meant that all of the magic in the world came from either the gods or from studying the natural magical forces of the world.

By the time 3E came around, bardic magic was its own thing, and it represented yet another source of supernatural powers. I'd be fine if a setting had musical magic instead of arcane or divine magic, but as you add more and more distinct elements to the setting, it just gets bogged down. A world with one unified source of magic, like in Harry Potter, is just way easier to deal with than a world with twelve different sources of magic.

I'm also not a fan of wizards casting spells all day, either, though. If a wizard only had a handful of spells in a day, and had to rely on hitting things with a staff at some point, then that would be great. And the combination of adding in several different sources of magic, while also letting everyone cast spells all day long without ever running dry, means that magic just completely overwhelms the rest of the setting. There's just too much magic for me to really care anymore.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I myself like the class, and I think that it offers a fun and interesting range of character types, and also slots into a useful place in a lot of settings; but I also totally agree with the above. Vicious Mockery is a nightmare of a spell, since it requires the player to come up with something funny and clever on the spot, over and over again. Illusions usually get cast with a bit of planning, so you get clever thinking with them, but a combat cantrip? Not so much.

I think that the best answer might just be to not ask the player for the pun.

Why should it be a pun? The spell description doesn't say anything about puns or humor.

Example(warning; graphic violence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HqdSjdtPAQ

No puns there.

 

[Arnwolf666]

If the Bard class was meant to reflect the skald concept, then they would have called the class Skald and it would have art to match. Instead, the picture in the PHB always shows someone carrying a stringed instrument such as a lute.

If Art makes you think like that it should be stripped from the game. Well I never like art in RPG anyway it prevents to many idiots from creating pictures in their own head.