Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ashrym" data-source="post: 7933619" data-attributes="member: 6750235">I'm going to head you off a bit here.  DnD uses "bard" with the roots in the fili, skald, and jongleur.  That was expressed in the original version.  DnD also specifically called out Orpheus as an inspiration and has stated in the pasts the class broadly encompasses other cultures even though the name came from specific cultures, and rhapsode was listed among other examples.DnD isn't Celtic, Welsh, Scottish, Greek, or anything else.  The names of the classes are attached to the Dnd settings as it's own basis.  A person could run a home campaign and rename them based on the settings but a musician still wouldn't be a bard.  At least not until the term musician was reestablished with additional connotations.  In DnD terms, musician falls under the entertainer background instead of a class.Here is a bit of Greek correlation from that line of inspiration, however:That's a slight variation on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis" target="_blank">music of the spheres</a> as per <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism#Music_and_harmony" target="_blank">Pythagoreanism</a> music purified souls and the universe was sustained by harmony. The DnD bard is doing the same thing the Pythagorean philosophers when they were researching and applying music as a fundamental binding force. By purifying souls they were evoking emotional responses with music. Not all singers or minstrels were Pythagorean philosophers either. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I bolded a key point for emphasis.  Bardic traditions require special training beyond learning music.  Bards study magic (among other things).  Musicians entertain audiences.Bards are historians, magicians, healers, advisors, teachers, and more.  That's not what musicians do.  Musicians do evoke an emotional response like bards do with music or poetry but musicians are not chronicling history or teaching through parable.  The bard's purpose goes beyond entertaining.Picking a musician as an inspiration is not a bad method, of course, but I'm pointing out musician does not equal bard.  A closer comparison would be a Rabbi if that helps people understand the difference in function.  It's like calling someone who goes hunting a police detective because they both shoot guns.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />To be clear, I do not want to tell you how to have fun.  I just like to make sure people understand the difference between a bard and a musician.  A bard is it's own real-world thing like a priest or a warrior, and like both it benefits form folklore and myth in a fantasy game.I also don't want to derail the thread.  It would be better to make a different thread or PM if you want to discuss it further.</blockquote>

Verification