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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8263787" data-attributes="member: 7023840">But is it? Or is this an example of an accident ... something thrown in? A bard must be human or half-elven. ...Bards begin play as fighters, and they must remain exclusively fighters until they have achieved at least the 5th level of experience. Anytime thereafter, and in any event prior to attaining the 8th level, they must change their class to that of thieves. Again, sometime between 5th and 9th level of ability, bards must leave off thieving and begin clerical studies as druids; but at this time they are actually bards and under druidical tutelage. Bards must fulfill the requirements in all the above classes before progressing to Bards Table 1.(PHB 117)So what is described here is not multiclassing (which is what demi-humans, such as half-elves, do), but dual-classing- which is available only to humans. Notably, in the half-elf description, it doesn't even state that the optional Bard is a permitted class (which is neither here nor there, as other races also do not mention, for example, that they aren't allowed to have psionics). Pages 32-33 have the multi-class character combination along with the human-only character with two classes. This is the only way to "remain exclusively {a} fighter" and then switch to thief. Which brings three different possibilities that come to my mind:1. The bard exists as both a class and a "pre-class," which is to say that a person isn't dual-classing, but instead goes through all the prerequisites of the bard class (fighter, thief) in a quantum state of pre-bardness. As such, the racial restriction on multi-classing and dual-classing do not apply, since the character is never a fighter or a thief, but only a pre-bard. This works great, unless something happens (like an item that changes alignment, or a reincarnation that changes the race, or the player realizing that BARDS ARE THE BANE OF ALL THE IS GOOD and abandoning the path of perfidy) that somehow converts the character from pre-bard to never-can-be-bard, thus necessitating an emergency ruling from the DM.2. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of the small minds that read AD&D, not the great mind that wrote it. <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=";)" /> 3. Bard are all bad, half-elves are half-bad, so it seemed a good fit?</blockquote>

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