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

[thunktanker]

Just like all those scholarly wizards, druids, and such. What's your point? Why are people giving such about bards when wizards are in this game? Or is this just yet another of the double-standards in favor of wizards?

What? You don't think it was historically accurate that one person could mutter words and make weird gestures using some bat crap and some sulphur and then throw a massive ball of fire 150 feet with his bare hands, incinerating people? Surely that actually happened, which is why the bard must be subject to standards of historical scrutiny. Next, you will be saying that orcs, dragons, gnomes, mind flayers, ect. never existed and are fictional. Hypocrisy!

 

[Tony Vargas]

If it helps, I've no clue what an Elan is?

Is it a silly Bard character from something?

Yes, a comedic charachiture of the 3.5 version of the class at its most absurd. From the online comic Order of the Stick

I also don't get why people dislike gnomes.

Maybe it's the silent G?

But I get not liking parts of DnD while still liking DnD.

Cool. So Brandegoris can keep playing D&D. ;P (Maybe he should stop talking about it in quite the same tone, but it's as much his game as anyone's.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

Just like all those scholarly wizards, druids, and such. What's your point? Why are people giving such about bards when wizards are in this game? Or is this just yet another of the double-standards in favor of wizards?

[MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION] had a theory that the caster|fighter double-standard that pervades D&D was a 'revenge of the nerds' power-fantasy. D&D is a nerd game, nerds and jocks didn't exactly get along in high school, intellectual casters are the stand-in for the nerds, big dumb fighters & barbarians for the jocks. Since the nerds made the game, the nerd-identification classes are Tier 1, while the Jock-identified classes are Tier 5. I suppose we could go into more detail mapping D&D classes to high school cliques, and Bards would be, IDK, band geeks.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

[MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION] had a theory that the caster|fighter double-standard that pervades D&D was a 'revenge of the nerds' power-fantasy. D&D is a nerd game, nerds and jocks didn't exactly get along in high school, intellectual casters are the stand-in for the nerds, big dumb fighters & barbarians for the jocks. Since the nerds made the game, the nerd-identification classes are Tier 1, while the Jock-identified classes are Tier 5. I suppose we could go into more detail mapping D&D classes to high school cliques, and Bards would be, IDK, band geeks.

Always a strange thing for me, because I was friends with most nerd groups in high school, and there just wasn't that sharp divide at my high school. My first DnD game was at the invitation of a jock, and his cheerleader girlfriend. Her best friend was a drama nerd, and I was one of those kids that didn't have a "clique", as such, but floated around at lunch depending on who I saw first, or my whim.

But almost half the people who were in acedemic extra curriculars were also atheletes, of some kind. The movie stereotype also seemed to me to be nothing but a movie stereotype, until I met people who went to other high schools who were picked on by eh jocks, etc.

 

[schnee]

I do think it weird that they're full casters. I'd have even gone for 2/3 or something, even though in some ways they'll always be those super-weird Fighter/Thief/Druids to me.

 

[Xeviat]

I used to think the concept was weird. They've grown on me. They're definitely very D&D. If I was playing a different game in a setting that wasn't made for D&D, I think I could lose the Bard. But, I don't believe music is a requirement for the class the way others do. Oration is a performance. They're the magical Warlord, a concept I came to accept just like I accept the magical woodsman in the Ranger or the fantastical knight in the Paladin.

But, I'm joining the echos of "why weren't they a half-caster".


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[TheCosmicKid]

So, "maþþumgyfa" might share the origin root for Tolkien's hobbit cultural giving of "mathoms" (if I remember the correct word) on their birthdays?

Good eye! And there's no "might" about it. Tolkien constructed original languages for the Elves and outlined those of the Dwarves and Orcs, but for the old language of Men and Hobbits he just used Anglo-Saxon. Justified as a translation convention, since that language is supposed to be the ancestor of the Westron in which the book was written just as Anglo-Saxon is the ancestor of the English in which we read it. Also justified by the sheer beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Just like all those scholarly wizards, druids, and such. What's your point? Why are people giving such about bards when wizards are in this game? Or is this just yet another of the double-standards in favor of wizards?

The bard is fine, if you treat it as an untrained wizard, like it was in 2E. Wizards aren't real, so we can treat them however we want.

Bards aren't fine when they represent minstrels, because minstrels were real things that actually existed. We know what a minstrel is, and it doesn't belong on the battlefield. Likewise, it's not fine for a soldier to juggle horses or shout malaria away, because those are all real things and we know how they should interact. When you have something in the game that is based on reality, we expect it to be treated at least somewhat realistically. When you have something in the game that isn't based on reality, then the only constraint is that it is internally consistent.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The bard is fine, if you treat it as an untrained wizard, like it was in 2E. Wizards aren't real, so we can treat them however we want.

Bards aren't fine when they represent minstrels, because minstrels were real things that actually existed.

Magicians were real things that actually existed, and wizards are merely a fantastic exaggeration of them. So what's so horrible about bards being a fantastic exaggeration of minstrels (or even, y'know, bards, which were not the same thing)?

 

[thunktanker]

it's not fine for a soldier to juggle horses or shout malaria away, because those are all real things and we know how they should interact.

Why isn't it fine to have a story in which malaria can be shouted away? I might read that story. It sounds intriguing.

Trees are real. No treents? Lizards are real and never talk. No talking lizards? I've never found a fantasy world in the back of my closet. No Narnia?

Besides, everything has components of reality in it somehow. We know how making hand gestures and speaking works, for instance. Those things should be treated somewhat realistically, your argument suggests. So how do those things produce a phantom horse? Seems like wizards are failing to treat them realistically in D&D. Your principle needs a second principle to determine its application.

But anyway, you seem to be trying to impose a principle here that would serve to put constraints on where our imaginations can take us. Why? What does this principle give us in exchange for constraining the kinds of stories we can tell? I'm not sold on its value, and just asserting it will not convince me. D&D is fantasy, and its unsupported departures from reality are part of its charm.