Bards and redundant "morale" bonuses

[frankthedm]

Plus if bard stuff stacked, they could spelldump too easily. This way the bard always has a buff, not falling back to sheet music[scrolls] 2 encounters into the day.

 

[moritheil]

I just noticed that Bards have multiply redundant ways to give people morale bonuses:

Bards would be a lot more effective at buffing their allies if they had some different bonus types that could stack!

In a generic campaign, I have to agree. Of course, IMC there's a race that gains double bonuses from morale effects, so there it's a good thing . . .

 

[Joshua Randall]

Like it or not, stacking modifiers are part of the game. This is explicitly mentioned in the rules -- stacking modifiers allow and encourage the players to make clever use of spells, magic items, and so on.

I definitely agree that thematically, it makes sense for a bard to provide lots of morale bonuses. However, the bard's spell list is rather underwhelming already, so when two of his best buff spells (heroism and good hope) are redundant with a class ability he gains at first level -- that's just lame.

Don't forget that the Inspire Courage ability, Heroism (or Greater Heroism) and Good Hope don't provide exactly the same benefit. The first doesn't give a bonus to most saves or to skill checks, which Heroism does. And Heroism affects only a single creature, while Good Hope affects a group (and also provides bonuses to ability checks and damage checks). So it's not as if any of them make the others completely redundant.

Not completely redundant, no. But for a spontaneous caster with very limited spells known, the bard can't afford redundancy.

Since this is the Rules forum and not the House Rules forum, I'm not going to propose any workaround to this situation. I'll simply stand by my original post: that bards would be more effective at buffing if they (like every other spellcasting class) could stack bonus types.

 

[Garboshnik]

Even though its not the houserules forum, I'll propose one: just allow the modifiers from these spells to stack.

I ran it that way for a while just because I had missed the matching types. The result was that all of the other players really missed the bard when he was gone, but not to the degree that he was overpowering. The player of the bard did get a little bored at times casting all those buffs but c'est la vie.