Bards - The Greatest of All Classes

[Crothian]

I've never had problems with bard sbeing underpowered, they have a nicht just like the other classes and granted it is not as obvious to everyone as say hitting people with a sword but that does not make it any less there.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I've never had problems with bard sbeing underpowered, they have a nicht just like the other classes and granted it is not as obvious to everyone as say hitting people with a sword but that does not make it any less there.

Agreed. There's usually always at least one Bard in most of the games I run, and they do just fine.

 

[Ranes]

You need to put down the video-game controller...

Ten out of ten for knowing how to start a fight. (But thanks for the entertainment.) As for WLD's hand-waving away bardic knowledge, there's a line just gagging for the DM's red pen.

 

[MaxKaladin]

People need to understand that what is known about bards in our literate society has passed through a number of layers of abstraction.

Yes, and that goes both ways. We've seen plenty of romanticizing of ancient cultures to make them out to be more than they really were before. Just look at all the nonsense people have come up with about the druids or stonehenge for examples. I suspect some of this "the bards knew everything there ever was to know" talk is another example. Were the bards better educated and more knowledgable than your average wandering minstrel? You bet. Were they some sort of ancient repository of all knowledge that ever existed? Hardly.

One thing that's getting left out here is that bardic knowledge was a sum of its parts. While every bard was required to memorize an impressive body of core knowledge to be considered a bard, his or her knowledge was not all encompassing. Different bards knew different things beyond that shared core of common knowledge. That's one reason the bards travelled around. They did so to cross-pollenate their knowledge, so to speak. They spread what they knew around and picked up things from bards in other areas.

I think the bardic knowledge ability does a credible job of simulating someone who has an impressive, but not all encompassing body of knowledge at his disposal.

 

[gizmo33]

..., until our Bard happened to glean it out of an old manuscript

Your highness, at the risk of suffering the same fate as your other enemies I would like to use you as an example of the EXACT bias I'm talking about when you ask people from a literate society to come up with ideas about bards.

There is an UNBROKEN oral tradition in the universe of bards. It has no need for the mundane scratchings of scribes - "manuscripts" as you say. (Pardon the alliteration.) The details of a person's deathbed confession would have been composed, on the spot, by the household bard into a powerful and stirring poetic epic that would pass through recitation like the black plague across Europe. There's no reason to assume that the bard would ever have to resort to reading manuscripts, or surfing the internet for that matter.

Of course rule Zero is yours to command, my lord. And the campaign is yours to do with as you please. I merely argue for the meekest of your subjects.

 

[gizmo33]

Ten out of ten for knowing how to start a fight. (But thanks for the entertainment.)

I said that as someone who has a high score of 290 thousand in Galaga. I live in a big, glass house. I hope you laughed.

 

[Ranes]

Laughed? I nearly subscribed to EQ II.

 

[Rystil Arden]

True, but I hate to see you make too much of a system of writing that was never taken seriously by druids and exists only in the form of a few tomb inscriptions. Bardic knowledge was sacred knowledge, and to write it down was blasphemous. It's like looking for the tenets of Christianity in pornography and trying to draw conclusions from the that. The real direct source of bardic knowledge is verbally trasmitted, and so you don't have it. My crazy thesis here is that only by viewing the written sources through the lense of what anthropology/comparative mythology has to say about pre-literate societies (and this term is prejudiced in assuming some sort of "progress" to writing) can you really do justice to the way that the people of the time period thought. I think a serious attempt at a character class worthy of the name "bard" would recognize what the people who invented the term would have understood about the class.

This is perhaps one of the most ironic paragraphs I have ever seen, if only because you either didn't understand me at all or wanted to make this seem funny. You tell me not to dwell on Ogham whereas you ignored the rest of my statement and dwelled on Ogham. In fact, the thesis of my paper was virtually identical to your thesis of "only by viewing the written sources through the lense of what anthropology/comparative mythology has to say about pre-literate societies (and this term is prejudiced in assuming some sort of "progress" to writing) can you really do justice to the way that the people of the time period thought", and I don't need to be told the limited use of Ogham.


As for Amairgen, I'm not saying he's a druid because I think he would be a D&D druid due to his mastery of elements, I'm saying he's a druid because the primary source material--which you quoted in translation--refers to him specifically as a druid.

Again - druidic knowledge is, in fact, unwritten and to the extent that it is not derived immediately from the powers granted by gods, I would argue that such knowledge is in fact BARDIC Knowledge.

That's circular reason that presupposes that I accept your premise of bardic knowledge as the entire collective unconscious of all humanity, which I do not.

And as for Lugh, gods are never fair examples of the class they represent.

You seem to know the facts about legendary bards. You certainly understand the trouble of interpreting early peoples, at least from my perspective. Your main problem is that your definition of bardic knowledge as an akashic memory ("the entirety of all sentient knowledge" "any non-written source of knowledge") is not accurate. This fuels all my disagreement with you. I'll reiterate: If you want an akashic memory, play an AU akashic.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I believe most gamers do not know enough about bards to do them justice, either as a DM or a module author.

Oh, I know enough about bards to do them "justice."

Trust me on that.

You know what they say... "Those who can't do... sing about it for pennies."


Wulf

 

[Rystil Arden]

Your highness, at the risk of suffering the same fate as your other enemies I would like to use you as an example of the EXACT bias I'm talking about when you ask people from a literate society to come up with ideas about bards.

There is an UNBROKEN oral tradition in the universe of bards. It has no need for the mundane scratchings of scribes - "manuscripts" as you say. (Pardon the alliteration.) The details of a person's deathbed confession would have been composed, on the spot, by the household bard into a powerful and stirring poetic epic that would pass through recitation like the black plague across Europe. There's no reason to assume that the bard would ever have to resort to reading manuscripts, or surfing the internet for that matter.

Of course rule Zero is yours to command, my lord. And the campaign is yours to do with as you please. I merely argue for the meekest of your subjects.

Henry is referring to the D&D bard whereas you are still stuck on the Celtic bard, which is where your confusion (or is it mock-confusion?) stems from. Of course the Celtic bards didn't have access to an efficient means of writing, and if they did, who's to say they wouldn't have used it? After all, unlike the church-scribed Celtic myths, the Greek epic cycles were preserved orally and eventually written down by the same people who had memorised them.