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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6178450" data-attributes="member: 17106">I don't know where you get any of that from. Even if I were running a game with no combat whatsoever, I'd still say a barbarian is better than a bard on principle and in practice. A barbarian is about doing stuff, and a bard is about persuading or influencing or inspiring other people to do stuff. I think it's inherently better to cut out the middle man and do stuff yourself. My group generally respects the more direct approach, which I don't see as being particularly spiteful or prejudicial.Strength is much better than Charisma (at least if you believe WotC's paradigm for racial adjustments). I distinctly recall one barbarian character I had taking the feat that gives you a huge bonus to breaking objects. Useful in combat? No. Useful? Hell yes. And if you want to look at things in terms of "pillars", barbarians are quite good at exploration, and bards aren't in particular. Speed bonus, survival and perception skills, even trap sense in the 3e version. These are useful things. Charisma skills, conversely, are only useful if there are other creatures around that are amenable to being influenced, and their effects are largely dependent on the NPCs being able and willing to do what he wants. Enchantments have a niche, but are usually illegal and/or likely to draw ire. All of that stuff is very situational.The other thing about bards is that they're really the only "jack of all trades" class, which makes them a "master of none". Players want 9th level spells or similar high level abilities to be on the table, even if the campaign never goes that far. Being pretty good at a bunch of things isn't as desirable as being really good at one thing and pretty good at some other things. Enchanters and rogues command more respect than bards for that reason. To some extent, these are things that can be patched; and I tried to give the high-level bard something more to strive for when I revised it.None of this has anything to do with how combat-focused the characters are. If anything, we tend not to hold one-dimensional combat characters in very high regard either.</blockquote>

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