How do you justify the bard's abilities?

[Reynard]

Years of mounting disgust at the number of threads about not wanting monks, "eastern" elements, and so on in a particular campaign?

Well, to be fair, I don't think the desire for setting consistency is a bad thing, nor is the tendency toward faux western-medievalism that surprising given the inspirational literature for the game (not to mention the cultural background of many, if not most, D&D players).

Seriously, what was ad hominem about that? Is "grognard" an insult now?

It can certainly be construed as such, although I admit "tone" can be very difficult to discern in text.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I have never had trouble justifying bards, seeing them as face/magic multiclasses, who use magic to do things with their performances no one else can do.

In many ways, bards make more sense than a lot of other classes.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

I tend to do a lot of re-skinning, and bards take quite a bit, imho. So they can express their magics through music, dance or other art, or through simple presence, oratory, or the like.

I like to think of them as using magic in a different sort of way, drawing on a specialized power source. Just as a druid draws on nature, or a wizard concocts formulae to tap into magic, a bard draw on the Power that Civilizes. This is why they use song, poetry and story-telling, and have vast reserves of knowledge. They tap magic by manipulating the social spirit, the flow of history, the spirit of adventure and the drive of imagination.

So by profession, a bard could just as easily be an actor, a professor, a poet, a drummer, a comic, an opera singer, a sargent, an artist, a fifer, a librarian, a school teacher, a witchdoctor, a ship captain, or any other person who uses presence, authority and/or knowledge of people as part of their job.

 

[Garthanos]

As the official purveyor of history and fame it would be very in keeping to have heros gaining better advancement when their tales are told by bards. And as a branch of druidic hierarchy if you harmed them you were guaranteed cursed.... this independent of the tales of there satire inducing boils even suicide. Self doubt is incredibly deadly on a battle field...The bards attacks really could be undermining the enemy so that a later attack has greater effect (see hit point loss not being wounds - in every version of D&D except maybe one).

Many myths have the universe created with song itself (see tolkein) perfection in music remakes the universe as you would have it.... so the bards song makes its target lesser.

The root of the word Enchantment and Incantation = Chant aka song. Your wizards may be perceived as singing there magic too ;p

Charisma is creativity and divine inspiration and passion or spirit all very useful even when using a sword... especially when you add in the above.

Bards work very well for me.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I like the concept of the Bard not just being a singer, but a poet, etc.

One thing you might want to get some influence from is modern-day mentalists to get inspiration for how a lot of the bardic powers would work. Perhaps a good template for a Bard might be Derren Brown. If you do a google search and take a look on YouTube for some videos, you can see him performing some tricks that might open your eyes to just how powerful a simple mentalist could be, such as getting a guy to subconciously give you his wallet, to making a guy drunk via post-hypnotic suggestion.

And that's somebody in our world without magic. Then, if you add active magic to that, you can get quite a powerful figure.

There are also some real-world concepts involving sound that you could get inspiration from. Infrasound exists and was used in a few movies to instill fear. There is also such a thing as "Projected Sound", which involves using sound to project a sound as coming from another source, sound which only one person in a specific area might hear.

There's a lot of inspiration from our non-magical world.

 

[Garthanos]

Good examples, though the bard is more from Celtic myth than anywhere else. "It was believed that a well-aimed bardic satire, glam dicenn, could raise boils on the face of its target." - wikipedia, with reference to Irish bards.

Yup, though the power of music is certainly acknowledged cross culturally. Bard so named in Celtic heritage was a powerful magical and oft times heroic figure emulating those heroes of which he tells the tales...

It occurred to me that rhythm and song is used as a tool of memorization long before tools like literacy became prevalent.

 

[Reynard]

I like the 2E bard as a spellsinger. (My mother was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club when I was a kid, and both Pern and the Spellsinger novels were a big influence on my view of fantasy early on -- well, those and He-Man.)

I like the 3E bard as a "magician" and have even gone so far as to remove the music element entirely in some campaigns/settings. Replace "Perform" with "Spellcraft" and you have a different flavoired but mechanically identical character.

I don't much like the 1E bard as-is, but if it were one of a number of similar "prestige classes" i think it'd be okay.

 

[Aus_Snow]

More readily than is the case with the Wizard, for example.

At least the Bard has an obvious focus, means, and shtick, what's more.

The Wizard? Um, oh he or she learns uh, stuff, and um, (sometimes) waves hands around and does the funny dance, and er, (sometimes) bellows crap in some wannabe language, and um, (sometimes) throws dubious and occasionally cliche or painfully punny (and otherwise arbitrary) items into the air.

Gimme the Bard logic any day.

 

[Wik]

I had trouble with this, until I read the novel "Rhapsody" a few years back. Basically, a musician in that book was able to tap into the primal rhythm that connects all things. Her knowledge of true names and her perfect pitch allowed her to do all sorts of things - like singing the note of "fire" would actually create fire, and so on and so forth.

Since then, I've always seen Bards as sort of "Song Mages" - wizards who achieve arcane effects through musical means. Rather than going the traditional way - tapping energy and releasing it through weird gestures and whatnot - the bard is shaping that energy using a musical focus. The bard is also focused on true names, which is why many bardic effects are charm-based in nature. And since they use music to shape effects, it comes as no surprise that many effects are amplified sound.

In our game, mind you, our bard isn't really a "bard" at all. He's more like a revolutionary mad-bomber who has picked up a fair amount of sound-based magical skills which he occasionally uses - when he isn't busily swinging around his fullblade and using short-range arcane magical spells.

 

[Celebrim]

As for the bard's flavor, read the Kalevala. It's pretty clear that the D&D Bard is meant to be Väinämöinen. In the Kalevala, everyone is pretty much terrified of Väinämöinen singing, because he has the ability to 'sing you into the ground', meaning literally that he asks the ground to swallow you up and the earth, moved by the power of his voice, gladly does so.

The problem here is that we don't have that sort of tradition of sacred song in the modern world. When we think of singing, we think of pop stars, not sacred music and chants. So when the average player imagines a bard, the whole idea seems sort of silly. But no one in the Kalevala finds Väinämöinen silly at all. He's terrifying, because he knows the sacred words that give him power over spirits.

Interestingly to me, we don't find the idea that someone can read from a book and gain the power of mind over matter to be 'silly'. We live in a world of written tradition were the knowledge of books gives one arcane understanding and power not available to everyone. So no one finds the Wizard funny. The Bard comes from a world of oral tradition, where the memory of words gives one power and understanding. Lacking a strong oral tradition, the Bard lacks mythic resonance and is relegated to comic relief - a jester.

For the longest time I thought I was going to write the Bard out of existance in my homebrew, but the Bard ended up tougher than I thought it would be. In my world, there is a traditional lost golden age of magic - the time of the Art Mages - when the gods freely shared magical lore with mortals. The art mages managed to make every mundane act magical. So, for example, carpenters performed carpentry magic, stone masons performed masonry magic, and painters performed painting magic. After mortals misused their knowledge, the Gods destroyed all the learning of the great Art schools, leaving mortals with only scattered fragmentary knowledge. That knowledge became what is no known as Wizardry, which preserves just a single narrow branch of the boundless former lore. But then, having written that, I realized that Bards fit in well after all, as they maintained there own narrow art magic tradition that some how escaped the iconoclasm. And the existance of bards lets me hint that perhaps other things may have escaped the gods attention or been allowed to persist out there. It's not a thread I've ever had a chance to follow up on, but its a nice dangling hook for a campaign secret.