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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9755907" data-attributes="member: 7023840">As I already suggested, if you want to play a Bard in 1e (WHY? FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, WHY?), I recommend playing one of the excellent single-class options I mentioned earlier.To me, the issue with the 1e Appendix Bard is how half-.... quarter-baked it is. Not only are the rules non-sensical (as in, they literally don't make sense and require multiple houserules), but the class itself doesn't make sense compared to the other classes. The closest comparator is the 1e Monk, and even that class looks correctly balanced and well-thought out compared to the 1e Appendix Bard.Essentially, you have a multitude of problems.First, you don't actually become your class until "name level" play. Essentially, you become a Bard when all of your companions are 9th level or beyond (depending on how you do levelling). And that's weird. But it gets worse!Because the Bard's class doesn't recognize this... look at the XP levels- you're essentially a level 1 PC. While everyone else needs multiple hundreds of thousands of XP to advance a single level, you need .... only 150,001 to get to 11th level!THAT IS CRAZY. But do you know what's crazier- compare that to the Druid. Imagine you are "maxing" your fighter level (7) and thief level (8). You need 70,001 xp for fighter and ... 70,001 xp for thief, for a total of 140,002 xp for max F/T (and you want to max fighter levels, since that will always be your attack ability). With me?To make Druid 14, you need 1,500,001 xp, along with having won in combat against Druids at levels 12, 13, and 14.To make Bard 18, you need 1,400,001 xp. Are you following me? So, you can hit (depending on how you level) F7/T8/B18 before the Druid gets to level 14. And without engaging in any combats. That means that not only do you have the fighter and thief abilities, but you also have all the abilities of a 14th level druid, except you can't cast as many spells. At that point, you're stuck at 4/4/4/3/3, while a 13th level Druid is 6/5/5/5/4/3/2Essentially, you will always have all the abilities of the Druid, sooner (once you shift), never having to deal with the Druid sacrifices (weapons, armor, combat against other druids, etc.), with all sorts of other cool abilities, and only sacrificing 6th and 7th level spells.IMO, the class simply doesn't work as written. It doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it in a certain type of campaign, but it's not ... the design problems are just so deep that even if square the circle of all the other rules, it's just a bad design.</blockquote>

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