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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5021092" data-attributes="member: 8461">I agree; I think the bard, as it stands now, fails in its design goals to the point where applying &quot;patches&quot; won't work. It needs to be almost completely torn down and rebuilt from the ground up in terms of class abilities to fix it.Well, the idea of the bard as generalist is how I always perceived the class. And while I do think that generalists are harder to design, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're predisposed to fail. I think a good generalist is one that can serve as any of the major roles in a party, but not in an optimized fashion.For example, I recently found a third-party product which had a feat called Incantationist. This feat let a character cast any spell as an <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm" target="_blank">incantation</a>, laying out a series of guidelines for converting a spell to an incantation that serve to limit the feat's versatility. For example, the casting time is ten minutes per spell level, requires one assistant per spell level, requires several successful skill checks, has gp and XP costs, requires either a spell scroll of the spell or a spellbook entry of it to work, etc.That's the sort of thing I mean in regards to having the ability to serve in a party role without eclipsing a specialist character. Someone with the above feat can serve as an ad-hoc spellcaster, but nowhere near as well as an actual spellcasting class. That's generally how I thought the bard should function for most (if not all) of its abilities...it just isn't built that way in 3.X.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 5021092, member: 8461"] I agree; I think the bard, as it stands now, fails in its design goals to the point where applying "patches" won't work. It needs to be almost completely torn down and rebuilt from the ground up in terms of class abilities to fix it. Well, the idea of the bard as generalist is how I always perceived the class. And while I do think that generalists are harder to design, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're predisposed to fail. I think a good generalist is one that can serve as any of the major roles in a party, but not in an optimized fashion. For example, I recently found a third-party product which had a feat called Incantationist. This feat let a character cast any spell as an [url=http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm]incantation[/url], laying out a series of guidelines for converting a spell to an incantation that serve to limit the feat's versatility. For example, the casting time is ten minutes per spell level, requires one assistant per spell level, requires several successful skill checks, has gp and XP costs, requires either a spell scroll of the spell or a spellbook entry of it to work, etc. That's the sort of thing I mean in regards to having the ability to serve in a party role without eclipsing a specialist character. Someone with the above feat can serve as an ad-hoc spellcaster, but nowhere near as well as an actual spellcasting class. That's generally how I thought the bard should function for most (if not all) of its abilities...it just isn't built that way in 3.X. [/QUOTE]

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