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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brudewollen" data-source="post: 4189192" data-attributes="member: 2274">I'm playing a 3.5 Bard in a game right now and it's a bit annoying at times, to be honest. Fortunately we are doing mostly urban stuff now, so I get to use a lot of my persuasion and charming talents which has gotten us out of a lot of jams.I think if their powers were more specifically about this than a mix of this and buffing then they'd make sense.  Controlling foes through music and such is very useful and I've so far  been focusing on this in my spell selection.  Morale bonuses and such are also useful as secondary ability, but I think they are boring for the player - everyone else is getting to do stuff but usually the Bard has to hang back and when it's his turn all you get to do is say, "I keep playing that song and move here so I don't get hit."  Lame character design.  My DM has said that I can maintain a bard song and use ranged weapons if I want, just so I have more options, but I can't do melee or cast spells.  I think that's fair and not overpowered.Lore, logically, makes sense as an ability but it's a weird thing to use in-game and I've never liked it, neither as a DM nor as a player.  It just feels like a crutch sometimes to finding things out rather than doing other things to find clues and such.  It works better in my experience when a good DM uses the fact that you have a Bard in the party to impart back story or lore knowledge that he simply wants to get out there.  He can write up a story, song, verse, etc. and give it to the player to read (sing?) in game, rather than having some guy come up to you and tell you stuff or whatever.  But that's a story-telling thing, not a rules or powers thing.I've been acting fairly rogue-like with my Bard.  He lies CONSTANTLY to get us out of jams (sort of have the "Lies of Locke Lamora" in mind as a character template for him) and I wouldn't mind it if those abilities were expanded and strengthened even further.Another way to maybe do Bards is to have different music or entertainment types be used for different kinds of powers.  A bard can specialize in 1 type of entertainment for a certain type of power at 1st level and maybe every 5 levels can add another type.  So, singing is used for controlling and commanding, percussion instruments are use for boosting courage, stats, etc., acting helps with lying, bluffing or other kinds of deception powers, woodwind for charm effects...just some thoughts off the top of my head.  It might make them more limited in scope in some ways, but if you really boost what they can do with each power-set they might be more useful as to what the player wants to do with their Bard.</blockquote>

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