Where's the Bard?

[Klaus]

Good riddance, I say.

Bard: "I play my instrument!"
Rest: "Whatever..."

If that is all a bard is to you, then yeah, they're pretty lame.

Perform (oratory) to give speeches like Aragorn's at the Black Gate or Henry V's on St. Crispin's Day is a perfectly valid interpretation of the Bard.

 

[Khaalis]

This is something I'm wondering too. I know the Bard won't make the initial cut, but hopefully it is not too long of a wait. I mostly DM, but when I play I love playing Bards.

Out of curiosity, and this is meant with no maliciousness, but what is it about the bard you so enjoy? Personally its always been a class I never really understood since its 2E incarnation. The 1E version made a little sense being basically the first real prestige class based on druid (though all the other additions didn't make a lot of sense). In 3E the class is simply, IMHO, one of the weakest and least useful classes for adventuring.

I'm just honestly curious what people enjoy about the class.

 

[FourthBear]

Perform (oratory) to give speeches like Aragorn's at the Black Gate or Henry V's on St. Crispin's Day is a perfectly valid interpretation of the Bard.

Very true, but I will note that in this the Warlord and the Bard may be stepping on each others' toes. The primary difference in what most of the bard conceptions to date from the Warlord are indeed 1) musical performance and 2) magical influence. So the bard as an arcane leader may be stressing the use of enchantment magic rather than inspiring speeches (which appear to be more strongly under the purview of the more narrowly defined Warlord class).

 

[Cadfan]

I believe there was leaked information to the effect that bards may have "planar patrons." I'm hoping that means something like an actual muse as a source of power.

 

[Khaalis]

Perform (oratory) to give speeches like Aragorn's at the Black Gate or Henry V's on St. Crispin's Day is a perfectly valid interpretation of the Bard.

Very true. However, I just don't personally think the mechanics match up with what the class was intended to be. I also never saw where the weak dabbling in divine and arcane magics came from in the theme or the dabbling in thievery.

The bard (assuming you want anything close to a historic or even cinematic bard) needs a lot of work. I just never understood the attraction to the 3E bard. I have been DMing since AD&D and I can count the number of bards I've seen played on one hand.

From what we have heard so far of the other Leader role classes, I would actually love to see the bard cast in the leader role with much more cinematic and thematically relevant abilities. JMHO. I'm seriously not trolling, I'm just curious of other's opinions on the class.

 

[Khaalis]

I believe there was leaked information to the effect that bards may have "planar patrons." I'm hoping that means something like an actual muse as a source of power.

From the 4E info page...

Bard - From Wizards Presents: Races & Classes: Gets power from otherwordly patrons (?). Its powers focuses on illusions and confusions, so that enemies hinder themselves. They can also inspire their allies.

* Drawing their powers from “otherworldly patrons,” Bards will possess many abilities related to illusion and mental trickery. They will retain their inspirational and lore knowledge abilities.

 

[Peter LaCara]

If that is all a bard is to you, then yeah, they're pretty lame.

Perform (oratory) to give speeches like Aragorn's at the Black Gate or Henry V's on St. Crispin's Day is a perfectly valid interpretation of the Bard.

I don't know how you could interpret these guys as anything other than Warlords. The only reason we used Bards for them before was because we didn't have Warlords yet, so we had to shoehorn in any inspirational speaker type with the magical singing guy.

 

[FourthBear]

I'm just honestly curious what people enjoy about the class.

I've seen bards in 2e and 3e several times. Each time they were actually pretty fun in play, but not due to their class abilities, but rather to the role-playing issues around a light-hearted, dramatic, performing character. In all of the cases I've seen, the bard was not contributing in many of the classic D&D challenges to the same extent as the other players (combat, traps, environmental hazards and the like). Of course, in social situations they often dominated.

Could a player have used one of the other classes and simply roleplayed them in a similar way and gotten as much fun out of it? I think so. I assume that bard choice was based on abilities that tended to reinforce a performance based character (even if in some sense they may not have been ideal) and the stereotypes of the other classes didn't inspire the player.

 

[zen_hydra]

If that is all a bard is to you, then yeah, they're pretty lame.

Perform (oratory) to give speeches like Aragorn's at the Black Gate or Henry V's on St. Crispin's Day is a perfectly valid interpretation of the Bard.

Those examples seem much closer thematically to the Warlord class (IMO).

 

[Khaalis]

Thanks FourthBear. In my personal experience I found that most players who wanted to play that kind of bard "archetype" primarily chose a rogue and played them as they would have a bard. The second most common class substitute I've seen is druid. Most of the people I've gamed with over the years see the bard as a Celtic tradition and tend to see the druid as an extension of that Cletic flavor. So they basically just played a druid with the personality and penchant for performance that a bard archetype has.

Most players said that this was so they could role play as they wanted to but still offer something of substance on the actual "adventure" parts of the game since they found that they didn't enjoy being the 5th wheel when the game left a primarily role-play mode and went into encounter mode.