Would the bard have been better off as a non spontaneous caster?

[Aus_Snow]

The only class I've seen with a happy compromise is the Spirit Shaman: spontaneous caster, has potential access to a list of spells, but can only know a certain subset at a given time.

I would've much rather seen a bard built on that model. Not full spontaneous, not full prepared - somewhere in between.

Yeah, that could work too.

I might have to see where that takes me while I'd otherwise be experiencing a dull moment at work. Hopefully I can come up with something that looks good and works.

 

[Imp]

Conceptually I side with those who think of bards as loremasters – so, no spontaneous casting.

One concept I've thought about for a while, to try to get some control over ever-expanding spell lists, is giving spells skill requirements. For many spells this wouldn't be very onerous – +4 in knowledge (arcana) for a 1st-level spell, say – but some could require more esoteric skills. Where I'm going with this is, you can combine the bard and wizard spell lists this way. Just make the "bard-only" spells require a lot of points in perform.

A bard, having a bunch of skill points to throw around, would have some advantages in this setup.

 

[Slife]

Yeah, that could work too.

I might have to see where that takes me while I'd otherwise be experiencing a dull moment at work. Hopefully I can come up with something that looks good and works.

The blue mage homebrew class (not mine), has a similar approach to spells known. You'd have to change the spell learning mechanism, obviously

 

[Technik4]

I think they just need to improve his number of known spells.

I remember when 3e came out they touted the difference between the bard and sorcerer as the bard knowing many spells, but only casting a few each day, while the sorcerer would know few spells but be able to cast them many times. Sadly, this is not actually the case. And I don't think giving them Magic Missile would overpower them (didnt they have it at some point? 2e? 1e?).

 

[boolean]

Or the cleric, who already does?

The cleric only knows all the spells on the cleric list, and perhaps a few extra from domains.

The archivist can potentially learn every cleric spell, every druid spell, every paladin spell, every ranger spell, and every spell from another source that appears on any domain list. And that's just core.

It's unlikely that an archivist would actually learn all these spells (cost, access), but an archivist is capable of learning many spells that a cleric cannot.

 

[Nyaricus]

The cleric only knows all the spells on the cleric list, and perhaps a few extra from domains.

The archivist can potentially learn every cleric spell, every druid spell, every paladin spell, every ranger spell, and every spell from another source that appears on any domain list. And that's just core.

It's unlikely that an archivist would actually learn all these spells (cost, access), but an archivist is capable of learning many spells that a cleric cannot.

Yeah, what he said. And, to clarify, clerics only know the stuff from Core, not SC, et al.

cheers,
--N