The Bard Debate: clues & limelight

[subplotkudzu]

I've just finished reading all of the Order of the Stick archives (insomnia, your friend and mine) and found them rife with the 'Bards are Useless' meme. This ended up kicking another couple thoughts into my head.


The primary one is that one of the Bard's big abilities - bardic lore - can be easily overlooked. If the GM needs you to make a Bardic Lore roll to find the dungeon for this week, you will. If he needs you to make it to be able to figure out the big puzzle on level 4 to get further, you will. Plus, the time honored dictate to GMs that you don't leave any critical clue or plot point accessible via a single die roll (or a single PC) means that there will almost always be another way to access the information from Bardic Lore. The Bard's special ability is the power to act as the GM mouthpiece for information that would otherwise come some other way, because if it doesn't turn up, there's no game. And no player respects that, because even if their players should be impressed, the player knows the Bard PC is just a walking clue dispenser.

The secondary one is that the bardic ability to give other people a +2 on skill rolls is on a certain level stealing the limelight: any player who needs to take 20 and get the +2 bard kicker on a task will suspect that the GM boosted the difficulty just to give the bard something to do. Rather than being an aid, the Bard is either a tool ("Hey, bard-boy, come make me Masterwork!") or someone horning into his scene.

Just some thoughts, but I suspect these, plus the lack of ability to swing around a big pe... sword has something to do with the class being reviled.

Comments

Re: Convincing Corylus

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I still don't see the bard doing anything that any of the rest of the PCs couldn't ultimately do.

That's not a great metric, however, since the bard does them better. For example, why play a Cleric?

Their weapon choices are limited to Simple Weapons, meaning that they're as poor as Sorcerers and only better than Wizards.

Heavy Armor? Oh, yeah, the clanking mess is great to have around - and Fighters and Paladins get Heavy armor as well. Bad weapons and awkward armor? Joy.

High HP? Their HD are lower than a good third of the classes - better to have a Paladin or Fighter in the party.

Attacks: No better than a Bard, but with only Simple weapons.

Turn undead? We've run into those, what, once in the whole campaign. Besides, Paladins get it too, and they have more uses per day with their higher Cha scores.

Healing? Sure clerics, along with bards, rangers, paladins and druids. Is there anyone who *can't* cast cure wounds?

Combat spells? Right, like a wizard or sorcerer can't do a tone more damage, and their Prayer et all spells are no more effective than a Bard's singing. Any terrain altering spells or 'save or be hoseed' spells are mimicked by Bards or arcane spellsasters.

Skill Points? Suck. Skill choices are pretty damn bad as well.

Within this group, we have a ranger and a druid, so there are our healing points - and if we acknowledged cleric sucked Emmett would have leveled into Paladin - easier since bec doesn't like Alignment restrictions. We have several fighters who can fight better than any Cleric. Cleric looks good magically, but that's just because we don't have any arcane spellcasters for a while. We now have a sorcerer and a bard as PCs and a Bard NPC. We can, I suppose keep our cleric NPC, and he'll stay on the ship and heal us when a fight's over - that's all they're good for.

Now, you and I both know that the class is far from useless, but they are a mix of combat and spellcasting which means that any 2 other PCs will have better skills in those areas. The Cleric is better at Healing than anyone, but so many other people can heal that it isn't really important until high levels. The Bard likewise is a mix of things - fighting, magic and sneakiness, and like Clerics they are hands down best at on thing - they are social animals. A Bard would have a mix of skills that no one else does (a rouge could take them, but they're expected to take some of their class specific skills like open locks - which Val has points sunk into and he never gets to use, and iH has as well), would free up Lynden from having to memorize bless/prayer (or not, because the two classes combat modifying effects stack!), would have a broader array of spells than our Rogue 5/Sorcerer 2 and would fight as well if not better than a similar rogue.