24 thoughts on “What would you people like to see for Bard Week? (It starts next week)”

  1. I will definitely take a hard look at Burning Wheel elven spell songs and which ones I can port into DW.

    I am thinking about a more scholar based Bard CC as well as at Storyteller/Fatespinner.

    Any cool older bard concepts or ideas from other games you would like to see in DW?

  5. Ok here is what stumps me about the bard thing.

    There’s a bunch of goblins comin’ at ya, waving spiky clubs and rusted short swords. The Fighter unsheathes his sword. The rangers draws an arrow. The Wizard prepares some kick ass fireball spell-thing that will blast them off the face of the earth.

    And the bard? He draws his mandolin…

    I read BARD by Keith Taylor in the eighties and fell in love with the trope of Felimid Mac Fal, the lithe scoundrel who could sing a king’s court to sleep, rescue the maiden and ride off into a multi-planar sunset on the back of  a horse goddess. So I played a Basic D&D bard for a few years. In those days it was a multiclass thing, if my memory doesn’t fail me you had to start as a thief and then progress to what you really wanted to be. 

    But the question still stands: Is it even appropriate to start strumming your mandolin when you’re about to be slaughtered?

  7. Yea I know. Just playing devil’s advocate…

    The scene is Highlander (original first movie) 

    7  EXT. HILLTOP – MORNING                                            7

       The Knight, above the fog, hears the battle commence below.

       He spurs his horse and starts down into the mist.

    8  EXT. PLAIN – MORNING                                              8

       The two opposing clans are now one confused mass of tartan   and clashing swords.  The air is charged with SHOUTS of ex-  citement, agony, and the SHRILL of bag pipes.

       The fog has made each man’s battle his own, each isolated with   his opponent.

    –

    If you remember the movie – the sound of bag pipes made that scene. THAT’s my boy, the Bard!

  8. Wynand Louw Play fast and loose with your arcane art and the definition of ‘performance’. Maybe it’s dancing or weaving.

    I played a story teller last time I played the bard – all about the right words at the right time or invoking the right myth or story to inspire people to shrug off wounds or face danger. Nothing is more fun than getting in a dwarf’s face and shouting about dwarven heroes of yore and how a missing foot wouldn’t keep them down. No music was performed.

  14. It’s a Niche bard…  Let me at them ogre’s first… Either i have them dieing by laughter or they are distracted as i’m hanging over the boiling water and you can save my bacon!

  21. I would definitely like to see more variation on the ‘bard’ concept away from the 3e/4e concept of magical musician. In fact for my world I was looking at the Fantasy Craft take which removes the classic bard and instead has the Sage, who is the Spout Lore master and class dabbler. If you want to know some magic you can take the multiclass move to get it. Then there is the Courtier and the Assassin (more like secret agent) that both have roots in bardic flare. This is definitely a class though, that I think falls under me discussion of needing Kits or similar treatment to allow for different variations without having to write a whole new class for every concept. JMHO.

  23. Yeah, 4e bard was awesome.

    That said, the last bard I saw in my games was kind of cool. A bit skald, which I love, and a lot warlord. He “played” the warhorn, multiclassed in “lead the charge”, hack’n’slashed his way with duelist’s parry, and so on. My point is: I like to see more martial variations in the bard’s universe, where being a supportive jack-of-all-trades doesn’t mean “foolish and funny mandolin bard”, but something more in the line of a polymath warlord.

    also, Evil Bards. Awesome. Like what, Dark Lords leading armies of demihumans.

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