"Bardarian" Feats

[palcosmo]

Inspired by the various "Ascetic" feats from Complete Adventurer, I've come up with two Bard/Barbarian multiclass feats. Your thoughts and comments are really appreciated.
[hr]Resilient Support

Your impressive zeal for your bardic talents both lends greater confidence to your friends, and steels yourself against the attacks of your foes.

Prerequisites: Bardic Music, Damage Reduction class feature

Add half your Bard levels to your total Barbarian levels for calculating Damage Reduction; add half your Barbarian levels to your total Bard level for calculating the bonus to your Inspire Courage ability. For example, a 6th-level Barbarian/5th-level Bard has DR 1/- and adds +2 to her Inspire Courage ability.

This feat has no further effect on any other class features.

(I like the idea of this feat, but I think it's probably too powerful. Would this, in your opinion, be less broken as two separate feats?)
[hr]Lyrical Rage

You have learned how to channel your bardic talents into fighting prowess, transforming yourself into a more fearsome opponent.

Prerequisites: Bardic Music, Rage ability

When initiating a rage, you may spend daily usages of your Bardic Music so that your Barbarian Extra Hit Points are lost first, as per standard Temporary Hit Points (like those gained from the Vampiric Touch spell). For every Bardic Music sacrificed, the Barbarian gains 4 Temporary Hit Points. These Temporary Hit Points are deducted from your pool of Barbarian Extra Hit Points, and, as such, your Temporary Hit Points cannot exceed the total of your Extra Hit Points.

For example, a 7th-level Bard/6th-level Barbarian enters a rage. She would usually gain 26 Extra Hit Points, but she sacrifices 6 of her Bardic Music uses. She therefore has 24 Temporary Hit Points, and 2 Extra Hit Points. (She could not sacrifice all of her 7 Bardic Music uses, as 28 Temporary Hit Points would exceed her standard 26 Extra Hit Points.) For the remainder of her rage, she has a "buffer" of 24 Hit Points that are lost before she herself is truly damaged.

Both Extra and Temporary Hit Points are lost at the end of your rage.

(Yikes, does that all make sense? I hope so... Is this too powerful? Or just too awkward?)

[Muffin_Man]

They are ok, but the only problem is that they don't make sense in the "role-play" point of view.

[Manave_E_Sulanul]

I think they are great feats and make perfect sense in a roleplaying point of view. Something like a death chant you scream as you rush into battle against your deadly foes.

[Jestir256]

There's an historical precedent for your Bardarian; one of my friends turned it into a prestiege class. It's called the Skald. I guess Skalds were a kind of warsinger; they could memorize hours of epic poetry (Beowulf is one such epic). If a player ever does it in one of my campaigns and starts memorizing epics, he will get boku bonus XP and his party will get SERIOUS bardic music effects.

Resilient support is exactly the kind of thing this PresClas is set up to do. The Skald might actually have been a little overpowered, but I'm a 3.0 player; I'll do anything to get a Bard in my campaign. They're probably the most fun and least useful class.

[iKitten]

Personally, if you want to play a Skald type character, you're best off simply multiclassing between bard and barbarian. You don't need some prestige class to make you overly specialized at something you do pretty damn well on your own.

The feats are unappealing, overpowered, and unnecessary in my opinion.

[Annon]

I think that the first should probably have a feat prerequisite as well. Maybe drop the DR 1/- and add a couple prerequisites rage feats form Complete Warrior instead.

The PrC idea is a good one as well.

Savage Bard is also a good idea to look at, as well as the bard/barbarian PrC from CWar. Just start with them and modify.

[Sacrath]

I have to agree with iKitten, the bard/barbarian combo works just fine, there is no need for these feats.

[Mephistopheles]

You should also add some barbarian feat to the prerequisites for your first feat, since there are other classes that can get damage reduction that don't have rage.

And they seem quite fine to me, not really overpowered and fun to use if you want a skald-type character.

Though one thing I want to point out, the ascetic _____ and divine ______ feats are also because normally you can't multiclass with paladin or monk

[HempRope]

At the very least, I think you need to split your first feat into two. One for the bonus to damage reduction, and the other for the bonus to Bardic music.

However, I would beware of high-level Bards who decide to pick up a Barb level to get DR. It wouldn't be horribly useful, but be wary anyways.

[Everyman]

I agree with Hemp...you probably need to split the first feat into TWO feats (which would even out power levels and make it much easier on the brain to comprehend). In fact, it may not be totally necessary to have the DR part.

There is a Bardic Feat in CA that gives a creature DR with Bardic music use, so perhaps what should really be done with the first feat is explain why barbarian levels help with music. Here's my idea:

Furious Song [Bardic Feat]
Prerequisites: Bardic Music, Rage class feature
Your experiences with both song and rage have instilled your works with greater emotion than normal.
Benefit: You may add half your Barbarian classes to your bard level for the purposes of determing the progression of your music. This does not grant new musical abilties, but does stack to determine level-dependant effects of your bardic music. For example, a 6th level Barbarian/6th level Bard's Inspire Courage song would grant a +2 morale bonus, and he have all songs listed up to Suggestion.

How's that?