A Bard Fix [PEACH]

[Human Paragon 3]

Yes, bards are not that bad thanks to their spellcasting, but at lower levels you know they're just not that great. They're supposed to be a jack of all trades, master of none, but instead their incompetent at basically everything. Their main class feature, Bardic Music, is usable a piddling once per day at 1st level, and it doesn't get much better until about 6 when you get Suggestion and a decent number of uses per day. Fascinate is good, but, like most Bard abilities and spells, useless against a wide variety of mindless or imune opponents.

Supposedly this is fixed by their versatility, but bards fall painfully short in every party role:

Fighting: Pathetic compared to all full BAB classes as well as monk, rogue, and the full-casting cleric. The longsword proficiency they get does not come close to making up for a lack of sneak attack and poor HP. If they want to be able to cast spells, they'll have light armor or worse, too, making them useless as a front-liner. In short, they can never take the place of the party meler in the event he goes down.

Arcane Spellcasting: Pathetic compared to that of the wizard and sorcerer. A lack of abilities and shortage of feats compounds this.

Healing: You get some, but not enough to fill the priest role adaquately should your party lack one.

Skills: You get a fair smattering of them and a good amount of skill points, but the inabillity to search for traps make you a far second place to the rogue. This would be OK- the rogue is supposed to be the master of skills- except that you are also lacking a few important adventuring skills such as survival, ride, and handle animal which actually makes you third place in the skill breakdown behind Ranger, who, like the rogue, is actually useful in combat. Bardic Knowledge is rather limited in its attempt to make up for this.

Social interactions: The Bard is great here. He shines as a party face and does it better than any other class, although sorcerer, rogue, paladin and a number of other classes can do it almost as well.

The Fix:

To round out the bard a bit, I suggest the following fixes:

Skills: All skills are class skills. This makes the bard a well-rounded skill monkey, even if his total skill output is worse than the rogue.

Hit Dice: Bring it up to a d8. There's no reason he should have less HP then the more powerful cleric. If he wants to be able to fill in for a mele class, this is a must. The standard bard is by far the worst core combatant besides wizard and sorcerer, who at least have powerful offensive spells at level 1.

Class Features:
At level 1: Bonus Feat. This feat can be taken off of either the Wizard of Fighter bonus feat list. An extra feat will do a lot to round out the bard, either giving him a much-needed combat edge over the rogue or cleric, or giving him a leg up in the magic department. This also makes him more versatile and more customizable.

Swift Aid: The bard is adept at distracting enemies. Once per round, he can use the Aid Another action in combat as a swift action. This makes up for his extremely limited use of Bardic Music at low levels.

At level 2: Insightful Dodge (When wearing light armor or no armor, the bard can add his INT bonus, if any, as a dodge bonus to is AC when not flat footed or surprised). This gives him a respectable AC making him actually useful in mele. He can't fight if he's afraid of being eaten alive by even the smallest enemies. This also frees the bard up to wear low AC check penalty armor and spellcast freely.

At level 3: Another Bonus feat to further customize the bard.


Together, these class features make the bard useful at low levels before stronger magic and musics kick in. He still isn't a better fighter than the fighter, better skill monkey than the rogue, better caster than the wizard, or better woodsman than the ranger, but he is finally second place in every role like he was originally designed to be.

[Human Paragon 3]

bump for peach.

[Caracol]

I don't know, I played a bard only once, in a tournament, and obviously that was more a roleplay matter, and I didn't have the time to test his abilities relly well.
Anyway, I'll try to give useful comments to your Fix:

Skills: No. Bards are really good as skills, they leave out just the stuff intended to be for specifical classes. Leave the lockpicking to rogues, and onestly what does a Bard has to do with Survival? They are the second place for skills already, so no need to bump that.

HD: No. If you think like this, there's no reason for Rogues too, that go in melee combat even more than the Bards. The Bard and the Rogue are designed to be similar with specializations each: Rogue skillmonkey/fighting, Bard social interaction/magic. Why they should be more resistant to damage?

Bonus Feats: Seems useful, but what kind of bonus feat he would choose? If fighting, they are not needed. A Bard is NOT inteded for fighting. It doesn't go with the concept. There are a lot of class variants or PrC for bard-like characters that stress on fighting, but they have bigger restrictions, like no spellcasting or no bardic music.
If the bonus are metamagic, they are useless as well. Bard do not have enough spells or spell levels to let the metamagic feats be applied, or their spells are not intented to be used as maximazed or so.
What other feat could be used istead? The skill-boosting is the only thing that I think they would really need, if only they didn't have enough skill points anyway.

Swift action: Nice, but if you think how would appear in real life, you realize that is a bit unrealistic: a bard istantly makes up the right song to aid an ally sneaked and attacked. It takes time to come up with the right music to help your party: a swift action is too little time.

Insightful dodge: Now, this is really useful and well conveyed. It helps a Bard's low AC. But remember, a bard is not a melee fighter and this has its use only to protect yourself, not to have an advantage in melee. And I've personally saw bards in HEAVY armors, since most of the spells they have don't have a movement component, and they decided to accept the chances of failing or to avoid those spells to use a better armor.


In few words: the idea of fixing the bard is good, but that's not the way. If you want to make him better, create new bardic music effects for low levels, make Bardic Knowledge really effective and add more bardic-flavourized spells. That's what a Bard is intended to be: music and social interaction, not a wannabe-whatever other class.
When you remake a class, try to boost the existing abities before making up some other ones.

[jagadaishio]

The bard fix is a jack of all trades replacement class which you can find in the book Dungeonscape. The class is called Factotum, and it can do a little of everything fairly well, unlike the bard. You should check it out.