Is it impossible to seperate bards from music based magic? How

>>52543379
Like most classes, the bard is drawn from a variety of stories, mythologies, and the like. The travelling charlatan who gets by with their wits, primarily.

And sure, you could tweak the bard and have it fill the same basic role. The music aspect is most closely tied to the bard as a support class. You can imagine that if you just stripped it, you'd end up with a class mostly about magical deception/trickery with a bit of swashbuckling. Either bolster those aspects, or add in a new gimmick to make up for losing Bardic Performance. You still have a dashing and clever adventurer with a variety of tricks up their sleeve.

>>52543447

They still overlap some (or a great deal) with other archeytpes. Both the Bard and the Rogue could be investigators for instance, the Bard and the fighter could be swashbuckling swordsmen and duelist, they could also be spellcasting mystics.

This is not a problem unique to bard so much as subclasses of the big three archetypes were shoehorned into being their own thing.

>>52543379
Bard tells stories, stories are often songs because it makes them more memorable and attaches visceral feelings to them, hero is inspired by the bard and goes off to fight the big bads with either a better understanding of history, and therefore a higher proclivity towards doing things right instead of wrong, or gains a figurehead/scenario to emulate.

Music appears more "magical" than storytelling because instead of using mundane language it uses a more ethereal language.

>>52543379
>mind control bards aren't a thing
Controlling media means controlling the minds of those who consume it. It's interesting to see that the potential evil side of bards (outside of generic tricky misleading rogueishness) has not been explored.

>>52543572
Or because music relies on mathematics and is a more universal language than any verbal language, which are fairly arbitrary.

Universality tends to point to magic. Wizards know universal truths about the world and exploit them, sorcerers innately can exploit truths of the world without knowing them.

>>52543379
It's mostly from The Book of Three Dragons. Best bard ever.

https://www.amazon.ca/Book-Three-Dragons-Kenneth-Morris/dp/1593600275

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>>52545861

I'm going to have to disagree with you.

>>52546247
Heh, yeah, he was pretty good too, but second fiddle and such a minor role.

Figures like Orpheus and Taliesin provide a mythological basis for the magical power of music and poetry. Historical bardic traditions also gave their adherents important roles as fonts of information because of the way verse structure and musical accompaniment provide natural mnemonic tools for remembering a vast quantity of history and folklore that normal people wouldn't have access to. Actual ''magical'' musicians from tales and the seemingly magical nature of the perfectly normal bardic role in superstitious society conspire to create the cultural backdrop that informs game design decisions, which then become self-reinforcing.

It would certainly be possible to design non-magical bardic musicians for a game, but doing so isn't really going back to any kind of original state because the magical bard isn't an artificial construction-- they've always been quasi-mystical in one way or another. The dnd version is certainly not the only way to interpret that, but it's not fundamentaly wrong in any way either.

>>52543823
I once had my BBEG be a bard, evil to the core, using his music to persuade people into believing the heroes are the reasons for the misfortunes of the country. All of his stories told the exact thing that happened, but twisted to blame us for it happening in the first place or something along those lines.

Party never actually got to fight him, as he would always run away, so instead they dropped a castle on his ass. They planned that kill for weeks.

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Friends at the Table Podcast has a spin on bards that doesn't require them to be musicians.

Basically there exists a kind of magic called Pattern Magic, where if you follow certain insane rules you can create an effect (ex. if you arrange three antique bookcases in a triangle, and place a series of river-washed stones around the edge while humming a tune from your childhood, you can create a teleportation circle).

The orcs run the New Archive, where they try and collect everything (this being a post-post-apocalypse fantasy world) and every scrap of knowledge they can, and use it to discover the Pattern in the hopes of fixing the world. The PC bard does use a violin for his Pattern Magic, but mostly because that's easy to carry, and he can only do a fraction of the stuff we've seen really talented Pattern Magicians with access to all the stuff of the Archive achieve.

>>52543379
>reflavour your abilities to be based on something else
>???
>profit

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>>52543379
The Bard and Wizard share many things in common:

Both memorise a range of complex written creations that effect the world around them in complex and indirect ways.
Both will use various complex physical devices while also performing verbally in the use of their powers.
Both will often have a book of some kind, vital to their profession - whether a spellbook, a storybook or a songbook - from which they prepare their upcoming workings.

Music and bardic talespinning are basically a more primitive form of vancian spellcasting.

>>52543379
A bard could be anything + musician/storyteller. Fighter bards, mage bards, rogue bards etc. Depends on which direction you wanna take it

>>52543379
Make non-magical inspiration and morale buffs relevant.
Make social interactions relevant.
Allow bards to take special social-related abilities that, while not magical in nature, are beyond the ability of just any other class with enough points in the right skills. (For example, in a game I'm writing the 'bard-like' characters may take a feat that allows them to attempt persuasion rolls even when telling absurdly unbelievable lies, like 'It wasn't me, it was a dragon that shapeshifted into me!', with a penalty, instead of auto-failing them).

Done, I guess.

>>52543823
>It's interesting to see that the potential evil side of bards (outside of generic tricky misleading rogueishness) has not been explored.
One of my favorite books by Charles de Lint is "Wolf Moon", where a Bard (who is also part hunter and summoner) is chasing a werewolf but it's revealed pretty early on that the werewolf is the "good guy" and the Bard often uses his magical songs to hypnotize or otherwise influence his listeners, usually just to get free food and sex but also to turn the few friends the werewolf makes against him.

De Lint has written a few stories about bards, but Wolf Moon is definitely a notable one where the bard is actually the villain.