I have to say that I really liked (and was excited to read about) the four re-done classes, but was a bit disappointed to not see the Ranger, Paladin, Druid, Sorcerer, and especially, the Bard - by far my favority class to play from a storytelling aspect, though I've always felt that they suffer from a distinct lack of true survivability when it comes to "agressive negotiations". You know, the killing things and taking their stuff part of D&D that is both mindless and theraputic after a hectic work week...
I've done some noodling and would like to see something done to the spells that Bards can know. If they are the masters of music that they were imagined to be in earlier editions, then why don't they have more sonic based attack spells? And it always bothered me that they could pick up skills and songs here and there, but not spells, even though the spells on their list were drawn from other class lists... For instance, would it completely break the game if they picked up the spell entangle? Or fly? Or Sonic snap?
I guess I'm just interested in what the Bard will look like in this incarnation - or re-imagining if you prefer that phrase.
I have house-ruled that the bard can learn spells from any list, but bar any base damage spell not sonic-based (so no getting around it with energy substitution). They can also pick up spells through their travels, but are limited to their Intellegence modifier + Class level of these extra spells. They don't start with these extra spells, so a level 1 bard only knows 4 zero level spells, but a level 2 bard with a 14 INT could know 5 zero level and up to 6 1st level spells. Since the spells per day remains the same, it just made them more versitile. I found that knowing 6 1st level spells (at 2nd level) but only being able to cast 1 of them each day wasn't terribly game-breaking. Swapping spells became a non-issue because even at high levels, they could still learn a few extra spells (they only go to 6th level anyways).
Maybe you'll incorporate some of these suggestions, and maybe not, but there they are. I hope to see the "new" bard soon...
From the tail end of the current release Barbarian, Druid, Paladin, and Sorcerer will be in the Alpha 2 book. Bard, Monk, and Ranger will be in Alpha booklet 3. Don't get me wrong I'm a big Bard and Ranger fan but this is actual very darn close to how I was conducting my own personal rewrites before Paizo made it's announcement, only the Monk was in group 2 and the Paladin in group 3.
Main four first, then an alternates party (the reason I bumped monk up to the second group as a scout-type), then a miscellaneous 3rd party (for which I was contemplating a new 12th base class).
As this is the only bard thread so far:
Bardic Music
Instead of having fixed effects for bardic music that the bard unlocks with new levels, make players chose which effects they take.
I developed a fairly simple system to archive this effect:
- The bard chosses 3 bardic music effects at 1st level.
- For every 3 levels, the bard gains one additional bardic music effect.
- Every bardic music effect has a minimum level to learn, 1st, 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th, and so on.
The number of known effects and the rate of learning new effects is completely the same. All you would have to do is create 3 new effects for 1st level and one new effect each for 3rd, 6th, 9th, and so on, so the player has actually a collection to chose from. ^^
If he wants, he can chose exactly the same effects as the PHB bard. He can also chose to learn effects with a minimum level lower than his current level. So instead of one 3rd level, one 6th level, and one 9th level effect, he can also chose one of 3rd level and two of 6th level. As the effects become stronger with each level, this might even be a good choice.
It allows much more of customization, much like the monk does. And the best thing is, you have 100% compatibility. You can either asign an effect collection or simply take the sample selection of the PHB.