I fell in love with bards

I made a Combat Bard who was a percussionist and used bludgeoning weapons to drop big beats while dropping big beats (ups). 

I've always loved bards, but caught enough flak/teasing for it that I started getting preemptively self-depreciating about it. (I was the one in the Argent Adept podcast who was basically like "Hey, thanks for creating a bard character I actually don't get flak for playing!")

They are the most mocked of classes. 

We should go back to the days when bards were feared because if you ticked one off they could basically create a song so scathing that even if you were a ruler everyone disowned you, or it was believed that a really well-crafted diss could even make the person ill.

I'm playing a Goliath Bard (named David) in a homebrew right now.  He carries a Gong.

Never heard bad stuff about Bards. In Everquest they were probably the most versatile of the classes and the trickiest to master, with some unique mechanics in the way their abilties worked (they used songs instead of spells, which worked differently). My dad played one and it was pretty cool - I preferred to stick with my Necro, though :).

But yeah, Bards are cool :).

I had attempted to turn this into a full on campaign where the Big Bad was a bard who stayed one town ahead of the party turning everyoe against them. 

OK. FINE. I'LL COMMENT.

I've had it pointed out to me that no matter what character I nominally create, I end up playing a bard. That Loremaster? Just a bard who doesn't sing. The diplomat? Loved to spin stories and host parties. My magic-user? Was also a chef. Even my straight fighter with low wisdom is basically a failed bard. He tells himself stories about how he's a great leader and is, like, super heroic. One of my current characters is in Runequest and is basically a lorist ... and has a high appearance and can act as the face of the party. My newest character is a monk ... who likes everyone.

So, yeah, I have almost exclusively played bards or bard-like characters. I might buy into the conception that Bards are generally weak ... at straight up fighting ... but if you play in a campaign where it's possible to get your way by getting other people to do what you want, bring along a bard.

And now, time to bore you with character stories! When it comes to roleplaying, I am a power gamer and a method actor. I love to have a character that really excels at something, being amongst the best (power gamer) and I love to lose myself in the mind of my character (method actor) and react the way that character would react. I have also lost a lot of my taste for combat in RPGs. It just takes a lot of time and, relative to character interactions or exploring the world, is overall less interesting per time spent. SO, in recent years I've focused my power gaming interests on non-combat attributes. That's led to things like my Loremaster who had such high knowledge checks in Pathfinder that he almost always knew whatever needed to be known and to my Traveller character who was so well connected, with a social score that made him a Duke, various strong networks, and an almost unheard of skill in making deals, that he could get the party into and out of most situations just by calling up his contacts and having some conversations. On top of that, because of my interest in method acting, I've realized over time that it's important for me to design personalities for my characters that help me rather than hurt me as I inhabit them. It's poisonous to design someone evil, as I'm going to be letting those thoughts sink into my psyche. So I try to create characters, however, flawed, that are striving to be good, at least, and often who have characteristics that I'd like to have in real life. Thus my monk, who likes and trusts everybody. He will certainly get burned by that, but it's going to be good for me to play it.  

I think I'm in the same place as arenson, where any character I build somehow ends up in the role of party face.

I always liked how Dragon Age (Schmagon Schmage?) handled Bards.

In Orlais, Bards are the players of The Great Game--the skulduggery, diplomacy, and betrayals that surround Orlesian station and politics.  A bard may sing or entertain, but their real purpose is to spy, to gather blackmail, to steal, and to assassinate.  That dancer?  She just seduced your personal guard and is interrogating him about your own indiscretions.  That actor?  He just slipped some Deathroot extract into that dowager's goblet.  That musician on her break?  She just bought the key to your personal vault from one of your servants...

Yeah, you don't mess with Bards in Schmagon Schmage...

I tend to always want to make skill monkey PCs who specialize in non-violent solutions, so between that and my love of music in general, bards frequently fit well into that.

Plus my RP group was people who were a combo of the Loonie and Real Roleplayer archetypes who were the few people who also actively liked bards, so they kinda showed up in general amongst our PCs. I particularly remember the guy who played a ventriloquist.

Can we get a topic split from a mod, please?  Pretty sure the Oblivaeon update month didn't have anything to do with bards. :)

Convincing someone that it's a good idea to do work for you...

How bardly...:)

My favorite of my bard's main role in the party was to convince towns and villages to let the Troll in our group come inside.  It was great fun, the Troll was a pet, comedic actor, loyal servant, whatever seemed likely to work.  It was fun coming up with new explanations.

My first ever D&D character was a human bard who was basically trying to find people/groups with really awesome stories she could shamelessly steal so she could get rich and famous performing them.

I'd say she picked the wrong group (unless you're going for getting famous performing sitcoms), but she ended up falling in love with the party's half-orc barbarian, so, some kind of useful result? (The general consensus of the group, including me, was that it was both adorable and something they didn't want to think about too closely at the same time.)

I luckily never caught flack for playing bards. Especially in the one evil D&D 3.5 campaign I played in... Which I'll share my favorite story from if anyone is interested.

For the short version, never let me play an evil bard if you don't want me to tear the DM's plans and encounters appart.

I forgot to mention that now the title of this thread reads like some really weird romance novel. Or possibly the plot of various Irish folk songs.

About time. 

I was impressed by your willpower, though... 

I love Face characters, the ones whose job it is to charm their way through any social situation. But my own social skills are so poor, I can't actually roleplay them unless mechanics are given full reign. D:

I'm finding reading all these stories quite interesting so feel free to share.

I'm not sure why I don't play more Bards, it'd be useful since I'm generally the know-it-all of the group (when playing DnD 5e which I'm immensley familiar with) but I just tend to go with something else.

Guess it might be because I try and avoid being too much of a party face. I constantly find myself jumping in and trying to move things along so I specifically avoid trying to grab the spotlight in whatever way I can.

Plus I don't get to play much, and knowing all the secrets as the DM/GM is far too much fun to stop for long.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bard?

*wanders in*

Me, too! I grew out my facial hair several years ago, and....

*Looks around*

Uh...

*Ducks*

It's OK, Trajector, RPG Argent would be the first to say you can totally be a manly bearded bard.

I now want to make a Dwarven bard who constructs a harp out of his beard...

I'll be happy to share once I have enough time to type it out.

I.E. when I'm not at work, which is when I'm usually on the forum. :P

One of the major reasons I have avoided rp heavy, mechanics light RPGs, because I don't play characters that are like me, and I hate when I have to improv a conversation with a stranger.  I don't talk to people unless I have an "in" in real life, if I could do it in a game, I'd do it in real life.  Just let me tell you what I want to convey and roll dice to see if it works.

Oh good, it's not just me. ;_; I feel better about myself, thank you, phantaskippy.

As long as you do that much, I'm totally cool with it. I've had to pry a few more sentences out of some people who thought "I persuade him" and rolling the dice were enough. That annoys me

I admit a lot of why my own group was comedic is that we frequently had the opposite happen: We'd spend a lot of time roleplaying out in detail something that should have plausibly worked... and then roll a 1 or some other failure. So then the GM has to come up with a reason it didn't work after all.

(Except for one guy who had a weird knack for always pulling out a 20 either exactly when we needed one OR when it was some really mundane thing where it'd be funny for the GM to have to describe critting it.)

Then there's the times my group would just do something plain old weird. Like along the lines of stories with bards, I once played a field secretary for an adventuring company who was mechanically a bardic sage. Unbeknowest to her (or to me, before that point...), our lady brawler had a crush on my character. So in the middle of a big fight that was going badly, the brawler decided she was going to book it while saving the thing she cared about most... by bodily picking up my character and taking her with her. My PC's reaction was basically "Hey, WTH? Put me down!" and basically arguing indignantly with her the entire time.

Then there was the time in the same campaign I had my PC make up a fake cover identity for one of the other members and just pulled a last name out of my rear end for it... only to find out I had somehow managed to accidentally come up with the same last name as who was supposed to be the Big Bad (when we as players didn't know that yet either). So I basically accidentally came up with having one of the other PCs pretend be related to the Big Bad when that was totally a really awkward spot for us.

I was like half-gripingly, "You changed that around to what I said just to make life difficult," and she was like, "No, it was seriously in my notes the whole time!" and one of the other players who was helping her GM was like "Yeah it was, I saw it," and the other player was like "Thanks a lot, Jeysie," and I was like "Oh come on, what were the odds that I would somehow guess that!"

That's amazing. :D We need to tell more gaming stories!

Most of my stories end up about terrible players or cringy moments (I can go for days), but I've got a few ridiculous and funny things.

For example, this picture in the link (I can never get these images to show up from my Google Drive) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MdM1_EUhJRDjIjwljJP80RwX5OR7LCjg

Everything from the box with the cleric to the Savage Worlds book in the back is the head of a massive Alligator that my players had to fight. The players are represented by the little colored gems. Why did I make such a massive creature? Well, techinically, I didn't. I made a massive mutant alligator for them to fight as kind of a ridiculous super hero fight (I mean, it was an equivalent to the sewers and an alligator the size of a bus, it was kind of campy), but then before the creature revealed itself they played a special card which quadrupled the size of one enemy on the board. When they played it they only knew about the robot nemesis of one of the players, and they had missed that I got to choose which creature was made multiple times larger (the card allowed them to draw more cards as compensation, and they felt good about making the robot a bigger target in the exchange.

They were worried when I grinned and said the robot didn't get any bigger.

They lost it when I revealed the Alligator a few turns later and told them that all they were seeing on the board was the things heads and a bit of it's chest because it couldn't actually get out of the lake anymore.

I laughed maniaclly, but unfortuantely it wasn't as much of a challenge as I had hoped.

This same game included them driving their captain and the chief of police (here's some advice, never actually make your players super-powered cops who have to answer to all the rules of being police officers, that didn't end well) to become alcolholics, a single card leading to multiple increasingly ridiculous romantic entanglements, and plenty of bad dice leading to things like attacking a laundromat, rebreaking your own arm, and incredibly poor disguises.

Well, if we're going to share gaming stories in general, my old RP group has a wiki with various logs and whatnot. The logs are of various stages of completeness; IIRC probably Trinsic Modern: Relief Squad, Space Quest: Exodus, Chaotic Crew, and Trinsic Past: State of the Union are the most readable out of the ones I RPed in. (Also Valiant Ventures and Finals at the Academy are technically log-complete but the campaigns themselves never were finished play-wise.)

I think the Gnome Illusionist has it beat but bards are a close second.  

Fun fact: I have played a Gnome Beguiler once. Even better, it was deliberately an overly-cheerful, optimistic, hyperenergetic inventor Gnome Beguiler because generally telling me a character idea is too stupid and/or annoying to play makes me determined to figure out how to make one work out successfully.

Also she was still arguably less weird than many of the other PCs. (Among them: A technically undead cleric of Pelor, a knight with color-changing hair, and a pixie wagon driver.)

My last pathfinder Character was Male Orc bard RockStar who wore Chain Male Bikini. That included am an open shirt, low riding tight leather pants, and the best Rocker hair. He usually cast Invisible Servant to do all the simple stuff like picking up stuff and drinking water. If fantasy ladies can wear next to nothing armor so could my rockstar.

In the end, he held the world best Rock concert the lead to a 3-day drug and fun time experiences before the group left him in that town and continued on. (They play one more session before we stopped playing the game, I miss that last day).

Bards are my favorite 5th character in a group.