Editing Bard (section)

==Bards: Sex Icons?==
[[Image:Dragonlayer.jpg|140px|right|thumb|said famous image.]]It's an old meme, so you don't see it often anymore, but occasionally you may hear some iteration of "be a bard and get all the females/males/other members of your hermaphroditic race" bandied about on /tg/. If you're wondering where that came from, well, you've come to the right place.

The "Bards are the Love Machine Class" meme owes itself predominantly to 3rd edition. /tg/ has always loved its [[monstergirls]], but 3e is when Bards both became "The Face Class", with a high reliance on [[Charisma]] and proficiency in all Charisma-based skills, and gained a mandatory nonlawful alignment. Combined with how brokenly powerful diplomacy could be in 3e, and you had a character class type where not only was "I try to seduce the [[monster]]!" one of the ''less'' annoying character schemes you might hear, it actually had a pretty good chance of ''working''! However, a lot of this could be said of any charisma-based class: Bards, Sorcerers, Wilders, Favored Souls, whatever. What really pushed Bards in particular over the edge was that Third Edition basically gave them ''mind-control powers'' (specifically Fascinate, Suggestion, and Mass Suggestion), enabling them to magically roofie NPCs. Plus, by the time 3e had rolled around, people wanted to push bards away from being perceived as twee Renaissance Faire minstrel types and instead began pushing them more as the fantasy equivalent of rockstars, so that certainly helped fuel the idea that bards get a lot of action.

The meme was really cemented in /tg/'s consciousness by the actions of an artist called Frederik Andersson. Possessing a penchant for tasteful sexuality, goodnatured humor, and interspecies erotica, he had already drawn a picture called "Dragonlayer", which depicted a smug female [[dragon]] presenting a [[Half-Dragon]] toddler to a gobsmacked [[knight]] as his king exasperatedly complained he had told him to ''slay'' the dragon. When he heard of D&D's bards, he created "The Bard's Tale", an ongoing series of pictures depicting a single-mindedly horny xenophile [[human]] [[bard]] with insanely high [[Charisma]] and his misadventures. Retconning "Dragonlayer" into being his first appearance, most of the Bard's pics revolved around him either seducing yet another beautiful non-human female or being presented with his halfbreed offspring from such a liaison.