by Karen Hertzberg on Jun 13, 2006
The Adaptable Bard
By Merriandra Eldaronde
It’s true: by literary definition, a bard is a poet or playwright, a tradition passed down from the druidic bards who served to chronicle, first in song, and then in written word, the rise and fall of kings. Taliesin and Aneurin chronicled the raw nature of man at word. Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, chronicled the ridiculous, the sublime, the outrageous, and the comical.
The bard of the gaming world, it seems, has more in common with the troubadour and the vagabond, the itinerant musician who drifted from town to town, plying his skill with stories and the harp, and maybe other trades as well in order to earn a warm bed, a warm meal, and a warm welcome.
Why did I choose to play a bard? At first, the answer is simple: I had fallen in love with the romantic ideal of the bard as poet, as lyricist to world-changing events. I was a newcomer to the online gaming realm, and the long-ago world of pen-and-paper RPGs had come before my love affair with the Celtic culture and the iconic bard.
Thistle for a Shield
The harper goes:
Armed only with a song.
Through warring countries,
Among the guards of kings.
He walks a path
Between life and death.
The friends who walk with him
When danger nears
Are few,
And the road
Winds far into the night.
The harper knows not,
Cares not.
He only leaves a whisper on the wind.
© 1985 meri pickering (a.k.a. Merriandra Eldaronde)
Becoming a bard was nothing like the warrior-poet of the verse I composed. My first few days online proved painful to my pride and a shock to my system, as I plummeted to the grassy ground beneath Kelethin one too many times. Why, then, did I continue to play the bard, once I learned that most of my gaming experience would involve intricacies beyond a few rhymes or a handful of free verse?
This, I suspect, is the answer that everyone has been waiting to hear, the words that have kept you reading through my metaphor-strewn paragraphs. I suspect you’ll be vaguely disappointed with my next response, however: I was stubborn. There weren’t many rewards in my early days of being a bard. I didn’t travel fast, and when I lost my corpse, I hadn’t yet gained the requisite level to use my song as a means of finding my poor, broken body. Once I did earn that song, it got me into almost as much trouble as my area-effect damage tune…
I never did admit that I had chosen the wrong class to play, because, in the end, I loved my bard, warts and all. Most of the “warts” that I might attribute to Lyralyrana really belonged to the game as a whole, including the ability to “fly” into a zone and fall for fatal damage as travel song dropped on the other side. Lag was my fiercest enemy, causing me to, literally, drop my friends, or to pull a patrolling dragoon when my “lag ghost” ran out into the middle of the Overthere. I could generate lag by adeptly mixing my songs, creating three separate, sparkling rings around each member of my party.
No, the warts that really did belong to Lyralyrana were mostly the real world traits of the women who had created the avatar. I get bored quickly: with Lyra, this meant seeking out new hunting grounds frequently. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also tend to get fixated on the impossible. “You can’t do X!” exclaims The Paladin. Soon after, you would see Lyralyrana What-Do-You-Mean-I-Can’t-Do-That Istarae trying to do X. And then trying again. And again. Someone once told me that I couldn’t make it inside Mistmoore Castle with my invis. Well, I certainly left a trail of corpses in my wake: my own, of course.
When looking back over all my years of gaming, do I have any regrets that I chose the bard in EverQuest, and then later, in Dark Age of Camelot? None. The bard class allowed me to be the vagabond and the poet. As a Guide, my bard became a dark elf whose heart was eventually freed to return to its true form by the tear of a dragon. What’s more, I was allowed to assume many different roles without having to level more than one character, depending on my party, whether I was raiding or trying to gain experience, and what was going on around me in real life.
In EverQuest, my bard was a true hybrid: a little bit enchanter, a little bit shaman, a little bit paladin. In DAoC, my bard was less hybrid, more healer and magic user than fighter. When it came time to choose a class in EverQuest 2, I was swayed to play a templar, having seen the necessity of a good healer in every party. I won’t choose that path again. My templar is dour and I cannot make her steps light: after all, she carries a great responsibility. My bard is manic, half whirlwind, half scholar.
A lion of lines, confused, breaking free:
A million swift thoughts in a turbulent sea.
Reach out, grab one before they are gone!
This is the poet who preys on the dawn!
© 1986 meri pickering
By literary definition, a bard is a poet. In the virtual world, a bard is poetry, always in motion.