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D&D Bard 5e – Best Race in 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

Today’s video and transcription continues our best Race to play a character class series in 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. This time we are looking at the bard.

D&D Bard 5e – Best Race in 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Video

D&D Bard 5e – Best Race in 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Video Transcription

Finally going to be finishing up our best race to play this character class, in this case the bard. So I guess let’s dive into it. Looking at it, we’ve got 29 races that have a bonus to charisma from all the books.

Cause obviously if we’re playing a bard, charisma is going to be our prime stat and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have to look at.

Yeah, I mean there’s a couple of things. One your bard is heavily invested in the social pillar of D&D which is based off of charisma.Then they are also a charisma spellcaster.

So yeah, charisma is going to be our prime stat. We can possibly have to worry about other states depending on what kind of Bard we are going to play. Like maybe strength, maybe dexterity. Constitution is good for everybody.

Are you playing it more, you know smarty pants, intellectual type bard, that intelligence but primarily no matter what kind of bard you play you’re going to be worried about charisma.

So I mean Bard is one of those, I mean especially in an earlier additions they required more stats and as you said, depending upon how you’re trying to play your bard is going to be where you place those on a stats are all gonna depend upon the priority of how you want to play that bard. All very true. I guess before we jump into it, as always there is the disclaimer because certain races just are good at playing pretty much any class.

Although I will say some of them are on our any class lists are actually really good bards. Anyway, that’s true, but one of those disclaimers, we’ve got those races that have those floating plus ones that can go to any stat, so we’ve got human, we’ve got half elf, we’ve got the simic hybrid and we’ve got the warforged envoy right, so they’re all great for playing anything.

Some of them are actually really good at bards anyway, but we’re going to get into that. All right, so we’ve been breaking these down a little bit differently. And so we’re going to start with by the books and the first book we’re going to start with as the first one that came out, the player’s handbook.

Player’s handbook is going to give us six options. We’ve got your dragonborn, we’ve got your human, we’ve got your drow , we’ve got your half elf, we got the lightfoot halfling, and of course you know the Ye olde tiefling.

So there’s plenty of choices. All of them are great depending on what kind of bard you want to go with. So with that we’ll move right to the next book. That’s going to be Volos Guide to Monsters. What do we have over there in Volo’s Guide to Monsters? We have Assimar, we have Triton, we have the tabaxi all good choices, but let us not forget the yuan-ti pureblood. I mean that’s one of those that dances on the scale.

Lets jump into Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes where we actually have two race choices, but we’ve got a bunch of sub-race choices. We have elf and we have tiefling. The Elf is going to be the eladrin and totally makes sense. But then we have seven options under tiefling.

So for different sub-races, yeah you can definitely make the kind of bard you want. Let’s head over to Eberron with Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron.  Here we have another staggering seven options for race that can have bonuses to charisma. Yeah, you’re going to get the changeling, you’re going to get a bunch of elves.

A lot of the Elf sub-races tend to be dragon marks. So sorta sub-races.I mean those things are all interesting features are unique to Eberron. So you can’t not talk about it. I mean the gnome is the same way with House Sivis.

You also have the kalashtar over there, the swift stride shifter, and of course we have the warforged envoy. The next thing we’re going to get into that’s our last book, and that’s going to be Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica.

We get a whopping one choice there and it happens to fall into our disclaimer and that’s the simic hybrid. Yeah, you get the floating plus so they can make a great bard or anything else for that matter. All right.

So I guess the next section that we get into now that we’ve looked at mechanically, statistic wise, I guess we can go into the other side of the mechanics and look at the features.

Okay. What other race features would make them a better bard.

So for this, we kind of had to look at is it going to make them a better entertainer or is it going to make them better at the social pillar of Dungeons and Dragons.

And that seems to be the two mainstays of what bards do. So totally makes sense for us to break it down that way.

We’ve kind of like have subsections is here. And the first one is we kind of went with animal performers. All right, so you’ve got your forest gnome they’ve got the ability to speak with animals of certain types. They’ve got animal companions, they can have, you’ve got your firbolg which kind of falls into the exact same makeup and then you’ve got yaun-ti who can wind up being snake charmers because they can talk to snakes.

Well they don’ttalk to snakes they have animal friendship towards snakes. They can cast it on snakes only.  And not only that, they also all have other magic as well that they could incorporate into their performances.

And then I imagine if they have the ability to communicate with different animals, it would be much easier for them to incorporate those animals into their performances.

Since you’re talking to them you could literally train them and have them work in your act. Why pull the rabbit out of your hat when you can just tell it to come on out. Very true. So I guess the next we’re going to look at our social pillar and races that are going to get things to make them better there.

Yeah. I feel like your certain races just to have a certain degree of mastery when it comes to social skills. In this case we have the half elf, we have the changeling, we also have the kalashtar, and warforged envoy. So the warforged envoys seems to be built for going and talking to different,different races.

I mean, come on, envoy is in the name and isn’t that kind of what that means? I believe so. Not only that for all of these particular choices, I also look at it as bards is a your natural diplomats and they can fill the role of ambassadors. They could fill a lot of other roles too. So I feel like all these races are going to lend heavily to that kind of aspect. I couldn’t agree more.

So the next we’re actually going to jump back into performing, but as opposed to with animals. Now we’re going to talk about magical performers all of our animal performers could have really fit into this category as well.

But we decided to give them their own just because that had that little extra oomph. But here you know you’re going to have tiefling , you’re going to have the drow as well as the eladrin for elves.

We’re going to have tritons, we’re going to also have the gith. Come on, how are gith magically performing? Well you know I didn’t see them at first, but like they do get things like major hand and detect thoughts.

So they do get different abilities, jump for the githyanki. So they definitely have different abilities that they can magically infused their performances with. Or if you’re going with the logic of bards also would make great diplomats and ambassadors.

I feel like someone had could like read people’s minds and stuff. Especially if they can figure out how to do it on the sly is going to get a little extra mileage out of that, that Gig as well. All right, so your, your githzeria are could kind of be there to stage performers that could kind of give some false divinations because they’re reading your minds.

You could totally go John Edwards with it and he’s like, I’m sensing someone has lost someone in this audience. You’re githyanki could totally be your physical performers.

And then also we just had like a blanket entertainment, the section as well. And in there we have the kenku, as well as humans. Because variant human can just pick whatever feat you need. Kenku with their voice mimicry I think they would make like great standup comedians or ventriloquists maybe. Somebody mocks you, you’d literally can just mock them right back in their own voice.

How great would that be Yeah. There’s a lot of choices here that you can kind of like enhance your performance with a bard depending on what your race choose to go with. We’ve looked at all of the mechanical options, that are out there with the features with stat bonuses. Now we’re actually going to break down the theme of what the bard is and what races truly speak to that just on their culture, their upbringing, that kind of stuff.

We’ve got five that we went with on this one and with that humans, because they can pretty much do anything, half elves because they’re already socially oriented, changelings because well changlings, tabaxi as well as the warforged envoy.

So to kind of like delve into these a little bit. Warforged literally designed and built for a specific purpose. So I feel like they can be built for being the bard, right, for being someone who’s going to infiltrate and get into places or be ambassadors and diplomats. Humans are really looked at in D&D as kind of embraced that as a whole most prolific race in every campaign setting and it’s out there.

So naturally they’re going to be adept at anything. That’s kind of how they were racially designed and as a whole, if they’re going to be good at everything, good at anything, you know they’re going to fall into that at the end of that spectrum that it fits that they could be a bard.

Now the changlings literally live their lives fulfilling other roles. Their natural state is kind of like acting and roleplaying. They would be really great at D&D. They would be really great at D&D. Finally, the tabaxi. Tabaxi have a strong tradition for storytelling and what is a bard but a storyteller.

Absolutely. I mean, I love the lore of the tabaxi. It’s rich and it’s fun. And getting charisma and dex that could be really useful for playing a bard. So definitely works out for me. All right. So every time we do this best race, we got to give you top three choices for the best race to play a bard. We sometimes break it down and we busted up as the, oh no, it’s this or it’s that.

But here we’re literally going to give you your bronze, your gold, your silver, bronze, silver, gold, whatever order is supposed to be in. Who is our third place? The third place is human. And the reason why is the human is just so versatile. Especially if we’re talking the variant, you’re going to get that extra skill, you’re going to get that feat, two stats you can put it wherever you want. And That’s going to kind of like customize what kind of bard you are.

Absolutely. The feats are so interesting, so versatile, so, so powerful within 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. And this will allow you to specifically begin crafting exactly the kind of bard that you want to play. So if you’re looking to go valor or if you’re looking to to go lore, these things are going to build upon those steps so much easier.

Next we have changeling. Changeling is an amazing race. Regardless of whether you’re talking about talking to other people, talking about performing, deceiving, persuading, or having the ability to alter and change your forms, like the changling do this tool becomes so powerful for playing a bard.

You know it was almost pushing my, top one out out and I almost gave changeling first place. Yeah. Not only that, they’re very versatile whether you want to that secondary stat to be dex or intelligence. Their skill heavy. Which is a recurring theme with your bard anyway. So they just fit really well. So with that Ted, who was our top number one pick?

Because they get mechanically a plus two bonus to charisma and two floating stats, because they get to skills, and some other features besides, I don’t think there’s another race out there that beats a half elven Bard. Half elven bard really works. I mean they live between two worlds. Oftentimes they’re described as natural diplomats. So I find that the half elf is a great choice.

The question is what is you go to race to play a bard? Let us know in the comments.