Hyperborea 3E: Character Classes - Overview & Targeted Focus 

I have always thought of the bard as being a recorder of the adventure and a musician / story teller after the adventures, sometimes even long after even the deaths of the adventures. Not as adventurers themselves, but more expert henchmen. I have a player currently playing a Bard in my AD&D 1E campaign, and he took the long road Fighter 7 / Thief 7 to become a Bard 1. If he had remained a Ranger 3, he started as a Ranger 1, he would have been a Ranger 8 by now (nearly 2 years of play) and more valuable to the party moving forward. I don’t see the big benefit of having a Bard in the party.

@@DM_Bluddworth OK, that's certainly a valid thought on the old school bard. Still, it's really about what they player wants/enjoys, not just what would help the party. A Fighter 7/Thief 7 with all those levels of hit points, to say nothing of skills, is still an impressive character. On the idea of bards purely of chroniclers, historically, there were bards who were knights and warriors. I'm thinking here of Ulrich von Liechtenstein (yes, the name used by the character in "A Knight's Tale"), who was said to have never lost a joust, and Thannhauser (yes, from whom we get "Thannhauser Gate", so really important to our geek world), who may have been part of the Teutonic Order (the only known image of the man shows him in a surcoat with the Teutonic Order's emblem).