Speaking of the Low Admissions Standards for the Bards College

Brief Twitter thread from 5/21/2021, in which I have some thoughts about the Bard’s College being a disappointing play experience. Particularly if you’re a musically inclined player.

Also, speaking of the low admissions standards for the Bards College in Skyrim, I’d like to take a moment as a musically inclined person to be kind of disappointed in that.

11:01 AM · May 21, 2021

I like the part where you go find lost musical instruments, but you don’t actually get to PLAY them, or get any music-specific teaching at the place. And the Bards College as a whole has zero fucks to give about you once you do the “go find the instruments” quests.

11:01 AM · May 21, 2021

You don’t get a room at the college. I think the closest you can get to any further training is that one of the three professors you speak to can train you in Speech?

11:01 AM · May 21, 2021

Nor are you able to ever draw upon being a bard at any point afterwards in the game, as far as I know.

11:02 AM · May 21, 2021

You can’t show up at inns and go “hi, I’m a bard, I can play for you” (which might have been a nice way to pay for your room for the night?), or maybe jam with the in-house bard (which might have been a nice way to maybe get rumors or quest hooks off the in-house bard?).

11:02 AM · May 21, 2021

Both of these seem like lost opportunities.

And just thinking of how musical instruments are used in Nethack, there’s lost opportunity there, too.

11:03 AM · May 21, 2021

Nethack lets you use non-magical instruments to do various interesting things, including getting through a tune-based puzzle on an important level, but other effects as well such as pacifying monsters. And magical instruments have additional effects.

11:03 AM · May 21, 2021

So PLENTY of lost opportunity here for Skyrim.

11:03 AM · May 21, 2021

Editing to add

1. This post was written on 3/18/2022, but is backdated to the time of the tweet thread for organizational purposes.
2. 10/2/2024: Reconstructed the original Twitter thread locally, because I deleted my Twitter account. Also, noting for the record that just about all of these objections I raised in this thread have been answered by Skyrim mods! Particularly Become a Bard Student of Song, which I’ve been using in modded playthroughs ever since I discovered it. The one exception is my talking about magical instruments, which that mod doesn’t do. But it does have the concept of “spellsongs”, which is still in the category of letting you do magical things with music, so that’s still close to the same thing as far as I’m concerned.
3. 10/3/2024: Fixed the timestamps on the reconstructed tweets, since I had to convert them from GMT to PDT.