[Midget Gems]

Bards only get the one song in BG1, which is very disapointing compared with, say, IWD/HOW where the Bard-Songs are almost too powerful. I find Bards are ok as Archers and auxillary Magic uses, plus the identify skill as well. But the one really useful thing they can do is use Wands and in BG1 these are very powerful items, so Wand users get a big advantage.

I did notice this interesting feature the other day when I had Eldoth as my companion - if I switched from Bard-song to a weapon then the song stops straight away, however if I engage AI and let this select a weapon in response to an attack, then the song goes on playing for quite some time. This 'lingering song' effect makes perfectly good role-playing sense to me, but I never noticed it before in any of my previous games.