Elan the Elven Bard
With the current DM absent, it's time for another one-off adventure to play, which means another character to create! Probably because it would be for one week only, I decided to try out the Bard class. Often thought to be too general to be of any use, and frequently mocked and derided, the Bard does not have the best of reputations as a character class, but they couldn't be all bad, could they?
I made him an Elf, because the race seems a little more dignified than others and more befitting the type of Bard I wanted to play, and I didn't really want to play a Gnome. Mind you, the amount of Bluffing and Sleight of Hand I used in the game, mostly on my own party, probably meant I should have been a Gnome after all.
I gave him the name Elan straight from the Order of the Stick comic strip, which has a mostly useless Bard of the same name. I took Improved Initiative as my 1st level Feat, so that with luck his average armour class and low hit points would be offset by being able to act, and thus disengage, from melee as quickly as possible, and Weapon Finesse with the Rapier as my 3rd level Feat simply because he's a Bard. That's what Bards do. I maxed out several Charisma- and Dexterity-based skills, as those were my highest ability scores, including Perform (Poetry), to be pretentious. A few pieces of equipment and a handful of spells later and I had myself a character.