[Bards] Some Thoughts on Documentation for Bardic Competition

[Fitzmorgan at aol.com]

   I'm all for bards doing research and one whould hope that their work would reflect that research.  However I'm ambivalant about documentation.  It's hard to supply the documentation in a way that is useful and timley for the judges AND doesent take you out of the moment.
 Idealy a bardic performance shoulld take you out of the everyday world to someplace special.  If you supply the documentation verbaly right before you perform you are reminding everyone that this is a 21st century game and you have to work that much harder to take them back to the middle ages.   You can try to supply your documentation in persona, but that is difficult to pull off well.  I expect that most bards in period didn't give their documentation before they performed.
   You can give written documentation but that judge really should be paying attention to your performance not reading your documentation.  After you perfore it's not fair to make the other performers wait while the judges read your documentation.
    So while I'm not against bardic documentation I'm not sure how to present it effectivily.

Robert Fitzmorgan


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Greetings All,

Having gotten back from Bordermarch this last weekend, I was contemplating
the bardic competition and something occurred to me: Very few people
supplied documentation for their pieces. I'm curious about what the people
on this list think about documentation for competitions and whether or not
it should be required. (Please note that I'm drawing a separation between
competitions and bardic circles/fires.)

Pendaran