I could make it out with a Death Mold Lost Soul Bard. For a **real** challenge make it a Maia Lost Soul Bard without linked stairs.

Hmm Bard. I never played one, bacause the songs look so weak that they dont matter compared to the other options. For example, you could play it as a simple warrior with magic device and have no problems at all. The restriction "no mindcraft" is rather pointless imo, as there are plenty of other similarly powerfull options. God magic, antimagic, mimicry, symbiosis, you name it.

If you want to create a character so weak that bard songs become a relevant boost, I would suggest no princess quests for starters; other doors to non-bardic power will have to be closed, too, but I am no longer familiar enough with tome 2 to list them all offhand.

Maia lost soul seems off when the intention is to have bard songs explored.

If you make this, I vote for the original Tome (since that is what I remember), and I would play the comp. But, tome being tome, I fear the way to go about this will be to not bother with bard songs much.

Don't Maias have decent melee to compensate? Which version (for the competition) should be the "original ToME"...2.3.5?

Original just means not T4. 2.4 would be my assumption.

I meant 2.3.5. I have no idea about the changes done in 2.4, and with a game where irreversible early decisions affect the character later, you always end up with borked builds for the first toons till you eventually get a grasp of all the details. Or you go to the sandworm lair but that has been rebalanced to now spawn <more_deadly_monster_X> and so on and so forth.

I would prefer the older version because I dont feel like re-learning the game.

FYI to everyone:
2.3.5 was the last 2.x version released by DarkGod. 2.4.11(?) is the last 2.x version released by AH.

Make some savefiles yo. debo is on a soul journey right now.

Jeez you people are conservative -- just try it :). There have been very few game play (or "balance") changes in my fork. The only one I can think of of the top of my head would be the removal of traps and making Thaumaturgy a little less absurdly overpowered. (I've also removed Alchemy + Runecrafting because they've been hopelessly broken. Bard is also on the list because they seem to be almost unplayable and the code support them complicates the spell system quite a bit. I'm not opposed to the class per se, it's just a pain to deal with such a large amount of code that's effectively never used.).

It still plays very much like T2 2.3.5 except it actually runs properly on 64-bit by not instantly giving you 300k piety on save/load, etc.

(I'm also thinking about removing ID and just auto-ID'ing everything.)

EDIT: Of course, just to be absolutely clear T4 is a whole different game.

I looked at all eleven Bard winners on the ladder.

Several were played as monks, including Lord Dimwit's yeek winner. He worshipped Melkor and used Curse to take down tough opponents. The lowest scoring winner was also a yeek played as a monk, but worshipping Tulkas.

There were several that had high Symbiosis, so they could b played as chain summoners (this was my first thought).

There was only one with maxed-out Mindcraft.

So the two common successful approaches are to use Barehand or to go with chain summoning. This makes sense, as Bards start out with decent access to most of the other Loremaster skills.

If you want something relatively easy to see if the class is worth preserving, try a RohanKnight worshiping Tulkas.

If you create a T2 2.4 comp savefile, I'll happily post it for comp 205.