[Legolas]

You can take several different approaches with bards.

First of all, there's the battle bard. This one uses magic and song to increase its reasonable combat capabilities, and has a Charisma of about 16, a Dexterity around 14 (depending on armor choice and selection of the Cat's Grace spell), and mainly improves Strength for damage. Typically you'd carry a shield in your off-hand. They go well with RDD levels.
Alternatively, make a ballistic bard. You would use ranged weapons instead of melee tools, and rather than Strength, you invest in Dexterity. Your bardic spells here mostly summon allies and make you harder to hit. They don't improve the quality of your bow and arrows the way Keen Edge and Magic Weapon do for close combat whacking implements. This goes well with AA levels.
Other builds concentrate more on the bard's casting abilities. You might want to take a spell focus: enchantment, and invest heavily in Charisma. This makes your mind-affecting spells very hard to resist. You typically do not want to multiclass here because it affects your spell penetration chances.
You could also opt to concentrate on different spell schools to do more direct damage, though bards have only a limited spell list to choose from there.
Another spell-based build does not rely on Charisma much. Instead, you'd spend points on Constitution. You then proceed to use the Wounding Whispers type spells to let the enemy beat themselves to death, while your healing magic keeps you from joining them.
The final popular build raises Intelligence, and so lets the bard take a great amount of skillpoints in many different fields. The Tumble skill raises your armor class, the Taunt skill makes your enemies easier to hit, the Spellcraft skill makes you more resistant to magic, the Use Magic Device skill lets you use those Monk robes without needing Monk levels, and so on. This type of build has lots of roleplay advantages as well. It also goes well with the Assassin class, giving dreadful paralysis DCs and extra spells.
As the above illustrates, you can concentrate on just about any attribute and get something good out of it.

The main problem with bards, is that you never have enough feats to concentrate on both combat and magic, so you're stuck choosing for one, or making a bad compromise. Still Spell and Curse Song are two spells which are almost always worth considering, because the former lets you cast spells in armor without suffering spell failure, if you are willing to cast your spells at a higher level. The latter is the bard's Fireball, an area of effect-type spell-like ability that damages opponents, and even makes them weaker in other fields as well.

[ 05-26-2005, 06:22 AM: Message edited by: Legolas ]