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Message: <blockquote data-quote="coyote6" data-source="post: 4840557" data-attributes="member: 1225">Yeah, I'd like to see more details, but that seems like a sizable downgrade to bardic performance. Maybe they thought it was too powerful? IME, it is basically a constant boost to the party's attack & damage rolls. But it was most of a bard's usefulness, IME, and it doesn't seem like one or two extra spells will help cover the lessened usefullness. There were few bardic performances with prescribed limits on duration -- Inspire Courage was basically "however long you weren't casting spells + 5 rounds". Now, just the +5 rounds part will chew up a fifth of an 8th level bards usage. An 8th level 3.5 bard could get 40 rounds of Inspire Courage by just taking a standard action to sing a few bars every 5 rounds. (That's not counting the Lingering Song feat, which moved it up to +10 rounds -- that made one action cover pretty much an entire fight.)Bardic knowledge seems a bit nerfed, too; instead of having essentially a free multi-purpose Knowledge skill, you get a smaller bonus to Knowledge skills. But a +10 isn't going to help you know anything earthshaking at 20th level; you'll still need to dump ranks into the skills, which means you'll only be good at a few areas.Perform is still split up into multiple skills, too. They combined skills to give Stealth, Perception, etc., but you still need 4-5 skills to be Bob Hope (singer/dancer/comdeian/actor)? That's still lame.I'm hoping things work differently in ways not described; for example, maybe the bard can activate bardic performance, then do different things at the same time (e.g., Inspire Courage and Inspire Competence simultaneously, so each round's worth of performance gives you more bang for your reduced buck).</blockquote>

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