DM Q&A Perform and Bard Song

[VaultDuke]

heya, i'd like to know how stiff the rules on 'perform' and 'bard song' are here.

is it possible to have a bard that lets out an inciting battle cry/war cry/roar instead of an edifying cheerfull tune?

i know aside from singing bards, there are also dancing and story telling bards. would 'cooking' (think 'high cuisine') also be an allowed form of performing?


please don't take these decisions lightely, i'm thinking of ways to turn my 'supposed to be brown' dragon disciple into a brass dragon, so i don't have to retire him.
it's ok, since brass wyrmlings are said to have brown scales that get metallic with age. but right now i have a brownish, 3 beef per meal eating hin running around growling at people (check brown dragon description) that needs to become a bit more brass like (dew licking omg, and talkative). it's surprisingly doable, since the two are so much opposed, that i can make some kind of weird justification for the whole mess.

the idea is basically: because he grew up in the jungle (Chult) with not so many people around to talk, he's grumpy and eats a lot. but as he now becomes more accustomed to people he might relax a bit, start to enjoy talking (more; not sure yet if i want him to become a great talker at some time) and grow a taste for luxury meals (instead of just gulping down meat). the role model of course is the messed up dew licker dragon (i won't even start to elaborate on how much mental pain that produces; stepping down from an awesome animalic brown dragon heritage to this; dew licking, seriously WotC?).


so long story short: high cuisine lover; performs tasty meals for others; still screams on the battlefield. y/n?

[Munroe]

Bardsong does not have to be song. The Player's Handbook gives a pretty good listing of things that qualify.

From Player's Handbook 3.5e, page 29 (in the bard entry):

Bardic Music: Once per day per bard level, a bard can use his song or poetics to produce magical effects on those around him (usually including himself, if desired). While these abilities fall under the category of bardic music and descriptions discuss singing or playing instruments, they can all be activated by reciting poetry, chanting, singing lyrical songs, singing melodies (fa-la-la, and so forth), whistling, playing an instrument, or playing an instrument in combination with some spoken performance.

I've also read this question on the old WotC Ask a Sage column (or whatever it was called, where people could email WotC with questions) and the answer there was that even regular spoken words would work as long as they were presented as a performance-like oratory.

Also bear in mind that dragon disciple is not a born condition, it is a chosen one. If your character is running around in the woods and grunting, that's because your character is a savage, not because of his draconic heritage.

Dragon disciples are spontaneous arcane spellcasters who use their magical talent to awaken latent draconic characteristics. It's very easy to explain a character's personality becoming more like the dragon-type's standard personality as he advances in the class, because he is becoming more like the dragon type as he advances in the class.