I was reading through the bard and I like it in general, but it seems a little fiddly in terms of the "which kinds of Perform" you can use.
Distraction. You can use oratory and comedy but not singing or music? I'm not really sure why. Same with discordant performance. You can't do discordant with music? To me "discordant" seems to suggest music *above* the other forms.
Fascinate. It says you can use any Perform, but then in the first sentence it says "music or poetics," I had to reread the entry a couple times to make sure I understood.
Anyway, I feel that a) given most abilities can use any Perform, and b) then there's a couple that require a special form, that you'll end up just having the 'right' Perform skill(s) all bards should take and eschew others as suboptimal. Unless this is jsut a dodge to make sure a bard is spending skill points on two different Performs.
As I look through all the abilities, I think that you can conceive of them being achieved via other Perform skills, perhaps with a little renaming - "Dirge of Doom" becomes "The Lap Dance Is Always Better When The Stripper Is Crying" or "Sermon: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" or whatever.
Just let any perform be used for any bardic skill. This is the "bad kind of complexity" that adds little but asks a lot.
Distraction might need a better name, but the concept of countering audible effects with Countersong, and visual effects with perform checks that are visual, does make good sense.
I'm not displeased with the division of the other bardic effects either, but that's more a matter of taste.
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The fun part is you can Distract your opponent by Dancing, but you can't Fascinate them.
You can Inspire Confidence in your allies by Dancing (something they have to watch) in the middle of a fight.
Suggest and Mass Suggest stack with Fascinate.. but you can Dance with Suggest and Mass.
Soothing Performance.. bad acting but no music?
I really want them to get rid of the performance types and offer some kind of synergy bonus or that bards don't get their +3 class bonus when using the "non-required" Perform skill. I think the abilities should be left to the flavor of the bard, not the required types of performance.