I'm building a gang of Thundercallers for my party to tangle with, and I wanted to clarify a rule. All messageboard posts I've found on the Thundercaller have been concerning their Sound Burst performance, but I'm curious about their ability to Call Lightning. Namely, someone who casts the spell the performance is based in needs to spend a Standard action to call down each bolt. The performance, on the other hand, reads "The lightning storm lasts for as long as she continues her performance, calling down one bolt of lightning per round."
Since continuing a Bardic Performance is a free action, that reads to me that, so long as the Tundercaller keeps spending rounds of performance, the bolt happens automatically each round. Am I misunderstanding?
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The Storm lasts as long as you continue to perform, however, it still takes your standard action to call down a bolt on any given round. It says it functions as the Call Lightning spell, and that is how the spell works.
For example, the Call Lightning will last as long as your performance does, but in any round you may choose to do something else instead of call down a bolt.
But it doesn't just say that the storm lasts as long as the performance lasts--it says that it calls down one bolt every round. Moreover, Call Lightning says "Each round after the first you may use a standard action (concentrating on the spell) to call a bolt", and a Performance is 'concentrated on' as a free action.