attracting rats - animal speaker

[gnoams]

I'm playing an animal speaker bard in serpents skull, and recently gained the "Attract rats" ability. We ran into a lot of unanswered questions when going about resolving how it works.

Attract Rats: wrote:

At 6th level, the animal speaker can use bardic performance to summon 1d3 rat swarms; they remain as long as he continues performing.

That's all it says, aside from advancing at higher levels. So it does call it a bardic performance so it seems safe to say it takes bard song rounds to maintain, is started with the same action needed to start any other bard song, and can't be maintained with other bard songs. That's all well and good, but what is the range? Where do they appear? Do you have any control over them?

The title of the ability also implies calling rats in the area like the pied piper, but the text implies they appear out of thin air like a summon spell.
So, I'm looking for thoughts on how this ability is actually intended to function.

[Cavall]

I would suggest the summon swarm spell as the basis for all your questions.

It will give you
A) a range. 25 feet + 5 / 2 levels
B) tell you how long it takes to summon. (A full round). However that could be up to your GM to say it takes less. Usually when a performance acts like a spell we use those rules but.. if he says it's a move or swift to start that's up to him.
C) tells you how much control over it you have.

And yes it's a performance and costs 1 a turn.

[gnoams]

Activation time seems to be the only thing that is well defined. Activating a bard song is a standard action, becomes a move at 7th, etc. If you think it is a spell like ability, that would be like the bardic performance fascinate, which can only be cast while maintaining another performance, but again, there is no text in the summon rats to support that.

We ended up running it as close range, bard song action to activate, but we got caught up on the who controls them part. The GM let me control them the first time, then changed his mind the second time.