Lead-In to Argent Dramaturge

[zimmerwald1915]

For a Hell's Rebels game, I'm making some Adventurers' Guide options for the Silver Ravens available to players, so that they can "originate" the concepts that will later have wide currency in their organization. The options I'm making available include the Diva Style feats, the Devil Sense feat, and the Argent Dramaturge prestige class.

The feats have generated quite a bit of interest, but the only player even looking at the Argent Dramaturge is playing a Wizard. And he's enthusiastic for the PrC, seeing it gel with his backstory and concept (basically a theoretician of rebellions as much as an agitator; he jumped on the Historian of the Rebellion trait), and not seeing that it loses him anything but a bonus feat and his automatic spells learned each level.

I'd like to support my player's choices, but from where I'm sitting, the PrC does not work well with the base class. It doesn't lose much, but the number of performance rounds it gives is low, the dramaturgical flourishes seem to assume bardic performance even if the class itself does not have it as a prerequisite,* and Anchoring Aria and Righteous Chord are better as wizard spells because the latter scale off the entire caster level rather than the PrC level.

Would there be a way to make the base class and the PrC mesh better, without having to rewrite anything? In a pinch, I'll suggest variant multiclassing as a Bard, but I'd rather explore my other options before that.

* Okay, the Masterpiece option doesn't.

[zimmerwald1915]

No advice to offer a pour soul?

[blashimov]

Uh, it's pretty cool, breath of life on a wizard?
Anchoring Aria isn't even replicate-able by a wizard spell afaik, and the banishment part limits HD but not really the saves, plus 2 rounds of performance is much cheaper than a 7th level spell!

Dramatic flourish is where you're right, it doesn't really work. Unless you want to make a level dip of bard pretty mandatory, here are a few suggestions:
instead of just flourishes, allow bardic music options to be picked up instead (courage, competence, fascinate, etc) so they could get the performances then enhance them with a flourish.
The other option is to modify / create new flourishes that allow the character to enhance spells (e.g. the magician bard archetype).

The class also seems to have the problem where it doesn't explicitly stack for the effects of performance anyway, and references 13th level in a ten level class...so seems a fine houserule.
Now here's the thing, having done all that it's a decent buff to wizard, an already strong class, so care with integrating that with a party.