My first go at a Homebrew idea. Take it as 3.5 since I haven't got my head around the 4.0 skill checks yet. Feedback welcome: a small story demonstrating the feat in action is to follow. In Brief: Perform (Street Theatre) covers the performance arts of the entertainer - juggling, lassoos, acrobatics, card tricks, shells games, balancing, animal tricks, trick-riding, tightrope walks, even trapeze acts if the opportunity (and equipment) offers itself. It differs from Perform (Act) performances such as mime in that Street Theatre performances generally involve props of some sort, such as balls or cylinders to balance on or items to juggle. Indeed a character attempting this skill with no props must Improvise (see below) and may take a -2 penalty. Advantages: As many of these forms of entertainment will immediately suggest, Perform (Street Theatre) allows the player (or NPC) to use her skills in a theatrical way, and enhance her performance with other skills. Disadvantages: While Bards who specialise in other forms of Performance may dream of one day enhancing their abilities with a Horn of This or Drum of That, there are no magical props for Perform (Street Theatre). Nor should there be. Synergies: Any skill that can be used for putting on a show, can grant a +2 bonus synergy bonus to Perform (Street Theatre) if the character has the requisite 5 ranks. The d20 SRD already states that "in addition to using the Perform skill, you can entertain people with sleight of hand, tumbling, tightrope walking, and spells (especially illusions)." The difference between a check of the skill and the check of Perform (Street Theatre) is that what is being checked is the capacity of the character to entertain with the skill, not to succeed with it. For instance, a character with a more comedic bent might just as easily put on a successful show by spectacularly failing her juggling or balancing attempts, then extravagantly mocking herself for it, to the delight of the crowd. This is particularly useful for characters with low Dex but high Cha. Examples of such skills are given below: Handle Animal: Using an animal to put on a show. Use Rope: Whirling a lassoo, pretending to cut a rope in half, or other rope tricks. Sleight of Hand: Acts of legerdemain, juggling. Balance: Tightrope walking, balancing on poles or cylinders. Ride: Trick riding. (etc) These various synergies stack, in as much as a single performance may indeed involve trick-riding with a lassoo, then balancing on the horses back, then juggling or fire-eating in that position. However since such elaborate performances approach the truly heroic and legendary, the DC of such performances increases by 5 with each synergistic skill added. Alternately, this would be a good situation in which to use Unearthed Arcana's variant rules on Complex SKill Checks, with each relevant skill providing its own synergy bonus (if applicable). Since these skills add a synergy to Perform (Street Theatre), the player might legitimately ask the DM that 5 ranks in Perform (Street Theatre) add a synergy to one of the requisite skills. In this case the DM should only agree if the player has used or shown interest in that skill. If a player has never made use of the Balance skill in a performance, she can hardly argue that her performance training can aid a life-and-death balance check: on the other hand, if the player has used the Balance skill to dazzle audiences on various occasions, or has done hand-stands to fascinate some monster while the party quietly sneak past, then the experience of performing the skill under pressure would indeed add a synergy bonus to a later check. Improvisation: If a character attempts this skill with no props, he must take a -2 penalty, unless he has an associated perform skill that can be used without props (such as Act, Oratory, Dance, Sing or Comedy). 5 ranks in such a skill will provide a +2 synergy bonus that allows the character to use his Street Theatre skill without penalty. There is a wide range of possibilities to this skill, and both the player and the DM will have a considerable scope in which to shape it. A player may wish to put on a performance of trick shooting, to win the favour of an NPC lord who has a reputation as an archer: the DM might rule the player have a feat such as Weapon Specialisation or Many Shot before allowing this.
