Something I've noticed regarding Bard roleplay...

[Rithm Fluffderg]

I think Oblivion is the only one of the three moddable ES games to lack a decent bard mod. Morrowind has A Bard's Life, which adds a companion to the game, magic songs that you can learn, the ability to carry/wield a lute, and treats music-playing like its own, invisible skill that you can increase through practice.

Skyrim has Become a Bard which is an amazing mod whose only complaint I have is the lack of a magic song add-on - but then we have Ordinator which adds magic songs in the Speech tree and isn't incompatible with Become a Bard.

Oblivion has... the Minstrel's Lute.
http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/4660/

Which I mean, yeah, I'm not going to knock the effort put into this.
But... it's a bit disappointing.
I'm wondering if anyone else knows of any mods that might not be present on the Nexus and flew under the radar.

[Rithm Fluffderg]

I was gonna make this topic again, but then I realized it wouldn't be any different from this so ...

"Come my [topic] rise for your master
Let your evil shine
Find [them] now yes fly ever faster
In the dark of the night,
[They'll] be mine!"

[བྷ་ག་འཇོམས]

Unnecessary Violence has the ability to do different kinds of performance (playing a lute, juggling and dancing), which iirc at higher levels of speech can enrapture enemies, forcing them to dance or clap, depending on their personality (speech pie preferences).

CraftyBits has a lute you can play with your numpad (though it only has six notes, the transitions between some notes are laggy and the sound files it comes with are chords from the House of the Rising Sun instead of individual tones, so you'll probably want to replace those with tones from a VST or something), and it casts invisible AOE script effects around the caster that affect the disposition of npcs around you, again based on their pie preferences, with different kinds of songs (whether you use high or low notes, how fast you play and how much you vary the tones) affecting different slices. Unlike UV's barding, CB's can actually LOWER disposition, and when you begin playing your lute it also places a basket for busking at your feet. If npcs like what you play, they'll drop money and booze, and sometimes jewels, into the basket, and if they dislike it they'll throw trash in. Once I had Kalthar in the Leyawiin mages guild drop a potion of silence labeled "drink me" in the basket.

Downsides are that UV makes the game pretty unstable in my experience (going from almost never crashing to crashing maybe once an hour every time I've tried it), and CB's lute is kind of janky as mentioned previously (and doesn't really serve any combat purpose other than functioning as a poor shield, but 1vx combat performances aren't really realistic anyway). It is possible to use both together, though.