What if some well known and good played bards (probably the leaders of their cabals) like Tarleton or Kyaltaru were given the ability to replace defined song texts with their own? Same like warriors can do with warcry

As I see it is quite easy to code and will take about 15-20 minutes in month from some IMM to view sent (via note) songs and replace with them defined songs for a certain bard.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to let approved players come up with their own lyrics once they lyrics themselves are approved.

Since it would probably be a major investment time-wise for a coder, I don't see it happening. The number of people who would be allowed to have this feature and who would actually write quality lyrics and take advantage of it is probably a very low number. It also really doesn't work well with repertoires.

My idea:

Make a imm-given edge for bards that gives them an improved version of the old music command. Basically, bards could pick a repertoire and a class of affect and then provide the lyrics (including the ability to parse newlines). So for example:

Syntax: music <repertoire> <type> <lyrics>

Where type is something like a druid herb type or spell type, like offensive, defensive, curative, etc.

So you might do:

music romantic utility 'Never gonna give you up,\nNever gonna let you down,\nNever gonna run around and desert you!'

It would then pick a random affect sort of like damnation, the strength of which depends on the repertoire and instrument being used.

Basically, it's a controlled version of chromatic fire with lyrics. The affects would be minimal and generic (so that they kinda/sorta make sense with the lyrics).

I think you did.

I've considered this, as I think it would be very cool, but the
problem that I realized is that it wouldn't be immediately evident
that the bard was trying to land a fiend when you heard "Rock the
Casbah" or whatever.

Nice idea, but it has more than a cosmetic impact on the game.