TL;DR story tiem!
I have two characters. My first one is about level 13 with the alias "Leg Bandit". She wields a scythe, because I started as a farmer and it would be cool. Scythes... kinda suck, really, so I'm basically the party skillmonkey - cooking, quest taking, occasional wand use, poison chucking, what have you. My scythe's a living artifact, but it's only level two, as my pets are horrifyingly deadly and scythes are pretty awful. I think it does 1d26 or 1d16 or something,
Also, this character's a female at like 188cm, and started at 70-something kg, and got a bunch of "your arms are all muscly" mutations. I imagine her as a huge Amazon woman, except she is bad at killing you.
She has a little sister and a little girl (starting) for pets, both of whom have had bat genespliced into them for Greater Evasion. The girl has good evade and armor, so she survives most fights... but she wields an artifact claymore that does 3d12+12 damage. She kills EVERYTHING. She also has a shield, so apparently she swings a sword around bigger than she is with one hand. The sister isn't nearly as impressive - traded a scroll for her off some guy that visited my house, her evade is okay, but her armor rating is low, so she dies pretty easily. She dual wields artifact knives - one does huge lightning damage on hit occasionally, I think, but the little girl is still our MVP.
My first character was a first-race-option Pianist, Maximum Finger. I decided to make him a martial artist type (though I use guns and stuff with him, too), with a cat, so I'm pretty gimped in battle.As it happened, I eventually noticed he was like 122cm, 38 kg or something - so I started envisioning him as a guy with a twelve year old body, because a little boy with a piano strapped to his back, punching kobolds dead is AWESOME.
I didn't realize the job board was actually doable at low levels - that there were delivery quests and stuff, that is. So I spent all of my first so-many levels around Vernis and the puppy cave. I threw myself into the slime basement a bunch of times until I got sick of getting killed my slimes, and then I spent all my time in the puppy cave.
Eventually, some cursed equipment teleported me into the end room of the slime basement. I dropped my piano there, and wasn't able to reclaim it until much later. A pianist without a piano, how disgraceful.
So like I said, I didn't know the job board had, like "deliver [item] to [city]" stuff, so I ended up with nearly NO money left - not even enough to buy a meal at the inn. The fruit trees I'd been living off had all gone bare, so I decided that since the ONLY thing I could really do was wait until I starved to death, I'd throw myself into the robber den and kill them all through sheer attrition. I'd use my bow if they weren't in punching range, and punch if they were. Eventually I managed to kill all of them, through maybe 20-ish deaths... and I got my cooler box, which I'm pretty sure I promptly dropped in the Puppy Cave and lost forever.
Eventually I got a couple sidekicks - a Noyel horse, and a Gunner from Derphy. IIRC, they're able to hold their own passably well to go down in the puppy cave, but not enough to clear out dungeons or take on any quests that need me to kill things.
I've pretty much retired him. He was level 10. I think the biggest purchase I could afford with him was a blessed small cottage, but that's a pretty decent step up from "penniless starving homeless boy around Vernis whose cat hates him".
...Oh yeah, we were talking about perform skill, right? I haven't really used it with either of my characters, even my pianist. I guess that's understandable, since he lost his piano for so long, no?