Just a random idea while my mind wanders at work...
But I think it would be awesome to see the functionality of this ability expanded upon. It has always been one of my favorite Bard perks, and with the eventual shaping of the Bardic Lore/Performance skills, and the Satirize/Lionize abilities, I wonder if something like this might fit in with some of those themes...
So what if Bluff Dead could create a much more realistic version of death? (With proper restrictions placed upon it, of course.)
By more realistic, I mean that your name pops up in the gamewide death feed, and all opponents would be automatically forced to disengage in the same manner that they would if you had actually died. By all means short of an actual Cleric attempting to examine the corpse further, the character would appear dead. This would not only provide it with increased versatility in terms of PvP/PvE scenarios, but I feel would also turn it into a more realistic overall RP tool.
Skill checks could be set in place with the appropriate contests to determine success rates and the length of time that the Bard is able to maintain this very convincing state of death. And by putting a global timer on the ability, such that it is only usable once per day, or once every X amount of hours, it would help to prevent abuse or spamming. Talking or moving in any way would still be potentially hazardous in terms of revealing your dead state, and once your mojo/skill/whatever runs out, or your state is revealed in another manner, you're open prey for players and critters alike once again.
I have no clue if something like this is even remotely plausible, as I can imagine that scrolling the character's name on the death feed might could provide some tricky coding, so hopefully it's not something involved too deeply with core systems that can't be touched.
Thoughts, additions, criticisms?
>befriend clear all
You are now friendless.
