COGG BBS

Swindler-
Well you certainly know how to spin a convincing lie! When selling things to the market, you have the ability to try and 'swindle' folks with elaborate stories about items. This is most effective on arcane objects, occult objects, weapons and armor. Your skill on doing this will be based on your storytelling skill, and should you fail, you will not be able to sell the item for a cool down that is x amount of time long.

Successful swindles can result in more coin, misc extra objects, and even on occasion being able to sell things the market wouldn't buy.


Inspiration-
You're a natural storyteller, and you've picked up some tips from some if the best around! You can now storytell anywhere you choose as long as there are other players/allied npcs. You will not gain riln for the story, but your words can rouse inspiration in the minds and spirits of others!
OOC:You can tell stories whenever you are grouped with others, and it gives them some nice skill/misc bonuses. There would likely be a cool down on such a things

Element ideas:
Absurdity-Rouses the creativity in the minds of others, gives them a bonus to crafting skills, and a very slight bonus to artificing/stealth.


Adventure-The element of adventure can make folks eager to get out there and earn treasure, passive increase to riln and the chance to loot a lockbox from a corpse.

BBetrayal-adding an element of betrayal to make one wary of their surroundings, increase to perception.


There could even be small secret combinations like Adventure+History+Wonder-
You tell a story of adventure through ancient ruins full of amazing artifacts-passive chance to allow someone to stumble across rarer weapons/artifacts that can be studied or some such.

Most of these bonuses should be small, or short lasted perhaps a story of sacrifice would increase your benefits while guarding someone else, but make you more likely to take damage?

Maybe some of these elements can have negative effects such as horror and betrayal decreasing moral and sanity or causing fear? (Bardingers of Aranas anyone?).

Word of Wonder: Mesmerize a target with thoughts of wonder.

Word of Horror: Make a target suffer from fear.

Word of Tranquility: Make a target calm so they're not hostile.

Tale of Adventure: Give a combat reroll to your group.

Staggering Shout: A loud shout to stagger or knockdown an enemy.

Rally: Help a target remove stagger, remove fear, stand up from knockdown, remove mesmerize, recover from other status ailments.

Street Performer: In front of a crowd, perform juggling tricks, card tricks, or play music to make a little money like storytelling.

Card Throw: Throw cards at the target, not doing any damage but it could surprise them to lower their balance, like a feint. This is all about startling the target with something they don't expect, not accurately hitting them with a weapon, so make it not as dependent on combat, let it use artifice instead.

Traveler's Staff: Bards travel all their lives to collect their lore, tales, and songs. In their travels the humble staff is indispensable as a walking stick and a tool of defense in times of trouble. Give a defense reroll with a staff, and take less energy when traveling the wilderness and holding a staff.

Performer's Dodge: An upgrade to Graceful Dodge, it increases to 90% of Dancing or Acrobatics to dodge, and removes Graceful Dodge's roundtime penalty when over 2 seconds.

Sweet Talker: Use your Linguistics or Storytelling skill to sweet talk your way into discounts renting inns or buying from the market, and apply a small amount of your Linguistics or Storytelling to Trading rolls.

Loreseeker: Like Treasure Scavenge, but you search for scrolls and texts instead of treasure boxes. And you might find them when looting mob

I also think Bards should definitely have access to Tumble and Flip.

There are some great ideas in here. I'm definitely getting inspiration from several of them, thanks for posting! Please do add more, if anyone has further ideas. I'd love to hammer out bards some more.

What about an Infused Words ability that gives you amplifies your storytelling skill, and is a precursor to the other Word of Power abilities? It would also mean though that if you use a storytelling element that the crowd doesn't like, it makes it even worse.

Oooh, yeah, a basic "Words of Power" ability would be a good segue into the individual Word abilities, and add some good foundational flavor and basis to them. To-doed!

------ Performance

A handful of abilities that bards have access to. Each one would unlock a kind of "performance" that, when done for an audience has a mystical, beneficent effect. The core idea for this came from a performance that helps mitigate sanity loss by acting as 'armor' against a certain % of sanity loss (from any source that lowers sanity) for a baseline of 30min to 1 hour, maxing out at several hours, with efficacy boosts from the highest of Linguistics, Storytelling, Dancing, or Music. Fill in the blanks for whatever names are best for any specific performances (soothing performance, inspiring performance, etc.)

I think this could either be broken into several abilities that have several (mostly abjurative/protective) mental effects, and could include

• Mitigation against morale loss

• Defending against mind control

• Defending against negative/aggressive Words.

You could also potentially have this just be a singular ability, that builds off of each words, allowing a Bard to do the same thing (engage in a performance), but have each Word unlock a different type of Performance.

A way to spend inspiration as a resource would be awesome! The first thing that came to mind for me was to be able to use inspiration to empower their Words, to make them better (longer base duration, or maybe a reroll?). But being able to spend inspiration to boost up the rolls of your group mates would be cool too.

It'd be nice if the Solca glyph had an interaction with Bardic Words - perhaps either turning them into AOE effects, or just empowering them.