Thinking of Daevos' comments about defending unusual loyals, I wonder if it would be possible to have a new trans influence skill: Fealty.

You could INFLUENCE WITH FEALTY (providing they are uninfluenced), and if you win they will swear fealty to you for one Lusternian day.

This has a number of consequences, while they are loyal:

- They will try to contact you if they are attacked. This is not via tells, but via a messenger of some kind with delay proportional to the number of planes you are away. (Would be cool if this was org-specific... a Glomdoring person successful influencing fealty might hand over a small bat, a Serenwilde person a small pixie, etc)

- You can defend them against any attacker without gaining suspect status. Basically, if someone attacks your loyal they have declared on you.

- If they are killed, you will lose experience and be ego-shattered for the remainder of the time they would have been loyal. The amount of experience lost is equivalent to the amount lost in failing an influence battle (maybe a little less).

Thus, you would only want to protect denizens you were sure were worth protecting, and that you were capable of defending.

Thoughts?

You should only be able to have one fealty at a time. I don't think Gognigin would swear fealty to someone who was swearing to protect Marinus, etc.

I'm not sure if anyone would do that simply because if someone wants to attack them, they die. It's quite likely, say, that Kharvik will world-shattering crit Marinus or somesuch, and lose whoever it was experience.

This would work, assuming, of course, that only one person would hold the fealty of a mob, obviously.

Well, there's high potential for abuse there, especially with the auto-defend thing. I could influence something pretty random, like a Mesa nomad, if I knew that someone who had status on me liked to bash nomads.

Of course, if you remove that aspect of it, it's nothing but a liability.

I dunno. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't see it ever working out as something feasible.

Only problem I can see, is that it can't really be abused. There are few things that don't already call out that wouldn't be dead before you could defend them, so it'd be nothing but a good way to lose exp.

But how often is killing someone you really hate one extra time worth the extra xp loss? Losing ego battles isn't really much of a loss.