[CF-Devel] New Skill idea - Music

[Mark Wedel]

Scott Barnes wrote:
>
     
     
     >
     
      I just had an interesting idea for new skills, Musical skills.  This might
     
     >
     
      be a bit of work since it would require a new type of item to be added
     
     >
     
      (instruments), but I think it would be a great feature.  Basically,
     
     >
     
      players could learn to play instruments, and learn different kinds of
     
     >
     
      music to play, and it could give some interesting effects, not to mention
     
     >
     
      add a bit more flavor to the game (I'd love to have a Bard class :))
     
     >
     
      The effects would vary depending on the type of music played and whether
     
     >
     
      or not the instrument had any magical properties.  For instance, a player
     
     >
     
      could learn a lullaby that would put charaters/monsters to sleep, or
     
     >
     
      pacify them.  Or they could learn fast-paced high-tempo music that would
     
     >
     
      temporarily raise their speed.  And the intruments could have magical
     
     >
     
      properties such as a flute that heals characters when you play it to them,
     
     >
     
      or a horn that shoots fireballs, etc.
     
     >
     
      Like I said, that would be quite a bit of work, but I think it would spice
     
     >
     
      up the game quite a bit, and add a little more variety.
     
     >
     
      Comments anyone?
     
     
 Catching up on some old e-mail.

 Adding new items is some amount of work, but not incredibly hard.  Depending on
how they get equipped may be more difficult (if treated as a range item, perhaps
not a big deal, but there are really a lot of realism problems right now with
the range stuff, like how do you fire a bow while still holding a sword, etc,
but that is neither here nor their right now).

 For real flavor, you could actually distribute audio files with the clients
that play as the character does their thing.

 I would guess from the above that the musical instrument effectively lets you
use a skill/spell through the item.  So you play the fast tempo song, and
effectively you get haste, etc.  I think the effect in most cases certainly
needs to last long than the playing itself, otherwise moving faster won't help
that much.

 One question/issue is how the character learns songs.  IMO, this is one of the
biggest problems with alchemy (learning formulas is really player knowledge, and
not character knowledge).  I suppose you could add a third type of spells 'bard
spells', which are learned similar ways (songbooks).  But if you do that, then
effective the only differences would be:

1) Another skill to learn (play musical instrument)
2) Need to have an instrument to play a song (cast the spell), which gives some
modifiers
3) Casting uses yet some other pool (neither grace of mana) to determine how
much can be cast.  Or perhaps you eliminate that, and instead limit casting
frequency (can be done by something like a last_song value in the player
structure, and while that is non zero, that represents how long until the player
can play again (playing a song is tiring - this value when casting would change
depending on the type of instrument).  This would basically mean that the spells
would generally not be very useful offensively due to the infrequent casting
times, but could certainly be very good support spells (protection spells,
haste, etc).

 On the other hand, I don't have a problem with it - just some amount of work. 
Presumably, playing the instrument would fall into a personality experience
category, so that puts something more useful in that.  And does open up another
class (bard) which needs the personality stats more.