System Planning - Ambience

[taladan]

Ambience:

What is ambience anyways?

Merriam-Webster defines Ambience like this:

noun am·bi·ence \ ˈam-bē-ən(t)s , ˈäm-bē-än(t)s: a feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing : atmosphere -- The restaurant's soft music and candlelight gave it a romantic ambience.

So, when I think ambience, I think of things like the keychain that's jingling in the movie E.T. As a child, the sound of those keys jangling with the heavy tread of the boots struck fear into my heart while they were looking for E.T. That kind of thing can change the complete palette of a scene. I want us to think about ambience in a wholistic manner. Ambience shouldn't be just about the room the person is in, or the dungeon hall they're going through. Maybe we can come up with a system of ambience where each active participant in a scene has an added set of ambience strings that can be emitted to the room. In a scene like the following:

Ranger Bob and Cleric Josephine are in a tavern, having a quiet supper. Discussing an ongoing war in the neighboring region of the Iron Mounds. If this scene was set in a peter jackson film, there would be music going on, some lonely minstrel strumming a lute at the bar, maybe another bard sitting beside the fireplace telling stories to children for pennies, the clink and clatter of forks on plates. All of that is room ambience. Now, the person that is in the scene, they should /also/ have personality emits for ambience. Say if we have the tavern be in a non-combat specific zone, they have a package of emits that they can customize about their character. Some little trait or nuance that is specific to them, as well as combat specific emits. If the player doesn't want to customize this we could either pass over them (kind of like the multi-desc code on most MU*'s, it's there if you want to use it, but not a requirement), or we could come up with a specific bank of emits geared around races, classes, locations, etc. Possibly even work into the string parser to identify certain words or phrases that trigger a chance at an emit.

I believe that while this enriches the game for the players, it will also add a level of customization that people enjoy having. Attracting people to the concept of not having to always type out the same emits over and over, not having to configure them from one alt to another (they could certainly be transferrable, either singly, in groups or en mass).

Now open for comments and input.