Passive Bard

[quiet saddle]

In the current world we use playing an instrument to resolve some major quests, faction tasks, small buffs, and charm animals.

The situation right now is that a person has to select their instrument, stop moving completely and then focus on the Guitar-Hero style mini game to play a small section of tune.

What I am picturing is that our character knows the instrument already since they have had it since childhood and that they use it all the time.

A new goal would be to collect entire songs and play them from memory while on the move (like choosing a song from the soundtrack), letting players set their own pace. Now that they can just play on the run, the choice of song provides passive benefits to the player and their friends, or negatively impacts enemies - but since every player knows how to play their instrument, they all have 'Bard' potential and could learn more in the future.

Are you charging into a fight head on, giving and receiving large amounts of direct damage with melee weapons? Play a battle fanfare which boosts physical traits. This would be fantastic to do while mounted.

Do you want to reduce the defenses of enemies, make them confused and uncertain, or increase the amount of time it takes to do things like trigger an alert or cast a powerful spell? Play a haunting dirge as you sneak around - your connection to the spirits makes the atmosphere feel heavier. They believe they are surrounded, and their odds of winning are hopeless. Maybe some of them will just throw their weapons on the ground and retreat?

Obviously there are problems that are easy to identify:

• 'everyone will prefer a song to match their build'
• 'everyone will play different songs for maximum buffs or debuffs'
• 'groups get a huge bonus vs solo'

And not to mention if one of us starts playing a song:

• how does a group decide?
• does the soundtrack change if someone else starts playing?
• does it change with the pace of the gameplay (e.g enemies start dying, the battle ends)

It is a passive system to provide an 'atmospheric buff' and so the idea is that it doesn't really matter how the game decides who plays the song, just that someone in the group has collected the knowledge of how to play it. Then it could be argued that they are sharing that knowledge, and then one or more characters in the party could be animated as playing their instrument while they aren't doing anything else with their hands.

[quiet saddle]

Passive Bard

[quiet saddle]

When I think about it, I am picturing something like an emote which creates buffs or debuffs. Once you switch it on it will just keep playing, but you can switch it off by doing any other hand-based action like using a weapon, interacting with an object or character (e.g climbing a ladder, opening a door, swinging, drawing or sheathing a weapon).