Thursday, December 22, 2005
Musical Creation, Part Deux
Is this cheating? Mayhaps.
Anyway, I had some more thoughts on this whole musical creation thing.
Once all the Setting elements have been chosen, there's a number of dials that you set. Something along the lines of: Genre, Key, Tempo...maybe more? I know next to nothing about music as such.
Anyway, Genre would be a musical genre, and also the genre of the game (sometimes this is contiguous, and sometimes it'll need interpretation. I mean "Country" is pretty easy, or "Punk Rock". But, like, "Egyptian Orchestral"? Or even "Classical" could lead to many different kinds of games. "Bollywood" - now that would be some crazy shit). Maybe this is the genre of the song you played, or maybe it's not. In either case, the dial setting is how strictly the setting adheres to the genre, with some kind of mechanical effect in there somewhere. Maybe penalties for going outside genre? I dunno.
Key would be kinda funky. I'd need to talk to some music theory people and ask about what keys are standard for what "sounds" of music - like, calming, angry, progressive, whatever. Anyway, you set a number of keys (oh, a chord!) that corresponds to those themes/moods/whatever are in the setting. Maybe three, maybe five, depending on how extensive actual key corrolations are. Now, this is entirely in my head, and I don't know if it would make sense to people that actually know music.
Tempo would be a certain number that would have a lot of mechanical weight - something like, your actions push your personal Tempo up and down, and when its within certain ranges of the main Tempo it does stuff - too under and you get penalties to active things and bonuses to passive thigns, too over and it's vice versa, or something like that.
Other music stuff that would translate to fun mechanics?
Overall, I'm starting to get an idea of an Everway/Multiverser kind of thing, where theres an infinity of worlds, or at least locations, that are each musically-linked in this manner. You could pre-gen a number of them, as examples for creating your own, and characters from those worlds are always built on songs of that genre.
So I'm still missing grippy Situation creation, but I'm feeling better about the rest.
Anyway, I had some more thoughts on this whole musical creation thing.
Once all the Setting elements have been chosen, there's a number of dials that you set. Something along the lines of: Genre, Key, Tempo...maybe more? I know next to nothing about music as such.
Anyway, Genre would be a musical genre, and also the genre of the game (sometimes this is contiguous, and sometimes it'll need interpretation. I mean "Country" is pretty easy, or "Punk Rock". But, like, "Egyptian Orchestral"? Or even "Classical" could lead to many different kinds of games. "Bollywood" - now that would be some crazy shit). Maybe this is the genre of the song you played, or maybe it's not. In either case, the dial setting is how strictly the setting adheres to the genre, with some kind of mechanical effect in there somewhere. Maybe penalties for going outside genre? I dunno.
Key would be kinda funky. I'd need to talk to some music theory people and ask about what keys are standard for what "sounds" of music - like, calming, angry, progressive, whatever. Anyway, you set a number of keys (oh, a chord!) that corresponds to those themes/moods/whatever are in the setting. Maybe three, maybe five, depending on how extensive actual key corrolations are. Now, this is entirely in my head, and I don't know if it would make sense to people that actually know music.
Tempo would be a certain number that would have a lot of mechanical weight - something like, your actions push your personal Tempo up and down, and when its within certain ranges of the main Tempo it does stuff - too under and you get penalties to active things and bonuses to passive thigns, too over and it's vice versa, or something like that.
Other music stuff that would translate to fun mechanics?
Overall, I'm starting to get an idea of an Everway/Multiverser kind of thing, where theres an infinity of worlds, or at least locations, that are each musically-linked in this manner. You could pre-gen a number of them, as examples for creating your own, and characters from those worlds are always built on songs of that genre.
So I'm still missing grippy Situation creation, but I'm feeling better about the rest.
// posted by Nathan P. @ 12/22/2005 11:56:00 PM 
