Chants and Lore

[Pyradox]

You know what sound cool? Chanters. Just look at this:

Chanters construct chants from individual iconic phrases and rhyming couplets they have memorized from hundreds of stories and poems' date=' creating a chain of magical effects that plays out over time.[/quote']

I've been thinking about how this can work mechanically for a while, and it could make for a really interesting custom casting system. Obviously there's no information about it for now, only that it'll be different from Wizards, Priests and Ciphers, but just for fun, here's what I'm envisioning:

 

Overview

Chanters construct elaborate scripts for spirits using lore fragments that describe actions or events. In doing so the Chanter is an extremely versatile class, capable of altering the metagame of a battle through numerous simultaneous buffs ans debuffs, the power and wuantity of which are determined by their level. There are no predefined chants - though ballads and poems certainly exist and can be used as such, this system is built around custom effects and as such the individual unit of a chant is what gives the effects, not the chant as a whole. Think elemental casting from Magicka, but with a few important tweaks for flavour and strategy, as opposed to mayhem and hilarity.

 

The goals of this system are flexibility, interesting tactical decisions, the choice to scale for power or versatility over time and consistency with the lore, because what is a chanter if not a gigantic continuity nerd?

 

The Structure of a Chant

Chants consist of a series of phrases spoken along to a certain structure.

A chanter can rehearse a fixed number of chants based on their level, but can only perform one at a time. High level chants are longer, meaning they have more effects and a greater duration. Each effect represents a single phrase, and its strength is based on its position in the chant.

A chant plays out sequentially over time, with each effect in sequence becoming more powerful as the song increases in volume, the spirits get caught up in the action and the chant reaches its climax. This means that early on in the fight, you get simple effects, but as things get more intense, dramatic stuff starts happening. Once the chant ends, the local spirits return to whatever it is they do, but won't act out the same chant twice in a row, meaning you need to vary your chants for long battles. On the other hand, you may wish to use multiple weaker chants with different effects to account for the ebb and flow of combat - whether you commit to a full on epic or a short anthology is up to you.

 

Resource: Lore fragments

Lore Fragments are where you get Phrases. Phrases can be either individual lines or rhyming couplets. The primary difference being you can use a rhyming couplet multiple times to repeat an effect, but phrases can only be used once. For simplicity's sake let's just stick with individual lines for this explanation.

 

The individual phrases of a chant are gathered through lore fragments, which are gathered by reading in-game lore - books, poems, plays, tales (dialogue) and songs all contribute lore fragments to a chanter. Such effects include summons, buffs, debuffs, illusions, modifiers or new abilities for your party. So a line about divine intervention might create an angelic figure to guard you, but it won't actually smite your enemies.

 

Each phrase is a actual short, generic line such as "...the sun blinded my foes..." (Damage perception) or "...the heroes' blades struck true..." (Bonus to hit) which gives a basic impression of their purpose. These phrases are the parts of the chant that have power, anything between them is not defined during construction. From the moment the line is spoken in the chant, its effect lasts for the duration of the chant, unless overridden. This means that multiple similar effects stack, and can be modified as the chant progresses. So in the case above, the chanter confers a blinding debuff to his foes, followed by an increase in hit chance to his allies. A really high level chant could confer maybe a dozen such effects in sequence, and the length of the chant means the later ones could get quite powerful. So the same blinding debuff at the end of the chant might confer -10 to perception, actually blinding them for a few seconds as the chant concluded.

 

Resource: Epic Tales

Tales are where you get Structures (and sometimes more phrases).

 

Finding an epic tale is like finding a wizard's grimoire - it's a prearranged layout of fragments designed to shape an encounter to a certain purpose. You might get lore fragments as you do from any other source, but an inexperienced chanter might not be able to tell which parts of a Tale are references to actual events (and thus have power), or are just embellishment (makes the chant flow better, but has no mechanical purpose). However, different tales have different structures - not all of them involve consistently rising action. These structures might provide multiple, smaller peaks of intensity, or offer an earlier peak followed by a slow decline, prolonging powerful effects. These structures would scale based on length, but you can't apply a high level structure to a low level chant and expect it to work right- it's just not long enough. The intensity just won't increase by more than a certain amount in any one interval.

 

A structure gives a chant its form - if you're interrupted, any subsequent bonuses conferred by your structure take a penalty. If the next phrase is reduced to 0 power or less because of this (that'll be a factor of the time and severity of the interruption) the chant fizzles and the spirits forget what they were doing, meaning you have to start again.

 

Rehearsal

Chants operate on a rehearsal mechanic much like a Vancian system, where they must structure chants ahead of time in order to write them into a choerent narrative. This can't be done in combat, but much like spell levels, chanters can end up memorising multiple chants at once, though they can only perform one at a time. The length and number of chants you can know changes per level. As you unlock new chant tiers every few levels you automatically get a short chant at that tier, and at each level up you can choose to either add a new verse to an existing chant, or add a new chant to an already available level. You get several points to spend on this, and it's more expensive to buy a new chant than it is to add onto an existing one, and more expensive still to do it at a higher level.

 

Chant Points and Tiers

So a low level Chanter might have one four-verse chant at tier 1, and a two-verse chant at tier 2. Upon levelling up he gets two points to spend. higher level chants are more complex making it harder to write, but easier to introduce new elements, so it costs more to learn a new chant at a higher level and less to increse it's length. Low level chants are inherently simplistic so it's easy to write, but doesn't allow for much detail, meaning it costs less to learn a low-level chant and more to increase its length.

 

So he can choose to:

• Increase his first tier chant to 5 phrases (2 points)
  
• Learn a new, 2-phrase first tier chant (also 2 points)
  
• Lengthen his second level chant to 4 phrases (again, 2 points)
  

Say the chanter chooses to learn a new first-tier chant. He can now combine as many phrases as he wants onto any structures he knows in order to determine their effects.

 

He knows Phrases with the following effects: "Bonus hit chance", "Bonus damage", "Summon ally" and "Daze" (which is a couplet). His only structure is "Linear Increase" which adds 1 to each subsequent effect. Each tier also adds 1 to his effects. These numbers of course would require balancing before being included, but in this case, we'll assume each effect is of equal power.

 

So his new loadout might look like this:

1. (Tier 1) Daze 1/Bonus hit chance 2/Daze 3/Bonus damage 4
   
2. (Tier 1) Summon Ally 1/Bonus Damage 2
   
3. (Tier 2) Bonus Damage 2/Bonus Hit Chance 3
   

Duplicates

As you play you're likely to come across different phrases with duplicate effects. You usually can't repeat the same phrase twice in a chant without employing a rhyming couplet (maybe with a feat where you improvise a new wording?) but you can absolutely use the same effect on multiple phrases. This means you can have chanters who slowly increase the damage their party does over time.

 

Variations and Extensions

I think that's enough for one post, but here's some other ideas I didn't feel like cluttering up the mechanics with:

• Structures with a certain rhyme scheme, so you have to use couplets with specific spacing
  
• Performing different chants in taverns for money where the length and variety of effects resulted in more coin
  
• Writing down chants and selling them for a small profit. This requires ink and parchment to craft, but is a repeatable source of income.
  
• Improvisation mini-game where two chanters battle it out on stage for the crowd's affections, with rhyming bonuses for couplets
  
• Counterchanting where you automatically employ phrases to nullify a targeted chanter's efforts, provided you know them, and provied you aren't currently chanting yourself.
  

What do you reckon? Too easy to abuse? Lack of direct damage makes it impractical?

Edited October 15, 2012 by Pyradox

[khango]

I like the idea of collecting phrases with different effects and then arranging them in different ways. There could even be a quest to find a lost epic that turns out to be an awesome chant of several stanzas/lines/snippets that you could work into your existing stuff. I think it's a neat idea.

[Pyradox]

That would certainly be doable - in fact it would require a lot of dungeons have lore behind them for Chanters to collect, which basically works out great for everyone. The more high-level the dungeon, the more epic the tales.