MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

Hey guys, Lani here. Ever since I started playing Mabi back in G0, the music system has always fascinated me. As someone who did band in grade school and ended up Majoring in music, the music system is what always kept me coming back to the game. The system isn’t without its flaws, and with a private server, we have a chance to help make it a bit better. Here, I’m going to spit out a few ideas on how we can improve it from a performance standpoint, maybe make it a bit more desireable for Dungeon play, and overall improve the experience with it. If any of these ideas are not at all feasible, just let me know. I just want to put the ideas out there.

Step one - Playing Failure
One of the biggest problems with the system as-is is the potential to fail when playing songs. While I know that it’s an integral part of training the Instrument skill, it’s always been painful when playing music for the sake of playing music, particularly when using the Party Play/Jam Session to play with others. I don’t suggest that we remove the variance when playing music. After all, practicing your instrument can often be ugly and it’s needed by the Playing Instrument skill for training. What I do propose, though, are work-arounds for those who just want to play the music, like those that the Bard skills provided on live. Here are some thoughts:

1)When using Jam Session or the Performance (Tip Jar) action, remove the RNG on playing at the cost of not having it count for skill training.

2)Using Playing Instrument always sounds perfect, but the Training Req is still determined with the RNG

3)"Artisan” instruments available to those with high ranked Instrument skill (R5+, etc) that always perfect play, at the cost of not fulfilling training. These would serve as incentive to rank up Playing Instrument, and getting to them would be the end goal. Think like the weapons or Gloomy Sunday that required Master-level Talent to use.

Step two - Magical Music
Magic music was added as a way for bards to interact with dungeon runs in a meaningful way. So why does all of it suck? The Special Effects (Berserker, Fast Cast, Fast Aim) all seem fine but it takes forever to get the scrolls made and using them in a dungeon itself is just cumbersome. The Stat boost and healing ones are just such minor effects that there’s no reason to even use them. The scrolls from Briana and Barry give much better, guaranteed effects, so why shouldn’t the Magic Music you can make yourself? All I ask here is to make the Recovery and Stat effects more potent and have them always trigger. At rank 1, the highest a stat can be raised is by 15, and that’s on the very top of the RNG. That’s not worth an extra person in your dungeon that’s actively not fighting. Maybe double it? Triple? What would make that worth it without it being broken? Same for the healing. At Rank 1 Playing you can cap at 10 points every 10 seconds. Pretty much no reason for that. Let’s make bards useful if we’re not implementing the bard skill themselves.

Step three - Composing
I can understand not wanting to uncap composing and musical knowledge for Magic balance reasons (if that’s even a valid reasoning), but as someone who has composed and arranged for Mabi, having longer lengths on scores would be incredibly valuable. I’m not saying to just increase everything to 9999 (which would be amazing, by the way), but increasing things to even 150% of the rank 1 lengths would offer some tremendous leeway in what could be put into the game.

On that note, is it possible at all to change the nature of score scrolls? Is it possible to add more lines? Is it possible to add in Singing and make it so you could Sing while playing your instrument?

Step four - More Instruments
I remember hearing a few months back that it was possible or on the radar to add instruments that were later added into the game, like the Piano. I also heard someone was potentially developing new sound fonts for instruments to be added into the game. I think that would be amazing! Diversifying what we have available and pushing the limits of what’s possible under MML would be fantastic. Personally, I’ve always wanted things like Banjos and Accordions available, but that’s just me. If there is someone working on this sort of thing, I would love to talk to you.

Anyways, those are my thoughts!
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I agree with everything here. Also would be nice to have bard skills, but I doubt those will be added anytime soon (if at all).

Some of our volunteer item importers (Waffo and Noone) have successfully imported G20's Soundfont and instruments. However, not the Cello and Piano as they are slightly different.

However, there's a lot of complications in your other suggestions.
For the most part, it's all skill modifications (or additions) which are literally not possible within our budget.

Composing can be uncapped to R1 and it may be possible to uncap the length even further, but still requires modifications to the skill (albiet not quite as hard to do like your other suggestions).

I also love everything I could see here. However I also could see instantly what can be done or what won't be able to make it. Some are really nice ideas (Magical music ? Damn that's nice ! Adding/editing skills, urg...) but the most easily accessible ones are things I'm really looking forward to ! Expansion of music which is a very core part of Mabinogi is something I'd love to see. I even have a friend who recently joined, the first thing he asked when he saw we could play music was "can we do damn epic songs and boost the shit out of you in battles ?", as of now I'm not sure of what to answer (is there anything bard related ? I'm pretty sure bard skills got implemented later than G13 but I also remember some stats boosts from way before, so, what's what ?).

By the way, as players and maybe archives delvers etc, without any very specific skills, is it possible for us to help in any away aside of tipping the jar ?