Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

This thought was a little out there, but I thought it worth mentioning, and might add a little depth to the game. Feel free to shoot it down, its just a funny little idea I thought up.

Our adventurers are always trudging into stinky places, swamps, Sewers, Zhentil Keep, slipping on horse poo, and doing stuff that would make any real person sweat which should also in turn make them smelly! Smell should affect the character's charisma until it is taken care of. Doesn't really matter how smooth talking or gorgeous they are if they smell like an open sewer people wont want to deal with them!

I dunno if its feasible to code, but I think it would be very similar to the drunk code. Certain actions add add to smell:
+1 Running
+1 Eatting Smelly foods
+2 Slipping on horse poo
+5 entering swampland
+10 entering sewers

And some take away from it:
-2 Perfume (really just hiding it)
-5 Swimming
-5 going to a fountain/barrel/watersource and "wash" -5 to smell (quick wash of hands, face)
-10 Bathing in a bath house/freshwater source

affects:
0 and below = No echo, no cha modifier, no affects
1-3 smell = private echo to PC that they are dirty (you always know first), Affects: Beginning to smell
4-6 smell = Occasional notice that someone is smelling sweaty, -1 charisma until clean, Affects: Smells a little
7-9 smell = More insistent echo that someone STINKS! -2 cha until clean, affect: Smells bad
10+ smell = Echo: SOMEONE STINKS LIKE THE SEWER! -3 cha until clean, Affected: YOU STINK LIKE THE SEWER

Talonites might have fun with this code too, being able to get super stinky. Orcs and goblins wouldn't mind probably, but the more civilized races wouldn't be so tolerant of it, especially not sunites. And it might get the bathhouses some more player traffic. Probably would need some tweaking to those to make it work.

I dunno just a crazy thought I had.

How would you account for "cultural olfactory conditioning" (sounds official, eh?)?

I mean, for example, that it is less likely for someone to notice that you are sweaty in many places because most people are not bathing. A large majority of my work involves not bathing, sometimes for weeks at a time, and you really never notice it until you take a shower yourself. My girlfriend almost threw up when I opened my sea bag, but I never noticed a smell.

I think that reactions would vary across the Realms. Waterdhavians might notice some cases, but people from Daggerford probably wouldn't. I bet that a Sunite would notice before a Tempuran. How would you plan to account for that?

Well, a 1-10 scale was just my crude example for it working, not really intended as a final draft. The range was intended to help with that tolerance. But Daggerford might be more of a 2 naturally whereas Waterdeep is a 0 (yay for dungsweepers guild), Calimport might be more of a 3.. all of which fall into the social unnoticed except to yourself category. 1-3 is actually a somewhat wide range on a 10 point scale. By 4 you would be almost halfway to as smelly as possible. I don't know if it's even code-able much less what sort of numbers the coding would support. The drawback could be less, with a 1 to 18 scale or so maybe, with negative stats appearing closer to sewer, or just drop the charisma effect completely so only adventurers will react to it in RP.

Maybe I overdid the first post by adding in the rough scale. That was intended as a general concept, a way of explaining my thoughts better. But eh, I don't know that this idea will be well liked enough to even warrant considering these technical aspects of it yet. It was just kinda a goofy idea that hit me as one of my characters climbed out of the sewer and immediately was able to sell a piece of loot to a merchant. If the general idea is absolutely loathed by everyone, the scale itself is irrelevant.

I think if you walked in to any shop in daggerford with fresh muck up to your waist smelling like the sewers you'd be lucky not to be thrown out. A merchant would throw a fit if he thought you were going to soil his merchandise. "Get your grubby hands off my fine silks!" With the current system you can stride right in in rusty armor covered in sewer grime, vomit and urine, and buy at the same price just as if you walked in robed in silks, with a perfume box around your neck. That doesn't seem right to me RP-wise, seems less right than the slightly smelly merchant in Daggerford reacting the same as the tidy one in Waterdeep. I really think it would be cool if the code somehow supported it so that characters actually considered washing up a little before hanging around in the square or shopping after tromping through swamps and sewers.

I also was thinking it needed to be simple, because if the code is too complex, unique, difficult, incredibly large, or forces a modification to 10,000,000 lines of script, even if supported by players (which I'm not sure it will be) it will bog down Mask, and I suspect he already has an enormous to-do list. That was one of the reasons I was hoping the drunk code would be similar. If that only had to be copied and tweaked to make it work, then it might not be a monumental task, but then just that might be huge.