DADZ effect

When I was a teenager, we had those schoolmates’ parties in which we played a game we called “the item hunter”.

We selected one of us arbitrarily to be the I. H. and we sent him outside the room with a jailer that made sure he was not spying. We then chose an item inside the room, whatever that item may be including humans or even a particular part of a human (an ear) but it could be an earring as well. Anything at all, a book a lamp you name it.

The hunter is called to cum in with his jailer and the game begins.

The hunter walks in the room, and we (all of us) are supposed to give him a vocal feedback telling him/ her how close he/ she is from the secret item.
The pattern starts with a soft {sssssssss} then gets louder and then turns into a {zzzzzzzzzz} then even lounder until we turn it into {rrrrrrrrrrr} when the hunter is almost there and finally we cry out in the most silly way possible saying BINGO ooooooooooooooh.

Ok. What does this introduction has to do with RPG .... is what I am about to tell you.
There are four different sound concepts in RPG.

  • 1- Ambient sound, which reflects time and place in a most general way.
  • 2- Sound-Track, which is a musical identity that more or less prepares you emotionally or even scare you such as the cursed abbey theme in Divinity.

  • 3- Spoken dialogs, which are comprehensible speech cuts that duplicate a written dialogue for realism.

  • 4- Sound effects, which are related to objects undergoing a change of state, including taking and putting items or coming closer to an Orc or a demon.


DADZ effect (named after my-avatar-forum-name of course <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> ) is about that “sound-crescendo” reflecting proximity from a critical item or a dangerous race. However, rather than our old and primitive buzzing I am suggesting a much more creative musical effect. Musicians are very well informed on what drum-breaks should mean, or the introduction of a new instrument into the polyphony. Therefore, inside the second sound feature we call the musical-sound-track we can create it with some Artificial Intelligence handling the MIDI File Track Mixer. By triggering more and more tracks as the hero comes closer to a big surprise that could render the hero dead without prior warning.

Even though you know, expect, and anticipate a dramatic event, your heartbeat shall increase, your real life agility and tension rises and the excitement of the moment is enhanced. It is not a spoiler at all because simply dying to reload the last saved game is not really exciting at all. However, with this effect added you shall enjoy the thrilling events of the game even more and allow the script writer to include such events now and then to break the boring hack & and slash time intervals.

How about a different scheme of the same effect to give you a hint that a critical item is in this room and that you should look for it very carefully because no button shall reveal it for you?

This would certainly increase the excitement of investigation and make you enjoy solving riddles without missing one out.

Your feedback on this idea is greatly appreciated but all rights are reserved as of this moment because I patented it exclusively for Larian Studios by posting this post as an unprecedented verbose descriptor of the DADZ effect.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />