Combat and Scene Switching

Minstrel watches the current scene and the running encounter, then plays the cue that ranks highest for the current state. A cue points at a mood, a whole playlist, or a single track. You assign cues on the console’s Scenes, Combat, and Actors tabs.

One GM drives playback

Foundry designates one connected GM as the active GM. Only that client evaluates cues and starts or stops sound, and every other connected client hears the result. Minstrel reevaluates whenever a user connects or disconnects, so the designation passes to another connected GM when the current one drops.

Which encounter Minstrel watches

The current scene is the activated scene, or the scene on the canvas when no scene is activated.

Minstrel prefers the encounter that is both active and on the current scene. Failing that, it takes any encounter on the current scene. Failing that, it takes whichever encounter is active elsewhere.

Scene music and combat music

The Scene cue on the current scene plays while no fight is running. It keeps playing during a fight when no combat cue outranks it.

Combat cues apply only once the encounter has been started. Creating the encounter and adding combatants is not enough on its own.

Minstrel reevaluates when the canvas becomes ready, when a scene is activated, when an encounter starts, when an encounter is deleted, when the turn or round changes in a started encounter, when a combatant is added to or removed from a started encounter, and when a cue is edited on a scene, actor, or token.

Ending an encounter deletes it, which drops every combat cue from the running.

A transition writes a fade length onto each playlist the cue names. A mood cue uses the mood’s own fade length. A playlist or track cue uses the crossfade length from Settings.

The resolution order

The cue owned by the combatant taking the current turn wins outright. Its token, its prototype token, and its actor all count as that combatant’s own.

Everything below only decides the outcome when the combatant taking the turn has no cue of its own.

Combat music resolution in Settings applies next.

• Highest priority adds no preference of its own.
• Last actor to act walks backwards through the turn order from the current turn and favors the first combatant it finds that owns a cue.
• Prefer the scene cue favors the scene’s own Scene cue.
• Prefer the generic combat cue favors any combat cue that is not set on an actor.

After that, the higher priority number wins. Every cue row on the console carries an editable priority number, prefilled with a starting value for that kind of cue.

A cue whose mood, playlist, or track no longer exists is skipped, and the next cue in order plays instead. The console shows such a row’s target as “Missing”.

Silencing a context

A suppressed context drops all of its cues from the running. The Scenes tab carries a “Silence scene music” toggle and the Combat tab carries a “Silence combat music” toggle. The keybindings “Toggle scene music” and “Toggle combat music” do the same thing, and neither has a default key assigned.

Resuming a playlist that was cut off

When a transition stops a cue, Minstrel records which track of each of that cue’s playlists was playing and how far into that track playback had reached. Nothing is recorded for a playlist with no track playing.

The next time a cue starts that playlist, the marked track plays and every client seeks to the recorded position. A whole-playlist cue starts the marked track directly. A cue that names a specific track resumes only when the mark is for that same track.

Marks are stored in world settings, so they survive a reload.