[MUD-Dev] Critique this combat system

[hart.s at attbi.com]

[Britt Green]

> Praise is also encouraged! ;)

Of course, the person who should be pleased by your project is
YOU. Unless you're getting a check ;)

Overall, the system looks fine for the purposes you describe, but:

  - If you want fighting to be fun or exciting, you need to punch it
  up some, I think. E.g., allow outcomes to be determined by
  decisions in an interesting way. The more the system depends on
  "character" stats like "agility rating," the more you are
  emphasizing the agility rating and the more each combat is just
  the playing-out of battles already won & lost (e.g., in spending
  more time playing and therefore having more AGI, or whatever).

  - If you don't care if fighting is fun or exciting, you should
  still consider giving players control other than how much they
  have been sitting in the game and leveling or whatever. This time,
  instead of making it interesting, you are making it tolerable - so
  you could emphasize things like the ability to flee.

The angle I've been working through recently is to let combat be
fast & perfunctory, and to place the decisions elsewhere. As an
example (which I'm not using,) a vampire game PvP might feature
players searching for each others' hidden coffins, with interesting
and strategic possibilities, but when they are actually found it's
merely a consummation of the victory (or the achievement of
bargaining position).

Kind of a political-scale approach to PVP really, which lets the
game have relatively lower lethality even while combat has higher
lethality, without necessarily removing conflict or
decision-making. Obvious parallels could be drawn with, say, chess
or RTS.

- No matter whether combat itself is fun or not, you have to think
out how you are going to prevent, e.g. people killing each other
over and over again as a form of grief play, how you are going to
keep anyone online after they die and lose everything,
etc. (obviously dependent on other details).

Keep it up!

Sasha

----

P.S. A little more detailed consideration follows:


Let me try to summarize the overall arc of a single hit in your
system:

  1. Agility and weapon skill determine whether a hit lands.

  You didn't say what determines agility and weapon skill, but if
  they are just built up gradually, that suggests either that all of
  the action (e.g., decisions) in fighting are elsewhere, or that
  there aren't any decisions, just another reason to level up.

  2. [Armor determines how much damage a hit does.]

  This obviously does some of the work of making the constant
  hitting not so bad. If you had armor on, no big deal. So now there
  is a big incentive to get armor. How that happens is important,
  too. And the magnitude of attacks and what determines that is
  important (you do give it to some extent).  But leaving these
  aside, there is no decision other than the decision to wear the
  armor. Hardly makes for epic battles, but then again, you said the
  point was partially to make people avoid fighting. OK. But if they
  have armor, they'll fight with armor on, or get armor and try to
  find people with less armor.  Or get big damage weapons and
  nullify the effect.

  At this point the concerns get quantitative (how much armor?  how
  much damage? how much chance of dying?) Not insoluble.

  3. Luck rolls determine the consequences of damage.

  Consider removing different abilities, not just doing a luck roll
  for death. E.g., injured legs and you can't run, injured arms and
  you can't hit. This stuff is REALLY easy and REALLY fun to play
  with. And if you allow some kind of aiming it is a place for
  tactical decisions to be made.

The system I did a few years ago went pretty far down this path, and
I will attest that it was fun to write, at least - but needs lots of
support if you want it to be fun to play as well.

  (That's vague, you might say - you'd be right. What I mean is, you
  need to vouch for people not running around as cripples or dying
  constantly if they do fight. Or by making sure that fighting is
  totally unnecessary, that the danger is clear, and that there are
  easy ways to avoid it, like failsafe fleeing, etc.)

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