COMBAT SYSTEM SUGGESTION - Turn By Turn

[Enkidu98]

Hello,

 

I just dropped a funding update on kickstarter because I had seen something last week about this and also that you were looking at doing the 'old school' type combat where you pause, make decisions, and continue.

 

I know you have some hardcore PnP RPG freaks on your staff and so I was hoping maybe one of them has heard of 'Blood and Steel' which was a 'card game' addition to AD&D combat.

 

Quick Summary:

Game had a number of attack/defense cards so you could attack high, Parry Low, etc. Depending on what you chose and your opponent chose there would be bonuses or penalties to the die rolls. Made combat a litte more than just rolling dice but also having some thought placed into it.

 

In the ruleset, as I recall... its has been years, players had access to everything but for my own world/campaign I broke things up so that each region had a specific fighting style and moves that were available. You would have to spend proficiencies to learn another combat style and have their attacks and defenses available to you.

 

In this way I was able to do world building and give combatants from say my 'Corsair Kingdoms' a whole different attitude and style to their fighting than the Knights of the Empire of the Moon. The Plains Nomads, for example, fought primarily from horseback, and so their attack styles were limited in that they did few 'high line' attacks as generally they were fighting from a height already. So they focused on the mid and low line attacks and defenses. If you met one unhorsed, a cunning combatant would use most of their high line attacks while using their mid and low line defenses.

 

Something like this might be an interesting addition to your combat system. Since we'll be pausing and making decisions about our attacks, having some thought into an attack rather than just selecting a generic melee attack' may add depth and richness and reward players who are thinking. This would be a welcome change 'back' to the old style Western RPG instead of the shift to consolize like what happened in Dragon Age: 2 and many others.

[Haplok]

That's an interesting concept. Could be interesting in a game where you had control of your PC only. I'm not sure it would work that well for a party-based game though, where you have to make these kind of choices all the time for each party member. Could become a bit tedious.

[Veca]

I would like to see something akin to what they did in, I believe it was, Fallout Tactics (correct me if I'm wrong), where you could choose between fully Turn based, Squad turn based and full real time combat. It gave diversity to the fights.

 

Although with the full real time combat I would like to see it implemented as it was in IE games, in which you could spacebar the game to pause and think of what to do with the situation, without forcing it into fully turn based

[Sensuki]

RTwP generally means there will be a bunch of auto-pause options to support these slower styles of play?

[Enkidu98]

Well it could always be optional, you can default atttack or you can go down an attack tree and choose the type of attack/type of defense. Players would also likely have AI's and because each combat style is finite, the AI's could take into account their best guesses of what their opponenents style might be and then pick at random for those.

 

I may still have my old files from my campaing floating around ( I haven't PnP RP'd for over a decade... waaah) and if there was more interest I could grab them and then demonstrate some stuff.

 

What was nice was It gave another level of progression to a character as they advnced in levels. Thyeywould unlock more of their styles attacks and defenses and so grew in skill and abilities and let really combat focused charactrs have more flavour to match the skills and abilities of other classes who are always gettign neat stuff.

 

BTW, Monsters etc all had their own decks as well, based on what they were and how they would fight. Intelligent monsters had their own fighting styles as well. So if you are fighting 'giant rats' you know pretty much they are going to attempt to bite and their attacks are going to be coming low most often.

 

Again, would just be a neat addition/option for those who want to play tactically.. and since it is for combat focused players more than any other, the whole party likely wouldn;t be making these choices so may not be too onerous.