Drawing Cards for Combat (long suggestion)

Discussion in 'Skills and Combat' started by Freeman, Mar 29, 2013.

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  1. Freeman

    Freeman Avatar

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    There's one thing in all the interviews that honestly makes me wince, and that's the description of combat.

    Questing? Old school, hard-core no quest markers. YAY!

    Story? 40 hours each part if you push it, 5 parts. YAY!

    Characters? 1. Deal with it. YAY!

    Combat? I'm thinking something casual, like the game dominion. WTF? Really? One of the cornerstones of a CRPG game is going to get air brushed in?

    Look.. I love Dominion, and have all the expansions and that at home. It's fun. But this doesn't feel like a good fit for where the game is going. I understand the concept that sometimes you forget to do something in a fight, as a black belt I know it's happened to me a lot, but that will happen naturally through play anyway. We don't need to introduce it artificially.

    It's a question of balancing Strategy and Tactics. The dominion game does OK at building a strategy portion, but falls short on tactics.

    So, let me throw this out there, as my suggestion, as I don't just want to bring complaints.

    The idea is similar to the dialog system in Vanguard. Each character has Aggression, momentum and focus pools they can build up to do special attacks. This makes it the opposite of the cool down spamming. You have to actively do things to raise these pools in combat. When there are enough points, the skill becomes available.

    Simple concept to understand, now let me layer on the complexity and show why you can't just spam build up points until you're ready to go.

    Or, bank the points for a bigger payoff (more damage, defense, etc) later.

    The other side of this is the other player's attacks are manipulating your pools as well. Lowering your focus to keep you from getting in a good attack, or breaking your momentum.

    Other skills could use your point pool against you. For example someone with a lot of momentum could use your aggression pool to help determine the damage they do with an attack. This allows people to play active and reactive fighting styles. Ones where they count on the enemy building up big pools and using those instead. Or focusing on themselves, and hoping they don't get slammed for being to focused, moving to fast, or blinded by aggression.

    More complex moves might require multiple pools at minimum levels. Everyone will probably have a mix of skills, but focused on a couple.

    Armor and weapon choice would have an affect on things as well. Fighters that focus on momentum probably wouldn't chose heavy armor, focus fighters might like archery or daggers for precise strikes.

    Or you can drop some of the more complex stuff.

    At the end it creates a nice simple rock paper scissors concept that most people can wrap their heads around, but allows for some real in-depth tactics and strategy later.
     
  2. Haddy G

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    It sounds like Magic the Gathering deck building. If you pick too many skills before the fight then the odds of getting the needed skill become slim. That certainly adds a random element to combat. This card system sounds like it would work well on a tablet. I wonder if that is why he designed it this way. RG has stated him wants SotA to be ported to tablets in the future.

    BTW I like Magic so am good with this system. :)
     
  3. Jonathon.Doran

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    I have nothing against tablets, as long as they don't cause the game to be weakened down. A keyboard is a pretty good interface: It is fast, expressive, and found everywhere.

    Perhaps the tablet interface could be a limited form of macros, which would leave the keyboard players free to either use these macros or use their keyboards.

    To tell the truth, a deck building game is not something I am looking forward to. It will be a tough sell, but I'll take a serious look at what comes out. Players have expectations built on their experience playing other games, and it would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak).
     
  4. Umbrae

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    RG doesn't like the term "Cards" or "Decks". He describes this more as limiting your skill choices strategically. I am looking forward to hearing more, but I doubt this is anything we have enough information to visualize yet.
     
  5. PrimeRib

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    I think the GW2 system was one of the better once I've seen....they got many things right:

    Active dodges
    Weapons choice determined your active skills
    Swapping weapons
    Every class had "6" to heal

    The problems were:

    Cooldowns
    Everything but the heal (and the "1" for the auto-attack skill) was just random instead of making sense
    Skills with very different targeting mechanisms were all mixed together
    Bizarrely the skills associated with your left had were mapped to 4-5 and your right hand to 1-3
     
  6. Freeman

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    @Umbrae - The term he likes or doesn't, still makes me wince when he says you pick those out, outside of battle. I have this image of a character planning to storm a castle via some caves sneaking in, but they end up being blocked off, and having to shoot my bow.

    Now, despite the fact that I've trained with the bow, I supposedly don't remember any of my special skills. Nope... that's all gone.

    Or I set up planning to fight an ogre guarding the drawbridge, so I take skills for a solo fight against a single tough creature. Then the goblin ambush arrives, and in spite of me knowing a sweeping move that would handle this, I have to just not do that because I didn't remember to put it in my list of attacks I planned on doing today.

    If I'm wrong, and that's now how things will shake out, then cool. No worries. But that's the direction it sounded like in his interview. If so, I should probably raise these concerns now, and not once things get released.
     
  7. LordSlack

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    I don't know how Dominion works at all, but I have played UO and I have played The Secret World. What it sounds like to me is that you will have tons of skills to chose from like in UO, but instead of having every skill and spell available all over your screen or hotkeyed at the same time, you will have a hotbar where you can only equip a finite number of these. This is how TSW works. Now there has to be a twist on this system where perhaps in addition to the, lets just say 7, cards on your hotbar, you also have another 7 abilities on the backburner. What we don't know is that if you use a skill, will it fall off your bar and randomly be replaced by one of these? Will you be able to select a "deck" of 2-3 cards per slot, so as you use them, they cycle through your equipped skills in that slot?

    I guess I am having a hard time because I have no idea how Dominion plays so have no grasp on this concept outside of relating it to TSW and how they limit your active skills. I can tell you that I am not a fan of pure RNG even if your job is to select the pool it draws from. I can see lots of people getting frustrated when their heal spell or what have you is buried in there somewhere or an opponent draws 3 heals in a row then cuts your head off.
     
  8. BoMbY

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    Can only be TSW-like (some variation of that system). I too can see no way how a random skill availability could work well in any game.
     
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  9. Freeman

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    @LordSlack - nope.

    It's like having a hotbar that randomly fills with a subset of skills you know that you picked before hand.

    So if you know 50 skills, you pick 10 of them for the next battle. You will only be able to use those 10.

    But wait right there... not just when you want. We'll TELL you when you can use them, and act fast, because if you don't, it'll go back in the randomizer, and you may, or may not, see it again in battle.

    How many will you get at one time? Depends on stuff, but it won't be all of them. So lets just say 5. (that's a number I pulled out of my ass, but it sounds like it could be in the ball park of whats available for you).

    Oh... and wait there's more. Some items and equipment will add things to your bag too. Awesome? Wait right there billy, because these items can also add 'duds' that do nothing. You might reach in your bag for skill and get... nothing!

    It's an interesting concept. It's easy to see how it could even be fun... in another game. In another place. In a game where people like the stimulationist elements and want to sheer sheep and bake bread, making combat so 'gamey' rubs a bunch of us the wrong way.
     
  10. redfish

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    @Freeman,

    In Vanguard, do your characters skills and stats (realistically) allow you to build and maintain these pools easier? Part of the issue I have with a lot of real-time combat is that we're talking about the character's skills and stats, not the player's. The player shouldn't have to be a good gamer to win hand-to-hand combat, the character should have to be a skilled fighter.

    As for RG's suggestions, I think it could work okay IF they allowed you to switch skillsets when you were not in the middle of direct m?l?e where you had to dodge attacks. So a bowman doing an ambush wouldn't have to worry about it, and if someone could hide for a couple of seconds without being interrupted, he could switch his skillsets. Perhaps also if someone could block for long enough without being interrupted.

    What gets me worried is the suggestion that you have to set your deck before you go on an adventure, like mages in AD&D memorizing spells at camp before the adventure takes place. If it were that strict it would be overly limiting. But if it were limited to m?l?e situations where you were thinking on your feet it wouldn't be overly limiting.
     
  11. Freeman

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    In my suggestion it would be both. You would have to be involved in combat as a player, but character stats could help with that.

    For example someone with a high agility/dexterity would probably gain momentum faster. Someone with high intelligence/wisdom could gain focus faster, or start with a larger pool, or have a higher cap. And then there's just the basic what skills you have add to what.

    So, in Vanguard, how the conversation works is you have cards that works as 'moves' in the conversation. So "insightful Comment" would give you a point into insight. With enough insight points in your pool, you could play "Poking insecurities" which moves the way the discussion is going towards your favor.

    As you go up in skill you get more cards in your hot bar, and often gain new cards/skills through conversations and quests. These cards can be more powerful, but often require you to have more stuff in your pool before using. Or in some cases multiple pools, or add to multiple pools but have a long cool down before use again.

    So you end up going into most conversations with an opening gambit of what you're going to do to swing things in your favor quickly, but might find the person you're talking to has a card that drains your intimidation pool right before you need it. So you have this skill you can't use because you just don't have the pool to play it.

    It's also neat that conversations with key people in town can affect all the NPC's in town. Sort of a diplomacy monster kinda thing.

    So, if we're dreaming big, here's my vision. Weapon and Armor give you a base start for each pool, and affect the max pool for my aggression, momentum and focus. Special skills can then add or draw from the pools of you or your opponent. Meaning you have to have some skill as a player on when and how you're using them, and work towards using some skills, while at the same time your opponent can be draining them and making you change strategy.

    Example: A ranger type character sees two orcs up ahead in the woods. He draws his bow and uses his skill 'aim'. It keeps him from moving or attacking for a few seconds, but adds to his focus pool. That lets him play 'head shot' (I know, I need better names) because he now has enough 'focus' in his pool. It does enough damage to drop one orc, but now the other one sees him and starts charging.

    He pulls out his swords, and uses his 'spinning slash' to add momentum to his pool. It gives a little, but lowers his defense for a bit. Which means the orc has a chance to use "stunning blow" and cause the ranger's momentum pool to drop. It means the Ranger's plans on his next attack are over. He doesn't have enough momentum.

    Due to a successful hit, the orc's aggression builds up. He uses "bull rush" now that it's available and pushes the ranger out of position, as well as destroying his momentum.

    The ranger, in a bit of panic, starts trying to regain his momentum with defensive maneuvers. Turning on "roll with the punches" means he can't attack, but greatly ups his defense, and adds to his momentum pool every time the orc attacks it took the last of his focus from the archery rounds to do it.

    The orc's agression keeps building, but he's not landing any blows. Eventually the Ranger gets enough momentum to unlock "turn about is fair play" (again, need a better name) and when the orc attacks, his aggression is added to the rangers damage, and the orc dies.

    That's kinda my vision. It's not the only one, but what I like about it is, everything is always available to you, you just have to work up to it. Your character skills can help you do that easier, and so can your player skills with timing, and planning.

    But even better, it isn't something you can just presume to know how battle will go. If that orc hadn't broken momentum right away, other attacks would have been available to the ranger. You could even do things like 'taunt' where you deliberately up the opponents aggression, just to use a skill that plays off it, only to find they had a high end skill you just helped them unlock. Battle would be under the players control, for good or ill, while still being something more than 1,3,5,1,3,5,6,1,3....
     
  12. PrimeRib

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    Is this adding flair or dramatically changing gameplay?

    I absolutely do want the gameplay to be 3323324. And I want these to be understood and predictable.

    If my cards mean that may interrupt has a chance to disarm vs stun, or that I do more bleeding damage and less direct or that my finisher attempts to decapitate, then I think the system is awesome.

    But if I'm staring at my skills trying to figure out wtf they do and then staring at the keyboard because someone keeps moving them around, this is a terrible system.
     
  13. Freeman

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    With my suggestion? It would be yes and yes.

    What my suggestion would do is exchange 'cool downs' for 'warm ups'. It keeps combat predictable, as in [2] always does what [2] does and same with [3] but changes the timing of how you play.

    It creates a 'rock/paper/scissors' game play where your opponent factors into your strategy as much as your play style does. So you could set yourself up to only focus on your pools and know that doing [2] twice will give you enough momentum to do [3]. You just have to worry if your opponent is suppressing that with their attacks.

    Because of that, you might play a reactive fighter, who's sole focus is on your opponents style, and you're just using their own skills against them. Or a leader/team fighter that gives points to the pools in your group.

    If you're talking about their game play, and what they want?

    Then I'm with you. Let me cards be 'add-ons' to the combat. It means 3323324 stands as is, but there's a chance to have some special effects due to my moves. But it doesn't sound like that's how it's going down... they even suggested that you can't access potions without having it be a card in your bag. Or that you won't have full access to your spells during combat.

    I'm concerned about that. I see potential in the idea, but the execution as I understand it is scaring me.
     
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