> > >combat or a regular event based combat that between each "round" of
> > >fighting the mud would prompt the user for a choice of commands,
> >
> > I've been thinking about changing my thac0 system around a bit myself
> > but i think you'll seriously peeve your users off if you interupt the
> > fighting prompting them to enter commands in between rounds.
>
> The problem is a bit more complicated. Think about it. The mud
> time is continuously running. It would indeed look silly for a player
> and a mob to "suspend time" in favor of round system. Also,
> there's the problem of combat being held up by a player not
> entering a command. Do we penalize the player and continue
> combat or use a default command?
>
It's even more involved than you suspect. In a standard
turn-based rpg game, a single player controls all characters in a
concerted way. In a mud, we're dealing with multiple independent players,
many of whom may not even be grouped with the people engaged in combat.
How do you deal with people who's favorite tactic is to rush in/stab/rush
out, or even the mob auto-aggro or otherwise attacking all passerbys..
remember, you're limiting the mob action to a turn based system too...
There are, of course, ways to handle this. One of the muds I used
to work on had the concept of scripted players - that is, players could
more-or-less define how they wanted to fight, which spells they would
cast, which equipment/etc they would use, and could assign that fighting
style a name or trigger.
That way, they could say, make sure to auto-flee upon reaching 10%
max hitpoints, or cast heal as long as their hits < max_heal_spell_gain or
whatever.
The concept was that you would have a default style at all times,
and could change it whenever you wanted during a battle (and since the
combat in circlemud is time-based, it would activate correctly upon the
pulses).
It's not that it was necessarily a bad idea, just that players
could do the same thing already with zmud and other third-party clients.
I'd be interested to hear how you plan to deal with some of these
problems.
PjD
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