slickriptide
Posts: 97
4/16/2016
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I don't know if anyone is still reading this forum, but I figured I'd ask for some input about how people imagine action-style combat being handled in a "text adventure" format.
Fallen London is one example where the physical conflicts are almost entirely abstracted. When a "Dangerous" challenge happens, you can imagine it to take place in any way you like. The important thing is not the details but the result.
I'm fiddling with a super-hero style game. There's only so much rescuing kittens from trees you can do. At some point, the player wants to punch out some bad guys, and she wants that experience to be at least somewhat visceral. A superhero gamer wants the "feel" of combatting evil and having larger-than-life action as part of the conflict resolution for whatever problem she's currently attempting to overcome.
At the same time I don't want to get into treating each individual punch as a dice-roll, in effect. In a tabletop game, maybe you could get away with that, but I think that the narrative-based player needs to feel some immediacy in the resolution of the combat. If he feels like he can just click "go" a couple of times, walk away for two hours, and come back and say, "where was I -- Oh, yeah, I was about to kick Snidely Whiplashe's butt" then something's lacking in the combat experience.
Never mind that managing it that way may be the completionist thing to do but it's also the most potentially boring thing to do with button-click after button-click after button-click to accomplish something as simple as defeating one evil minion.
I guess I'm wondering what the middle ground might be and how it might be implemented in a format like Storynexus.
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Slickriptide
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slickriptide
Posts: 97
4/17/2016
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Your description of Below is rather interesting. I kind of like the idea of a battle-based mission map having a "budget" and having the player's success or failure depend partly on how she spends her character's resources on "minion" battles, "lieutenant" battles, and "boss" battles. Sometimes, the "best" solution to an objective may be to avoid fighting entirely and attempt stealth or negotiation instead.
I realized recently that what I really want to do is have a deck for each mission that represents the setting and the potential conflicts.
So, let's say the player just feels like doing something random - "Patrol the city". There's a "patrol" deck that is conceptually equivalent to the area deck of Fallen London that has "random encounters". The player witnesses a super-powered street gang rob a tourist bus and tracks them to their lair in an abandoned building.
Now the objective is not just to catch the robbers, it's to defeat the gang and clean out the lair. Switching area to the lair activates a new deck attached to the lair. The lair's "budget" gives it X number of minion encounters, Y number of lieutentants, and Z number of bosses. The cards in the deck represent the rooms, passages, and encounters. The shuffling of the deck each time provides a random "map" of the lair so that playing the same encounter multiple times can have a slightly different feel each time.
Either the deck can be completely random, in a rogue-like manner of exploration, or it can be pseudo-random, in that the encounters are random, but that successes with minions build up and at a certain level trigger a lieutenant or boss. "Your Black Skull Gang threat level has become Hated. Black Skull himself has appeared!"
The player's success will depend at least partly on how he's kitted out and partly on how he manages his resources in the battles leading up to the boss.
It also means that once I have a "gang lair" deck created, that I can use it as the base model for any "signature" story that also takes place in a similar setting.
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Slickriptide
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suinicide
Posts: 2409
4/16/2016
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Have you tried the moon league in knife and candle? Maybe something like that could be put in for the harder enemies. (Raise speed, strength, and endurance for each fight or something)
But I don't think that would work with the weaker enemies. Or at the least it seems like it would make the system grow boring quickly.
Or maybe pokemon's system, or some other RPG system, since that's mostly text based, or can be converted to text without much problem. (I think, it's been years since I've actually programmed something, so just ignore this if it won't work)
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/profile/sunnytime
A gentleman seeking the liberation of knowledge, with a penchant for violence.
RIP suinicide, stuck in a well. Still has it under control.
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slickriptide
Posts: 97
4/17/2016
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I haven't played Knife and Candle. I'll give that a try and see how it works.
For weak enemies, I'm figuring that a basic challenge-result is alright. The trick will be to describe in a satisfying way, that's still sort of boilerplate. "Signature" villains will require more of an actual battle, or at least the feel of one.
edited by slickriptide on 4/17/2016
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Slickriptide
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