Tilting at Windmills

I’ve been considering adding a new factor to combat… also known as luck.

Many heroes in literature were often considered lucky… in fact, in a lot of sources, luck is actually considered a tangible element, something that can influence events.

Tunnels of Doom employed a luck system, under which player luck was measured as bonuses or penalties, from -2 to +2. A higher luck bonus would increase the player’s chance of hitting in combat. It may have had some other periphery effects; I have not analyzed the actual code of the game to know for certain. Luck could be increased or decreased by drinking from fountains, using items, and it seemed to change all by itself at times.

My consideration for my game is using luck as that “random chance” that breaks the deterministic nature of tactical combat, but in a very narrow fashion. Luck would be randomly determined for each player at the start of an encounter. (Monsters would NOT have this; luck is the province of the hero.)

Some of the situations I could see it coming into play are:

• The player is attacked, but his luck means that the blow is only a glancing blow (1/4 damage)
• The player hits an enemy, and gets a lucky shot that kills the monster outright.
• The player is targeted or struck by a spell that debilitates, but luckily it only lasts a single round.

Conversely, luck can also be bad:

• The player is attacked and gets hit in a weak point. (x2 damage)
• The player hits an enemy, but the blow is only glancing. (1/4 damage)
• The player is targeted or struck by a spell that debilitates him, and he suffers much worse from the effects than usual. (+50% duration)

There would be potions that could raise luck temporarily, and a trinket or too that offers a permanent bonus to increase the chance of good luck. It would be primarily for combat; if I wanted luck to be a factor outside of it I’d have to track it per player rather than just determine it randomly. Plus I don’t want luck coming into play for things like unlocking doors and disarming traps; I want to get away from the “do it over and over until you succeed” model.

I may keep this particular idea on the back-burner for now, and see how the rest of the combat engine does first. A little randomness can easily upset the game.

Hm… gave it some more thought. I really don’t need levels or experience any more, so out they go!

The “skill” trait, which is a measure of how good a character is at picking locks and disarming traps, will just become a static value for each class, which can be increased with trinkets or using high-quality lockpicks and disarm kits.

The principal job that levels had remaining was to determine how much health and mana a character had. Instead of having an abstract level system in which gains are measured through combat, I’ll integrate advancement into the game world itself.

Basically, in given locations in the game, you can find “milestones”. (The name just works, even though it’s a bit of a pun.) Each milestone has a given rank, and if you haven’t achieved that rank yet, it will automatically increase the party’s power level, which basically increases everyone’s maximum health and mana. There’s also other ways to boost (or lower) these, through fountains or items.

Milestones are located only in the darkest corners and deepest areas. So when you find them, you’ve done something that warrants an upgrade. There will be multiple milestones of a given rank, so you don’t have to follow a linear progression in the game to find them.

As for the in-game explanation, something along the lines of “An ancient stone covered in runes… touching it you feel the power of the heroic spirits of old, imparting wisdom and strength…”

Okay, I sat down and wrote out pseudo-code for the new combat engine and the changes necessary to remove hit determination… Make no mistake, there is still randomness in the equation. It’s just located in a different place.

There is now only one skill-based check in the game, which is for lockpicking. Other than that, I could almost dispense with levels and experience entirely and just add a different method by which to gain health and mana for your characters… something to mull over.

This is not like Tunnels of Doom, where you move and perform the actions of each character one after another, and then have the monsters take their turns. Instead, you set the actions you wish each character to take and then ALL actions, monster and player, are resolved automatically. The order of actions is the random part.

Each class has a speed rating for melee and ranged weapons, as well as spell casting. Each weapon classification also has speed ratings, as do individual spells. The heavier stronger armors act as a penalty if your actions are move actions. These act as static amounts on top of the random factor to determine order.

Actions are also under control of the player. Standard is two actions a round, which means you can move twice, attack twice, cast a spell twice, use an item twice, and so forth. You can increase the potential number of actions to four maximum, through spells and items.

Actions are also what give you your defensive abilities. If you have a spare action and are attacked, then you can engage in a defense. If you have a melee weapon you can parry a melee attack. If you have a shield you can block a melee or ranged attack. If nothing else, and there’s an adjacent empty space, your character will dodge to that square, evading the attack.

Different classes have some special abilities here. Fighters can parry once per combat round freely without spending an action. Paladins can block once per combat round without spending an action. Monks and Rogues can evade an attack without spending an action. Crusaders, a war-mage type class, can actually party targeted spells, a unique ability. And so on…

I’m not sure how “fun” this system will be, I will have to play with numbers in modeling it to find the right balance of randomness vs. certainty. Stacking the odds in your favor SHOULD let you increase the chance of a character going at the right time…

I’m also debating how to handle it when one character has more actions than the others… I may have to order and determine all actions of all units in one large sorted array and use a division mechanism based on total number of actions taken to do this in a realistic fashion.

Oh, and there’s definitely friendly-fire in this system. If your ranger fires off a shot and the monster just happens to move out of that spot and your companion into it… Oops! Area-spells should be very interesting indeed.

Well, three weeks of blissful non-single status came to a crashing end… I guess that leaves the computer as my sole source of company again. Bugger.

I’ve been considering changing my combat mechanics that I had plotted out. As time goes on, I’ve found myself pruning out things that came from other sources. It’s always good to design your engine to match the context of what it runs on and how it plays out.

In this case, I’m considering dropping hit resolution, which is rather big. The idea of an opposing check (with some randomness thrown in) to determine if a target is struck or not is a sacred cow of not only the CRPG but the RPG itself.

But I’m not doing abstract combat, showing monster portraits. There is a tactical battlefield in play, and the way hits are determined is where your unit is and is going to be, not some abstract number. So my idea right now is to remove hit values entirely and just have it so if you aim at a particular square or move into an opponent, you automatically hit.

Well, not ALL the time. I’ll probably add an evasion action that can potentially happen, with more agile classes like rogues more likely to do it, whereby the target can move into an adjacent square (if one is available) and avoid the blow. And of course, other defensive measures like parry and block are available, and those would still be determined through skill rather than position.

At this point, of course, it’s really damage that comes to the forefront. Since hitting is less random, then I’ll probably want to add damage types to the game. My initial plan is blunt, piercing, and slashing weapons (club, sword, axe), and magic as damage types. Armor will be rated for what it protects against, and monsters may be immune to certain damage types.

Anyway, I need to sit down and rework some numbers for this and see how it pans out on the spreadsheets. A lot to do… but at the moment, it’s a welcome distraction.

It’s been awhile since a post, time for some news. I went on vacation to Disneyland, I turned out to have a misaligned scapula which has been the source of my left side aches and pains for six weeks, and I met a wonderful girl. Not all in that order…

So I haven’t been working on my CRPG too much… Although of late sitting down was moderately uncomfortable, so I haven’t been doing much of anything at the computer. I also have been trying to get more fit, so spending time outdoors is also on the list. And spending time with a very wonderful woman.

So, I’ll take a moment to discuss one aspect of CRPG’s, which is the tone.

A lot of CRPG’s of the vintage days are well known for their unique character. Wizardry had a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach; Ultima had tons of pop-culture (for the time) references, and Might & Magic had science fiction mixed into their fantasy.

This isn’t too much of a surprise. Many CRPG designers started with tabletop games, and anyone who’s played those knows that nobody takes themselves too seriously. Sooner or later, a Monty Python quote will be uttered at the table, or an exotic name will be mispronounced to comic effect, and any tension disappears. That IS the point of these games after all, to have fun and relieve stress.

I think it’s important, though, to decide on the tone of the game you intend to design. Tone can include names plots, quests, map designs, and the end goal. Having these keep to a consistent pattern will contribute to the feeling of your game world being “real”.

When games take a wrong turn on tone, it can really wreck the experience of a game. Spoilers below…

For example, the game “Legends II” on the TI-99/4a was all right until the very end, when the “lost king” mentioned to being kept a prisoner turns out to be… Elvis.

Another would be Ultima 9, where the world map had a large number of unique and interesting places and terrain, but they were arranged in a fashion more like a theme park than a game. The various peasants met on the road also were generic, contributing single lines of fixed dialogue, often random. The game had regressed back to the first three Ultimas in terms of conversation!

So if you’re designing a CRPG, keep in mind that the tone you set will greatly influence how people react to your game. And if they want to continue playing after a particularly upsetting encounter.