How Combat Works

Taking a wide perspective, combat involves many activities: Magic-users cast spells, archers shoot arrows, clerics patch up the injured. Important and battle-winning that these may be, they are nevertheless mere adjuncts to the central conflict: Two individuals standing toe to toe, slugging it out with close-up weapons. The reason for this is simple: Hand-to-hand combat is more thrilling than ranged combat. The monsters are in your face. Yes, the wizard cranking up the spell that will nuke the bad guys is excited, but it’s an excitement borne by what’s going on at the front line: If the tanks aren’t excited by the fight, the wizard won’t be either.

For this reason ¹, most virtual worlds that have combat put hand-to-hand at the forefront. This defines the basic mechanism and the measures for success or failure. Ranged combat conforms to the same system, as does magic (whether the offensive or defensive kind). In discussing combat, therefore, it makes sense to focus on the hand-to-hand variety.

Here’s how MUD1 did hand-to-hand combat:

• One character attacks another player in the same location.

• An automatic fight sequence begins, in which characters take turns hitting each other.

• The chance of hitting is based on the character’s dexterity attribute.

• The damage done is based on the character’s strength attribute.

• Damage is deducted from the character’s stamina ² property.

• When one character’s stamina falls below 1, that character dies and the fight ends.

This is still pretty much the paradigm. Damage can be increased by weapons and reduced by armor and shields; spells can buff attributes, repair injuries, and do the opposite (to opponents); some combatants may have multiple attacks (dragons can breathe fire while clawing at you); skills may allow for additional special actions. In all these, the underlying mechanism remains basically the same.

Why did MUD1 do it this way? It looks suspiciously like the way that Dungeons & Dragons combat works—so similar that many virtual worlds openly refer to characters’ health as “hit points,” in the D&D tradition.

MUD1 did it this way because it delivered the gameplay. Roy wanted combat to proceed as exchanges of blows—I swing, you swing, I swing, you swing—because that was the most appropriate level of abstraction. He wanted it automated because otherwise it would have been tedious for players continually to type “hit them ³.” When one character swings at another character, there has to be some chance of hitting: This was encapsulated by the dexterity attribute. As for what to do when a hit got through, well, obviously there had to be some damage.

Roy and I discussed how to handle this. Although I knew the D&D combat system well, I also knew other ways to do this kind of thing (I didn’t only play D&D, after all). Come to that, I’d already designed board games and a computer game ⁴ that used different mechanisms. Overall, though, the classic approach won on the basis of simplicity. When you’re in a fight, you want an instant readout on how well you’re doing. Anything too complicated wouldn’t give players enough time to absorb it; anything much simpler and combat wouldn’t have been any fun.

We decided, therefore, to give characters a number of “lives.” Whenever a character was hit successfully, one life would be removed. To make this less predictable than it sounds, we scaled up everything by a factor of ten and added some randomness. Thus, although your character could usually survive ten blows, sometimes they’d hold out for longer and sometimes they’d capitulate sooner. We did some tuning to make sure that battles neither ground on too slowly nor ended too quickly to be fun, and that was that. Everything else—spells, weapons, artifacts—followed.

As a game mechanic, this worked well. As a representation of reality, it was somewhat off the mark. Real-life combat with hand weapons is not a gradual wearing down, a cut here, a nick there, until eventually someone dies of attrition. Instead, most blows are blocked, dodged, or parried, and when one does finally land it either has little effect or it effectively incapacitates the recipient. In real-world medieval warfare, once someone suffered a telling wound they could take no further part in the battle and were fairly certain to die even if no one finished them off (medical science couldn’t deal with infection). Virtual worlds set in different periods or having some kind of magic available in them don’t have to stick with these facts, of course, but they still need a fiction to rationalize it.

So what other combat systems are available that retain the gameplay but make more rational sense?