Enhanced Combat Systems
Actually, the MUD1-style approach does make some sense if, instead of stamina/health/ hit points, armor/shield is used. You bash at people until their armor comes to pieces, then the next blow hits their body and they’ve lost. Where characters’ injuries would heal with rest after a fight, “wounded” armor is repaired.
Of course, to be “realistic” some hits should possibly get through despite the armor, but even so they might not do fatal damage, yet fatigue can set in and…blah blah blah.
Combat systems can rapidly get very complex. However, the same approaches crop up time and time again, not only in virtual worlds but also in single-player and tabletop games. Here’s a run-down:
Reaction and recovery times. Traditional combat is round-based, in that characters trade blows either in turn or simultaneously. This is unrealistic, because some weapons take longer to recover from than others. In the time it takes you to raise your two-handed sword, I might have been able to run you through twice with my rapier. Defense also can have reaction and recovery times: Your heavy shield may take more damage, but if I switch the point of my attack you might not be able to bring it into play before I strike.
One-off attacks. Instead of having fights proceed automatically after the first blow has been struck, each one must be performed manually. If I throw my axe at you, I can hardly do so round after round anyway—it’s a one-off attack. Special boosted attacks (such as stunning punches or called shots) are usually treated as one-offs.
Stances. These are a crude mechanism for trading offense against defense. If you want to hold out until your allies come, you increase your defense but pay for it with a reduced offense. If you want a fight to be over quickly and can take excess punishment, you raise your offense 1 but your defense suffers as a result.
Hit location. The damage you do depends on what you hit. A blow to the leg is not as bad as one to the head. This brings in the possibility of having hit points for individual body parts instead of one value for the whole character. Where a blow lands depends on the weapon, the characters’ skills, the relative sizes of the characters, the relative sizes of the body parts, and (the strategy bit) where the player aimed.
Damage types. The theory here is that different weapons do different kinds of damage, to which different armors (or, combined with a hit location system, different parts of the body) are differently susceptible. Heads can take less crushing damage (for example, from a mace) than they can slashing damage (for example, from a longsword). If you’re armed with a mace, you should therefore target the head rather than, say, the midriff. Characters may have special quirks that make particular blow type/location combinations unusually effective (for example, a “glass jaw”).
Wound levels. This approach gets away from the hit points idea entirely. Wounds are instead rated by category—for example light, medium, heavy, disabling, destructive. They compound, so several light wounds make a medium wound, and so on. Heavy wounds may lead to some loss of functionality, and disabling wounds will lead to an entire loss of it. Destructive wounds disable permanently. Thus at light level your hand may be cut, at medium it may be gashed, at heavy it may be fractured (you couldn’t write with it, but you can still hold a sword), at disabling it may be smashed (you can’t do anything with it), and at destructive level it might be severed. Different weapons have different wound profiles for different body parts. A mace may have a greater chance of disabling a head than does a sword, but a sword has a (small) chance to decapitate.
Critical hits. Critical hits incorporate hit location and wound levels into a hit points system. Combat proceeds in the traditional “death of a thousand cuts’ style,” but if a character hits well enough (maybe one time in 20, depending on the location), they do special damage (usually equivalent to a disabling or destructive wound). Opponents who weren’t even breaking into a sweat can suddenly be knocked unconscious by a well-aimed blow. Thus, players who are losing a fight might stay rather than flee, in the hope that they can pull out a critical hit and win.
Afflictions. These are temporary side effects from blows/ spells that impact on a character’s ability to conduct combat. If combatants accumulate enough of these, it makes taking them down a lot easier. A few knocks on the head won’t necessarily do much damage in themselves, but if they make you dizzy then that could reduce your ability to parry something more serious.
Combat scripts. This approach owes much to pencil-and-paper role-playing games such as En Garde! 2. Combat commands are entered into a queue, and executed in order simultaneously for each combatant. Combinations of commands can be prewritten and hot-keyed, so that players can have time to think rather than relying on first-person shooter twitch skills. If you have a script effective against a particular kind of opponent, you can call it up instead of your default one. Of course, if you don’t but they have one effective against you, it could be problematical. This “program your battle” approach was adopted by Star Wars Galaxies, so it’s likely to become more popular as clones of this game appear 3.
All these ideas can be (and often are) incorporated into gloriously complex wholes. The level of detail can become so great that the rest of the virtual world pales by comparison. Few virtual worlds with an immensely complicated combat system avoid being completely dominated by it—Achaea is the best-known exception.
Although these combat systems are intended for melee, they can be used for other forms of combat, too. In particular, if characters control or are crewmembers of fighting vessels (spacecraft, pirate ships, mechs, and so on) then similar mechanisms can apply. “Number One: Take out their hyperdrive.”
As I mentioned earlier, whatever combat system is adopted for hand-to-hand combat underpins all other forms of combat. If you’re using a hit points system for sword fighting, then arrows will also cause characters hit point loss; if you’re using a wound level system, then damage-causing combat spells will have to use it too. These secondary combat activities come with their own issues, of course (arguments over the range and accuracy of crossbows versus longbows being particularly prone to starting flame wars). Weapon statistics aside, though, combat systems face in general a common set of difficulties of which designers should be aware.