Problems with Combat

There are many social problems with combat, which I shall come to shortly. First, though, I’ll briefly address some purely practical concerns.

• Equalizer weapons. Anyone who can flip off a safety catch and pull a trigger can kill someone else. Highly trained individuals have a better chance of success, but even complete novices—children playing with daddy’s pistol—are in with a good chance. Equalizer weapons brook no defense except a physical barrier (a good shot is no better at avoiding bullets than is a poor shot) and the damage they do tends heavily towards the disabling and destructive levels. Unless a convincing fiction for why this isn’t so can be produced ¹, equalizer weapons take a lot of the fun out of (combat-oriented) virtual worlds.

• Multiple weapon types. You might find that swords work best with a hit points system, but muskets work best using a wounds-based approach. Which do you use? What do you do when someone using a sword attacks someone who is using a musket?

• Over-robust defense. How long does it take for a newbie to kill an old-timer who isn’t putting up a defense? Typically, it will take much longer than it ought to. The unarmed veteran stands yawning while the newbie repeatedly swings their sword; when they hit, the damage done is merely a fraction of that necessary for victory. It would be like chopping down a tree if it weren’t for the fact that you frequently miss the target completely.

• Concurrent combat. How many creatures can you fight at once? Do you get the same number of attacks against each one, or do you have to share them out. Do you defend equally against all of them, or against some more than others? How do you stop people from ganging up in large numbers and beating the stuffing out of their foes?

• Targeting. Do I aim at an individual or at a point in space? As pointed out in Chapter 2, “How to Make Virtual Worlds,” there are implementational considerations here. There’s also the issue of consistency: If I aim an arrow at a point rather than at a character, then the same solution should be used for hand-to-hand combat. What about semi-autonomous weapons, though—for example heat-seeking missiles? Are both relative and absolute targeting systems needed? Who is hit if someone fires a bullet into a crowd?

• Area effects. If I throw a grenade or cast a fireball spell, the result affects everyone in an area. The whole point of such an attack is to avoid the targeting issue. What happens, then, if there is someone in the area who is on your side? Can you be blown up by your own bomb? This is mainly a problem for graphical worlds, because textual ones don’t commit to exactly where anyone is standing.

• Twitch. First-person shooter games rely on the skill of the players. There are two components to this: experience and twitch. Experience comes from having done something often enough that you know what to expect. Twitch comes from having fast reactions, good manual dexterity, and reasonable vision. Both experience and twitch transfer to virtual worlds, but neither ought strictly to be there: The knowledge and speed of a character shouldn’t be that of the player. Twitch is the more annoying ², especially when coupled with client hacks or go-faster macros that can make someone almost unbeatable. Where should you put the threshold, though? How many seconds is it reasonable to make people wait before you process their next combat command? What effect will lag have on this?

• Combat skills. My character can do things I can’t. What are these things, and how do they affect combat? If there are too many or too few, it could send players the wrong message. What can I do while I’m waiting for the next combat round? Will it occur instead of or in addition to my attempt to hit my enemy?

• Disengaging. When fights are handled automatically, under what conditions do they end? Can I simply run away? Do you get to hack at me while I do? Can I surrender or be captured? If so, how could I escape and why wouldn’t you just kill me anyway? What happens if I’m stunned, but not actually dead? Does the fight end there or does it wait until you strike the killing blow?

There are, of course, many other tedious-but-important decisions that designers have to make about combat. If the planned system is deep and complicated, these can take up disproportionate amounts of time to resolve—not because of complex interactions between components of the system, but because designers can become so involved that they try to treat what are essentially subjective choices objectively.

The main thing is to be able to step back, look at a combat system, and ask three things:

• Will it work?

• Will it keep players immersed?

• Will it be fun?

If the answer to all these questions is “yes,” go with it.

There is a fourth question we could ask, which on the face of it looks like it follows from the preceding three. It has deeper implications of its own, however.

Will players accept it?

To find out why this is important, we need to consider two notions: opposition and consequences.