Combat on Designing Virtual Worlds

How Combat Works

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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.

Enhanced Combat Systems

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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.

Problems with Combat

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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.

Opposition

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Conflict concerns opposition. Combat is the most obvious manifestation of this, but it occurs throughout virtual worlds. Two people wanting to get through the same turnstile at once are in conflict; two people aiming for the same job are in conflict; two merchants pitching to the same potential customers are in conflict. Combat may be one way to resolve this conflict, but others tend to work better.

In virtual worlds, conflict is typically categorized in terms of opposition: Who is in conflict with whom? There are three main possibilities:

Consequences

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Different locations have different risks associated with them. A PvP arena, for example, has a greater risk associated with it than a marketplace; a dragon’s lair comes with a greater risk than, raccoon’s.

Players like to know their risks in advance. They like to be able to tell by looking whether or not they can beat a potential foe in combat. Some virtual worlds helpfully color-code PCs and mobiles to make it easier to check them out. Although in real life you might not be able to tell a martial arts expert from anyone else merely by looking, in virtual worlds you often can. If there’s no fiction explaining why you might be able to do so, well, you still probably can.

Permanent Death

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PD is not the same as PvP. PvP means that one PC can do things to another PC that the latter didn’t agree to; PD means that if a PC suffers death, it is consigned to oblivion. When PvP and PD are combined the result is player killing (PKing): One PC can directly cause the PD of another PC ¹. Players often use PD and PvP as euphemisms for PKing, but the distinction is there and is very important. Many of the benefits that advocates of PKing cite are primarily due to PD; some of the strongest objections to PKing are due to its PvP element, rather than to PD.

Approaches to Permanent Death

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Let’s assume for the moment that a designer has decided they want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. The reasons why they might (or might not) make such a decision we’ll go into shortly, but for the moment we’ll suppose they’ve done it. What are the various ways it can be incorporated into a design?

It all depends on how you intend to ensure that a death is “fair.” Here are the classic ways to do it (most of which also can be applied to PvP):

Alternatives to Permanent Death

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Let’s assume now that a designer ¹ has decided they don’t want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. If there’s no NPC death either (because of world’s genre or application), that’s it, end of story, skip to the next section.

If there is NPC or (in most cases) monster death, the designer has to find some non-PD equivalent for PCs. If your character fights a monster and loses in the worst possible way, what happens to it?

The Unfortunate Consequences of

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Permanent Death

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People really do not like it when their character dies. That’s really do not like it. Not only will they say they’ll leave if it happens, some of them actually will leave. There’s ample evidence of this from virtual worlds that launched with PD but toned it down in the face of player opposition. You can take steps to minimize this—keep the incidence of PD low but the awareness of its possibility high—but it’ll still happen. Even non-PD PvP was softened in early flagship graphical worlds. People don’t like to lose, they don’t like to suffer, and they especially don’t like other people making them suffer.

The Unfortunate Consequences of Non- Permanent Death

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Let’s imagine what the real world would be like if the philosophers of ancient Greece had discovered the secret of eternal life. If you take your daily dose of elixir, you won’t age and will live forever. How would today’s society be different?

Well, it’s almost impossible to say, but one thing is for sure: Alexander the Great would still be in charge.

In virtual worlds, this is called sandboxing—the people who are first to positions of power get to keep them. There is no opportunity for change. Ensigns on the Star Trek spaceship Voyager (which was transported millions of light years from home) did not have a great career path no matter how able they were.

Why Permanent Death?

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Players are against PD because they don’t want to die. Although some socializers wishing to flaunt their loving and caring credentials might disagree, players in general don’t care if someone else dies—they just don’t want it to happen to them. Because no one wants it to happen to them, it doesn’t happen to anyone. So everyone is happy, right?

For a time, yes. Then, the fact that the whole experience is vacuous begins to nag at them.

The Hero’s Journey

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In his influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces ¹, academic Joseph Campbell asserted that the various heroic myths of all cultures follow the same, basic storyline. His theory was that myths are tied to the human psyche; they are cultural expressions of the universal need to explain the same, fundamental concepts of social, worldly, and other-worldly realities. Not all narratives follow the basic pattern (which is called the hero’s journey ²), but all myths and epics do. Famously, the movie Star Wars follows the hero’s journey almost to the letter.

Departure

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The call to adventure. The hero is given an indication that everything is going to change. The call may be symbolic, and the hero doesn’t have to realize what it means.
Refusal of the call. The hero is required to act, but initially refuses. This can be through fear, duty, or a whole bunch of other things. If the hero holds out, they may be subjected to assault until they take the hint.

Initiation

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The road of trials. These are a series of (often three) ordeals that the hero must undergo to begin their metamorphosis. They could well fail at least one.
The meeting with the goddess. This is another highly symbolic step. The goddess represents the totality of knowledge; if the hero is not consumed by exposure to it, they are liberated by it. This is usually described in terms of the hero’s experiencing absolute, unconditional love. The understanding the hero gains leads to a “union of opposites;” the hero’s self-image begins coalesce as the hero gains awareness of the forces of life and death, of mortal and spiritual.

Return

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Refusal of the return. Life in the new world is so pleasant and carefree that the hero doesn’t see any reason to go home.
The magic flight. The hero can’t stay and have the boon. This is the exciting escape with it.
Rescue from without. The hero still doesn’t want to return, is prevented from returning, or is too weak to return. Powerful friends or allies help it happen.
The crossing of the return threshold. The hero returns to their old world and old life. How will they reconcile the old and the new? How will they apply their newfound wisdom?

Departure

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In this discussion, the “old world” is the real world and the “new world” is the virtual world. The departure action therefore takes place in real world.

The call to adventure. Something triggers the would-be player’s attention. It may be a specific advertisement, testimonial, shelf unit, cover disk, magazine article, or pushy friend—it doesn’t really matter. The point is that the player now finds the idea of virtual worlds appealing when previously either they didn’t or they hadn’t thought about it.

Initiation

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This stage takes place in the virtual world, and is therefore the one that is most important to virtual world designers (more important than they may realize!). You may want to look back at the player development tracks shown in Figure 3.5 before you read this. You also might like to refer to the review of Hedron’s Six Circles, because this (at last!) is why I mentioned it ¹.

The road of trials. The player finds their feet. This is the opportunist/griefer step, where players meet and respond to small challenges to determine the extent of their abilities. Their success or failure at these will establish their course of future action.

Return

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This final stage accounts for players’ return from the virtual world to reality (or, perhaps more tellingly, the acceptance of players that the virtual world is part of reality).

Refusal of the return. The player has power, respect, friends, and peace. Why would they want to return to the real world?
The magic flight. The live team will usually not want a player to leave, and may provide a compelling elder game to try to ensnare them. They don’t, however, want their boon back (or wouldn’t, if they had one in the first place) and the barriers they erect are of the temptation variety rather than the physical or emotional of common myth.

Analysis

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Conjecture: Playing virtual worlds is a kind of hill-climbing activity through identity space; the hero’s journey is an algorithm for finding a very good local maximum, if not necessarily a global one.

I believe that the hero’s journey does directly apply to player development in virtual worlds. However, the fit is not exact. Given that the hero’s journey has evolved independently in all cultures through the millennia, should some effort be made to try and make the fit better? Or is the fit not exact because in truth it isn’t a fit at all?

Attitudes to Permanent Death

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Will attitudes to permanent death change?

If some way could be found to retain the desirable consequences of PD while losing the undesirable ones, attitudes wouldn’t need to change. With our current knowledge of PD, however, this seems unlikely.

Change will have to occur, however, if virtual worlds are to remain faithful to their essence, at least in combat-oriented worlds. Dilution of the virtual world “product” will leave people unsatisfied. Will they stop playing all virtual worlds, or continually drift from one to the next, forever unable to find something that satisfies their long-term aims without violating their short-term criteria?