Serious Question About Making A MU
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@faraday Yes, coding a full game in any language and framework will always take a lot of work. To learn programming means both learning a language and a mindset.
It doesn't change the fact that Ruby/Python are some of the best beginner languages around. I stand by my opinion that for being programming languages they are outright easy to learn and get started in. Does that mean that it takes no effort at all? Of course not. But even minute knowledge in either will help you tremendously and is a worthwhile thing to spend time on.
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@Griatch they may be simple for you, but not everyone is wired the same way. Or has the same valuation of how they'd like to spend their time. For me, cognitively and energy wise, at this point in time, it would not be worth the investment, because I have no interest in applying it in the greater world. I am old. There are things that interest me less than coding for $$, but not many, though I like to hear about other people's exploits and am happy to have people talk shop around me (hubby is a software developer and MU* code-y person). I really appreciate things being made accessible, so that I can learn how to do most basic stuff for game, I super duper appreciate the web interface tools, which helps my mind organize it better. It's fun to experiment with even if I have no interest in developing skills beyond it. I'm okay if there are people out there who think that clearly any game I run/create that I didn't code from the bottom up really isn't "mine," though I do sort of wonder why anyone (except other coders) would give a shit about that. Is that kind of like the old "OMG if you use AOL you're not a real internet person" stuff?
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@mietze That is fair. And for the record, making a fun game with ready-made building blocks does in no way reduce the value of the result (nor does it make said result any less yours).
I'm just saying that learning even a little code (to carve custom blocks, in this analogy) will rapidly explode one's possibilities and ways of expression. I see coding as a creative skill, a sort of art. I don't think learning it is a wasted effort, no matter one's age, but I concede this is certainly a matter of opinion and preference.
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I'm not completely new to coding as a concept, but I've also never coded anything particularly complicated. Like, if I look at code I can kind of figure out what's going on with it.
That said, I mostly just want a grid, boards, and at best a simple dice type deal just in case people need it. My general MU building philosophy is to build for the kind of players I want, so while I do enjoy a nice combat system, I think a combat system is only something I would add if I genuinely believed it would contribute to the kind of game I'm building. Like, if I was making a Dragon Ball Z game, I would 100% want a combat system.
While what I'm working on is something many would go "That DEFINITELY needs a combat system", I just have a particular mindset for this. I kind of have in mind who all will want to play it, so beyond that it's kind of icing on the cake. I don't even mind if it ends up being a game with like ten players to be honest. The process of making this game is something I'm doing because creatively I just have the burning desire to do it. My vision for it isn't super ambitious or revolutionary, I just think it'll be a fun game to play.
I'm vague on purpose because I don't want to get people hyped up like in my old thread. I'll say something substantial once I'm closer.
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I have to admit that I am rather torn on Arx style heavily coded combat. It does make combat happen one hell of a lot faster, which is huge. No more waiting 8 minutes for somebody to +roll Stat+Hit Things and bogging everything down.
But it also seems to make any kind of plot involving violence turn into a big ball of coded combat with no variables or real differences between characters outside of 'Jane has bigger numbers than Bill'. You do not get people moving to block attackers in a doorway, or people engaging their sword wielding foe with a crossbow whilst on the other side of a trench, or somebody throwing the guy wearing tons of armour out of a window, etc.
It leads to far faster and probably on average 'better' results but sort of smooths everything out and avoids the possibility of truly memorable violence times that can come from good systems in interesting circumstances with players who are rolling promptly. I still years later remember the wild flailing of one fight on a Fading Suns game where people did not consider the implications of using guns in a warehouse stacked with metal barrels full of pure ethanol.
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@Packrat IMHO that's still an improvement. I've seen combat scenes in nWoD that literally took 5 hours of nothing but rolls - not even poses (or just quick one-liners) - which just kills my interest in being there at all.
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@Packrat This is how I ended up feeling about FS3's combat. Its very streamlined and easy to run, but the limited design of it had an effect of homogenizing not just the different sorts of encounters on a single game, but combat scenarios across all FS3 games, regardless of genre. Which turned me off a lot of them.
That said, @Arkandel is right and manually rolled combat is atrocious nearly to the point of making games unplayable. If your system is less common (ie not WoD), it stands a good chance of actually ruining your game (because you get the usual slowness + the slowness of people who don't know the system at all the in the first place). So in most practical scenarios I would bite the bullet and settle for generic automated combat over more flavorful manual in most cases.
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Arx combat is kind of strange at times. The +combat system is heavily coded, but I personally have never seen it used outside of tournaments and sparring. I have seen combat several times outside of that, but that has always been in straight stat+skill rolls, which do allow for the ST to modify difficulty or risk on the fly to respond to stupidity OR changing environment--but on the other hand I kind of wonder how frustrating that must be for folks that have invested a ton into the many skills needed to do well in the system only to be matched by and frequently outperformed by someone who has not, just happens to have one high weapon skill. (And who has been able to keep up social and mental skills that can be useful too because they do not need to invest in the combat system skills). STs could definitely counteract this by having maybe raising the check number (or lowering it) based on how many of the other combat skills you do and dont have but I have never seen that done and given some of the pouty and kind of rude behavior I have seen from PCs even over how silly contests are done I'm very sympathetic to why a ST might not want to give out the same target number to everyone.
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@bored It does not help that quite a lot of games have implemented FS3 without the people running it actually reading the documentation at all. I have been on more than one where various stances/weapons/whatever have actually been doing the opposite of their stated intention with staff utterly oblivious until I pointed it out to them.
Things like shields making it easier to hit you, that kind of stuff.
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@bored said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
@Packrat This is how I ended up feeling about FS3's combat. Its very streamlined and easy to run, but the limited design of it had an effect of homogenizing not just the different sorts of encounters on a single game, but combat scenarios across all FS3 games, regardless of genre. Which turned me off a lot of them.
That said, @Arkandel is right and manually rolled combat is atrocious nearly to the point of making games unplayable. If your system is less common (ie not WoD), it stands a good chance of actually ruining your game (because you get the usual slowness + the slowness of people who don't know the system at all the in the first place). So in most practical scenarios I would bite the bullet and settle for generic automated combat over more flavorful manual in most cases.
I think in part, and could just be me, a lot of FS3 places haven't utilized the combat to its fullest. There's a lot more to it than meets they eye and some runners seem to accept it at face value and other than managing NPCs, its just running turns. I've had it set up to run airship/seaship battles, folks have used 'vehicles' as troops/battallions to have PCs operate as field commanders in charge of (operating) the troops. Not long ago on Fifth Kingdom, I used vehicles to run turtle vs wall combat (one of the medics on the wall took splinter/impact damage and some focus was on non-medics figuring out how to help them before the wall broke and the fort was invaded).
I imagine Evennia may be the same, combat goes by the numbers but its not fully tapped into for the versatility it can provide.
I'm just a surge protector doing my job, sir.
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@Lotherio said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
I think in part, and could just be me, a lot of FS3 places haven't utilized the combat to its fullest.
I concur. Out of the box, FS3 is effective for generic ranged-combat battles. With customization, it can be used for everything from mecha combat to magical duels. It will take time and tinkering from my review, but it isn't unintuitive.
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Another factor seems to be a strong tendency to make all types of equipment 'equivalent' and merely a case of what flavour of fighting you are going to solely specialise in. Of course this is due to the marked tendency for player characters to oddly have their powered battle armour on in the bar when ninjas attack and similar.
It does make it tricky though for people to be good at different things though. People optimize, if they want to use a sword? They max out their swording skill but ignore all others. If they are an archer? They max out archery and never take a single point in anything else, especially on games where there is a massive investment in equipment meaning that having multiple types is prohibitive and the idea of somebody dropping their eight million dollar sword into a pit or being attacked with it not to hand is unlikely.
If somebody is say making... a knight? Then in my view they should have good reasons to have some skill in unarmed combat, the ability to use a bow or crossbow (even if not super well) and also the ability to use a dagger. Not just maxed out Swording or Lancing or whatever. Those should be skills that are legitimately useful in different circumstances. Maybe sometimes you are being harassed by horse archers or you are going hunting, maybe other times you are somewhere social and wearing a sword is rude, maybe another time you have been knocked off your horse and are wrestling with a foe whilst trying to shove a knife into the eyeslit of their armour.
Also players seem to assume that the 'heavier' or bigger weapons have more advantage than they actually do. Maybe not so much now, but I absolutely remember people commenting on Arx about how X was at a huge disadvantage because they were wearing leather vs Y in full armour, even though the leather was higher quality and thus probably had better mitigation. The person who can beat a two handed sword wielding knight whilst wearing leather pants and a corset with a knife in hand? People need to seriously reprogram their assumptions not to view them as just having won a seriously one sided confrontation.
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@Packrat said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
Another factor seems to be a strong tendency to make all types of equipment 'equivalent' and merely a case of what flavour of fighting you are going to solely specialise in.
Again, this is FS3 out of the box, which was meant to cater to ranged combat using guns and explosives. On that battlefield, whether one uses an SMG or a rifle is largely unimportant. You can, however, alter the stats of all armor and weapons to suit however one sees combat playing out.
For example, if you wanted a game where you could hurl fireballs that take time to prepare, you could modify a gun to be a single-shot ranged weapon and call it "Fireball." After using the "weapon" once, you would have to take a reload action to use it again -- that would be the preparation time. And if you wanted to allow mages to switch form one spell to another, switching out weapons could take an action too to swap out "Fireball," which may do a lot of damage with little armor penetration, to "Frostbolt," which may do less damage but have better armor penetration.
I guess what I'm getting at is that FS3 is a highly-customizable system that takes some tweaking to fit into whatever theme and setting you have for your game. I'm sure Faraday'd agree. It was built for a futuristic war setting (BSG) but it can be adjusted as needed. Plus, Faraday and the Ares community's pretty friendly about brainstorming ideas to do just that.
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It isn't so much the stats where I find a problem with it. I realize you have some basic options like reloads and I think some explosives and the like. It handles vehicles pretty well because of the original intent (BSG) although I'm not sure about mixed cases. But really none of that's the problem. Mostly I get hung up on the format itself. Everyone targets and exchanges volleys. Repeat. That's basically it.
To be clear, I don't mean this as a criticism, it's just something that contributed to my burnout on the increasing number of FS3 games. Under no uncertain terms, I think if you're not a programmer who can make your own thing from scratch or playing something well-supported on other codebases (mostly WoD), then 100% as a new game creator you should be picking Ares/FS3 right now. It is far and away the best option, and kind of same-y/boring FS3 combat is still superior to 8 hour bullshit.
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Right, much as I might complain about it being kind of... Bland, I still remember running a that tournament on Arx where I managed to get through multiple rounds of elimination jousting followed by a like, 14 person grand melee.
In one evening, without it lasting until 3am or something.
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Obviously I'm kind of biased, but I think the FS3 combat system is reasonably robust. There are lots of options that give you various tactical advantages: stances, bursts, called shots, distractions, suppression, aiming, armor, vehicles... and of course the GMs can impose manual modifiers/damage and other clever tricks (akin to what @Lotherio mentioned.)
That said, combat systems, like any code, are just a tool. It's how you use them that matters. They're there to support the story, not to be the story. I've been in tons of combat scenes. The memorable ones were where there's more going on that just mowing down NPC #72. And that's tough to do when you have 15 players in a scene, just as it's tough to do much engaging storytelling when you have 15 players in a social scene. That's not really a fault of the system.
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@bored said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
But really none of that's the problem. Mostly I get hung up on the format itself. Everyone targets and exchanges volleys. Repeat. That's basically it.
I think a lot of combat RP ends up like this, but also it doesn't HAVE to. A great deal comes down to GMing. You can use a map and insist that people think tactically and refuse to allow people to attack without taking a turn to close distance, etc. You can set up enemies where teamwork tactics like distraction or suppression have a significant effect. It's extra work to do it, though, and I think some people don't find it worth the effort.
That is to say, I don't think the 'sameness' of FS3 combat is a result of the code, but of the GMing,
One thing I've started to do that I find more interesting is to only pose every 2-3 combat rounds, so you can wrap things up cinematically a little better rather than posing every strike. I think a lot of people have always done this, but I never had, and it's definitely made things more interesting because I can complicate the combat without slowing the scene down as much.
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It is very much a 'system thing' but one of the few parts of the original Fading Suns system that worked really well was that, absent special combat maneuvers, you could generally only use a given 'weapon' once a combat round.
But you could act more than once a combat round and still have good odds of succeeding if you were highly skilled.
So a character who was not monofocused on one combat skill could, for example, swing a sword in one hand and shoot a pistol in the other. Or kick somebody, etc. Not to mention even if the grappling rules were weird and broken without house rules? Armour and energy shields were good enough that grappling somebody was often kind of necessary and practical. A super focused sword person was legitimately vulnerable to two people in good armour grabbing them before one started to apply a dagger.
Of course some of those combat maneuvers had all of the balance and saneness that one might expect of the people who made 1st edition World of Darkness then fled the constraints of editors. A skill that lets you, as a single action, throw a number of enemies equal to your Fight skill as a normal throw action? (probably 7+ if you have this maneuver). Obviously completely balanced in a system where it normally takes a serious expert to not be immediately defeated by two capable foes.
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@Lotherio said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
I imagine Evennia may be the same, combat goes by the numbers but its not fully tapped into for the versatility it can provide.
Just to be clear, Evennia itself has no prescribed combat system whatsoever. It's up to each game-maker to pick a contrib combat system or, like Arx, make their own combat system on top of the Evennia framework.
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@Packrat said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
@bored It does not help that quite a lot of games have implemented FS3 without the people running it actually reading the documentation at all. I have been on more than one where various stances/weapons/whatever have actually been doing the opposite of their stated intention with staff utterly oblivious until I pointed it out to them.
Things like shields making it easier to hit you, that kind of stuff.
@Seraphim73 and I may have sighed at one another a time or ten about people not reading the rules.
I mean. There's fewer rules to FS3 than D&D or WoD. Cmon.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
