Dungeons and Dragons 5e Combat in a Mush

[Dillinger]

Would it work in a purely text based environment? If you have to use theater of the mind many spells, abilities and feats would lose most or some of their effectiveness, I'd think. I haven't played a MU* that has handled more complicated 3D combat that a tabletop system would use a grid and miniatures for. I have never really played MU*s for the interesting or strategic combat but I really enjoy it in a tabletop setting. Has this been tackled? Is it worth it? I wonder if you could make a plug-in for Ares to help with this type of combat with a grid in a browser or something.

I am thinking specifically about D&D5e but any system with this type of combat would have this similar hurdle to overcome.

[Jeshin]

@Dillinger

I have played DND 5E in theater of the mind, assuming you have a DM the DM will apply your spells as effectively as possible. It does probably mean due to human fallibility that some rule of cool or conservation of ninjitsu occurs because you are describing it and telling the DM your intents and the DM is applying it.

I think a MUSH could also handle it, but it would require a DM or someone to arbitrate.

[WildBaboons]

Ask these guys?

turiel.wikidot.com - It's a 5E MUSH. I don't play there, no idea how they've adapted the rules, but it's there and been there for several months.

[faraday]

TGG has a grid system tied into its coded combat. It did things like:

 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~  
 ~   @   +   +   +   +   +   +   +  
 ~   @   =   =  >=<  _   #   #   #  
 ~   #   _   _   _   _   #   #   #  
 ~   @   #   _   _   _   #   #   #  
 ~   ~   #   _   #   _   #   #   #  
 @   ~   @   #   #   #   #   #   # 

Your coordinates are : 6 12

<<Ground Combat>> You hear the sound of Machine Guns from Beach (7 12)!

<<Ground Combat>> Woods fires his Reising SMG at Yoshi but misses!

<<Ground Combat>> Jenkins fires his Garand at Aoi and hits!

Aoi suffers 8 wound damage to his right leg.    

When in combat, you couldn't just move freely through rooms, your movement was tied to combat actions and done in a grid fashion move 12, 1 or something like that. There was no magic, it being WWI/WWII, but there were plenty of advanced mechanics for range, artillery, planes, flares, covering fire, melee, trenches, obstacles, and more.

So yes, it can be done. It's clunky, but it works. A web UI might help some, but the system would need to still be capable of interfacing with players on a traditional MU client. That limits how fancy you can get.

Also, building a real-time interface between web and game for FS3 combat was a ton of work, and D&D combat is orders of magnitude more complex. I have to question the value of the endeavor versus just using something more geared to it like Roll20.

[utahsaint]

All the Battletech MU*'s of ages past had insanely complex automated combat that was grid-based as well, not unlike TGG really.

[Darren]

@utahsaint The Battletech games of old used a custom hardcoded module (the source code for which I believe you can still find on Sourceforge) that allowed them to do some crazy things that you can't do with MUSHcode alone. TGG's system was pure softcode, IIRC.

If I was going to do such a system today, I would definitely consider going with Evennia (or even AresMUSH) over MUSH.

[bored]

I don't think 5e really requires a map. There's no 5ft step, everyone can move-attack-move, and AoOs are usually pretty binary (did you leave the reach of the person you were fighting to go somewhere else?). Spell effects may be a little more complicated, but that's really just on the DM to try and be reasonable and everyone to be clear on their basic movement/positioning (ie; 'I stay next to name to protect him with Sentinel,' or 'we all move with an X-foot gap between us to avoid AoE').

If you really want a grid... Aside from TGG, there was also that 4e game that Nuku ran, which had a similar kind of grid system (which that edition more or less requires). I believe that similar code may exist in one of the Star Wars Saga codebases floating around, as I've seen it there as well.

I will say that both of these were pretty cumbersome, and definitely add a lot of time to a combat. This is something plotrunners usually want to avoid, so it's a bit of a consideration. A better solution, if you really want map combat in 5e, is probably using a secondary program to handle any map/token management and just reference back and forth from the MU (where the sheets are still maintained, HP tracked, rolls calculated, etc). People have used google sheets for this and similar, so you don't even necessarily need something as fully fledged as roll20.

[Seraphim73]

Dahan's Saga Edition code included a map grid and movement. Once you got used to it it was pretty smooth, but it had a pretty steep learning curve.

[Dillinger]

@faraday said in Dungeons and Dragons 5e Combat in a Mush:

So yes, it can be done. It's clunky, but it works. A web UI might help some, but the system would need to still be capable of interfacing with players on a traditional MU client. That limits how fancy you can get.

Also, building a real-time interface between web and game for FS3 combat was a ton of work, and D&D combat is orders of magnitude more complex. I have to question the value of the endeavor versus just using something more geared to it like Roll20.

Ah. I'll take your word for it. As a hobbyist programmer this would most definitely be beyond what I would want to tackle especially since Roll20 has been around for quite awhile and I'm still aggravated with it's current functionality. No way that I'd be able to cobble something together that would in anyway be comparable.

I wonder if a 5e MU* that allowed for either theater of the mind combat or used Roll20 for combat would be viable. Players would have a few hoops to jump through. I've never used Roll20 without voice communication, though, and I'm not sure how engaging or fun it would be to do so. Maybe some things should just stay separate. MU*s are good for some things and not all.

[Bananerz]

I love 5e.

Longest small party combat I was involved in with 5e took 3 sessions at 5 hours each for a party of six against multiple baddies and a Big Bad. Conversely, I’ve been in a single 10+ hour combat with 25+ players on a MUSH.

With grid map combat, you can as a DM engage with the players who want to use interesting solutions based on what they can see and interact with on that map. It’s sometimes hard to do in the mind. It also makes it easier to remind players such things as fireball can hit your flying character if you’re within the sphere of damage as it isn’t a 2D game, it’s a +3D (multiple dimensions/planes) game. Grid maps help identify where the player is in the world and the threats and such are at.

For this, I’d make a grid on the MUSH for normal moving around, but then for a specific battle or encounter, have it on a specific point in the grid map like a battlefield and run it simultaneously on Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 so my cohort of players can focus on strategic decisions which can be helped via visual cues they’re picking up on the grid map. But there's a bit of a learning curve on FG or R20, not to mention making accounts and whatnot.

For anything larger than 6 players and preferably at 40 players, I'd probably want 5-6 players per DM, and an overall DM coordinating and reporting to the overseer on something like an Epics event on a MUSH so things aren't clogged up and folks can see how their group and others are impacting the world. The overseer would emit on the main grid room of the battle, while I'd have players and their DM's TT in that room once combat started.

[faraday]

@Dillinger said in Dungeons and Dragons 5e Combat in a Mush:

I wonder if a 5e MU* that allowed for either theater of the mind combat or used Roll20 for combat would be viable.

I think there are a number of options depending on your goals and the tolerances of your playerbase.

WoD games have been doing "theater of the mind" combat for decades. I think that with all the powers and stuff, it's at least vaguely comparable to 5e in terms of complexity.

Roll20 might be a hard sell for RPers, but you never know. You could also do a more lightweight bridge like using Google Draw for a quick battle map coupled with some GM-driven rolls.

[Livia]

I play a lot of D&D 5e, and only once or twice have I used actual grids. Theatre of the mind stuff works fine, imho.

[Warma Sheen]

I agree. I think it works fine. I prefer it to anything besides miniatures. Anything less than that I feel just gets in the way and slows things down.

[Misadventure]

You can also just draw an ansi grid and update it if people really need it.
I would say anyone GMing would have first right of veto, followed by the players.

However, I've been playing 5E with just theater of the mind, and other than mapping (OMG just draw it already) its been fine. However, we don't have a lot of AoE going on.