Balancing the Risks

[freiana]

I actually have seen battles roleplayed (people running into town, shouting things, dragging someone in, one staying behind a few minutes and shouting some more, people in town reacting, pulling on the door, the 'attackers' coming out again, some fighting, people running, bla bla), and Black Canyon gave us an example about a roleplayed situation (with dragging involved, too, if I am right) before, too. It is thus possible, for sure. Oddly enough, though, it doesn't happen often, and I fully agree that this is sad, and it would be better if people -did- roleplay this more.

[Nalaris]

Well, sure, you can roleplay a battle. I think I mentioned this before. Cantr is a game about roleplay, so people will try to roleplay just about anything, because that's the point. But the majority of battles aren't roleplayed. People roleplay farming for potatoes more often than they roleplay battles. That's pretty messed up, because battles are way more important to your character's personal story than farming for potatoes or whatever, since you do the latter all the time. Cantr is a slow-paced RP-focused game, and battles are fast-paced and penalize roleplay. That's broken, and the only solutions are fundamentally to either change combat or change the rest of the game. One of these is obviously a lot easier than the other.

And I'm pretty sure that the biggest impediment to coherent battle roleplay is the lock and drag strategy. For two reasons. One, it looks bizarre and not very warlike at all. Human beings are built by biology and culture to recognize certain things as "war" and other things as not. Hauling someone into a building and then killing them is kind of like war if you tilt your head sideways and squint, but it looks weird and that makes it hard to roleplay. The same thing applies to instant healing foods, but that's a discussion for another time. Two, it chops the battle up into tiny pieces that can't roleplay with each other. You've got the attackers on one end with their one or two defenders they kill almost instantly, and you've got your defenders on the other end who can't really talk to the attackers at all. They can talk to each other but the actual fight isn't getting roleplayed at all.

Just because people can roleplay in spite of these things doesn't mean they aren't problems that need to be fixed.

[SekoETC]

If someone stops to write an emote in a hostile environment, he can get hit past the shield and if he doesn't have any healing food, he's screwed. It happened to one of my characters years back. Also even if you have healing food, you can be screwed if three people hit you at once while you stop to read someone's description. That happened to one of my other characters.

[Cogliostro]

During one of my spurious bouts of activity, I came up with a way to solve the problem, and put RP into combat as a fundamental feature of the design.

The main idea: consider every combat interaction as a pairing of attack and counterattack. Delay applying the damage from the initial attack, giving the defender a special grace period of up to one day, or until the player opens the character, whichever comes first. The defender then gets to counterattack, and there is no delay or grace period.

What we get: the attacker is forced to wait until the defender becomes active (can respond), but only if the attacker wants the damage to go through. Otherwise, they're free to walk away anytime they wish. Note: others at the location see the attack attempt in Events regardless of whether it ever resolves or not.

Because the damage is applied to defender only when they log on (or the grace period has run out), the defender is guaranteed ONLINE AND ACTIVE at the exact moment that the damage is, technically, applied to them. Their attacker, meanwhile, may have logged off. But even if the attacker hadn't logged off, for example, imagine the attacker is babysitting the char and trying to run away into a building as soon as the damage is applied to the victim - this is now totally impossible, as the coming counterattack by the defender is wait-less and precedes the message you get as the attacker about how much damage you just caused to the defender.

The counterattack is only a one-time thing. You could miss, You could randomly cause little damage. The defender may wish to shoot the former assailant again. They are free to do so! But now WE are going to get the associated wait, and the former attacker gets instant counter-attack rights on us.

Combat would be processed free from the artificial 1-hit per day limitation entirely. You could, if both parties are online enough and willing, fight a person 1-on-1 to the death in a single day or less. Neither attacker nor defender are limited in their movement. You can decide to run away at any time , but then your attack attempt will simply cancel and never result in damage to target. After damage is applied to target, as the attacker you CANNOT escape facing the full brunt of that specific char's counterattack (if that char wishes to strike back and does so).

If you're attacking a person who may be offline and they have many friends, the friends could all attack YOU while you're standing there waiting for your victim to react or the timer to run out. This obviously will result in major damage, which will either send you running or using your instant counterattack rights to get even against all those guys. If you run, the original person you tried to attack will not be hurt at all, permitting RP arrangements with a specialized cadre of guards who attend a "King" that may even be totally unarmed and carry no shield, yet safe while the guards are around.

We'd get a system that leverages all the existing combat code unchanged AND have exciting turn-based combat resolution, which is impossible to "game" by clicking fast or having the faster net connection. In order for combat to occur at all, you have to stay out in the open and fight your foe, yet there is no particular magic force that pins you down against your will too, you can always freely move if desired. I like this approach for its simplicity and being very to the point functionally, and it should be relatively easy to implement on top of existing code.

[Tiamo]

This resembles the combat system i proposed when the combat system revamp was discussed. I like this even better than my proposal (where the attacker could not walk away from a battle before it was resolved).
There is a big omission though: it doesn't address dragging. This should be incorporated in the proposal, making dragging a combat action.

I think this could be a good starting point for discussing a revised combat system that is in line with the pace of the game.

[Cogliostro]

Tiamo, thank you for crucial elements of the original idea, and being here truly thinking about all the possible angles.

For getting rid of the entirely unsexy drag wars, here's a simple, brutal approach: trying to drag someone who is armed and dangerous by default gets the draggers shot/cut up. It causes normal tiredness to the guy shooting, but does not give the draggers free counterattack rights on him. They may well still succeed at the drag but, the big issue is whether they can afford to risk it: with insta-healing being abolished, every percentage point of health counts bigtime in battle, in a never before seen way, because it will take everyone a while at a hospital to recover from that damage after battles are over, and there's little possibility to recover much health in the field quickly even with the best healfood. Let draggers have good reason to think twice about it, but if they realistically have the numbers or the guts, they're welcome to try and subdue a dangerous armed foe that way!

There are also a few legit reasons when you need to drag somebody who is a sleepy friend, to move them on a boat or car. A recent idea proposes explicit "white lists", of who is always allowed to drag me, and everyone else is going to be resisted if they try.

For common situations where it's the Law vs. some petty criminal, the Law gets to RP demanding that the criminal surrender their weapon. Doing so makes the character safely draggable, so they can be thrown into prison peacefully.

The above method is a compromise though, it's for people who think dragging is so fundamental to Cantr that it can never be rethought or abolished. If that's the dev team opinion, then little can be done, but IMHO, design-wise the best way to go would be to have that "whitelist" and if we're not on it, make the dragging of live armed characters simply impossible (instead of doing the damage-based deterrence described above).

[Black Canyon]

It would be nice to have a small "test area" to actually try out certain massive changes for the game. That way some of the bugs and quirks could be worked out before everyone is dealing with the fallout. Or some of those unforeseen consequences or issues can be uncovered at that time, before a larger impact to the game as a whole.

[EchoMan]

There already is. The problem is that is is hard to simulate thousands of characters actions with only a few testers.

[Black Canyon]

True enough. I guess that's why some of the larger games have those Player Test Realms where they let the players do their work for them

[Henkie]

People still keep seeing problems where there aren't any massive problems, things get advocated as colossal incongruities and continuously blown up to massive proportions. It appears this group of people has a new member now too, yet still there is argument everywhere...

I stand by my motives, which I believe are shared, that these 'revolutionary' (in the most literal meaning) ideas should not be accepted or actually taken serious (at which I fail, as a result of the fun I find in discussions). Continuously words of others and complaints are twisted and turned up to a point where, for example, nalaris projects his own stiff-neckedness on me.

I'm, for a change, no longer going to contribute to this nonsense, it's stupid anarchist rabble in my opinion.

[Nalaris]

Yes, god forbid we talk about the game. Let's start a fight about anarchism or whatever. That definitely sounds like the most productive thing to do right now.

More seriously, any idea that makes combat slow-paced like the rest of the game is a huge improvement, and the biggest improvement necessary to make the game work like it should. Cantr is slow-paced and RP-heavy. Having the most lethal parts of the game require rapid response and severely punish RP is terrible. Assuming it's as easy to implement as it sounds, Cogli's most recent suggestion seems like a good way of dealing with this part of the problem, which is certainly the biggest one. Although it does leave me worried that the admins won't solve the other problems with combat after they hit the big one.

[kemesO]

Dragging should be possible only after the imprisonment of a char by e.g. shackles or other item. Attempt to imprisonment and defense from it should looks just like fight-sheme in your proposal, Nalaris and chances of succes or failure should depend of tiredness, fight-skill and tiredness of involved chars.

[SekoETC]

That doesn't take friendly dragging into account. People should be able to give friends a permission to drag them without resistance.

[Nalaris]

Yeah, I wholeheartedly support the dragging whitelist idea. That's a pretty solid one.

[Spillages]

Been a while since i've played, coming back I notice many changes.

My suggestion, is not to alter the way combat is(or was when I played 6+ years ago as I haven't tested that aspect yet). It worked as it made it great for situations as people have described. But, we do need to realize that killing does change a person. Just look at the people coming back from war, or serial killer locked in jail. If you are keen to pay attention, they can have a different look in their eyes. Would make a serial killer(s) stand out among a crowd. Just as the new feature I see that shows when a person is wounded. Possibly implement a feature to show (for lack of the correct word) someone's morale/karma. Someone who slapped someone once or twice, would appear to be a normal person. Someone who used a deadly weapon may at times appear to be unstable. Someone who has harmed many others may appear unstable quite often. Someone who has brought death to another will definitely show a bit more. and of course, a mass murderer would have to nearly be in exile, to not be noticed. Of course, this may wear off over time, depending on the severity. Someone who just walked outside after murdering his wife, may be blood stained, or even skiddish to ones questions.

EDIT: this suggestion would also force RP. and in my eyes, a serial killer who can RP properly to pull it off, is a winner in my books. A "troll" who does not want to RP, would be much easier to spot.