Taking Feature/Mechanic Suggestions for a New Arena/War Game

[HollowOfHaze]

Wargames: WIP


This is the development page for a new arena-styled RP, titled Wargames. This RP will make use of the dice-roll system recently added to the forums, to allow for combat, movement, and chance in general to be decided by true chance, not the RPers, allowing for a fair experience within the Wargames. The exact implementation of dice-rolls is still being developed (I'm open to sugggestions), and everything here is what I currently have written down, and subject to chance. This page will be updated as new features/mechanics are considered and implemented.



All dice-rolls will be done with the equivalent of a D20.


1: Health, Shields, and Stats


a) Health and Shields - Each player will start a round with 150
Health, and 100 Shields. Health is not replenishable, while Shields
regenerate if a player manages to stay in cover without being hit for two turns,
or if they remain out of combat for two turns. Health does not regenerate.


b) Stats, and Stat Variables - Include the following:

   Evasion: Buff/debuff which modifies an attacking
   opponent's roll to strike, directly corresponding to how
   much the value of a roll is reduced. (Ex: Enemy rolls a 15
   for a strike against a player with an Evasion rating of
   3, reduces roll value to 12). Examples of actions affecting
   Evasion include form shifts(see section 5), being in cover
   (increases Evasion significantly), and being midair/ in flight
   (decreases Evasion significantly).


   Accuracy: Modifies the roll of your strike against an opponent
   when attacking. Represented similar to Evasion, and
   directly counteracts the Evasion buff/debuff.

2: Turns - Due to the nature of the forums, you may make your move after half (up for change)  of other participants have taken their turn.
If the number of participants exceeds 5 (up for change) participants, then you may make your move after 2-3 (up for change) others have gone.


3: Combat


a) Weapons - WIP (Will take suggestions).


b) Cover - Rather than preventing damage, cover gives a large boost to
Evasion, making strikes by opponents possible, but highly unlikely.
Offensive actions are not allowed while in cover.

4: Forms and Form Shifting


a) Form Shifting - Can be done at the start of a turn, and has a delay
of two turns before another shift can take place.

b) Midform - Known to many as Anthro. Weaponry can be used in this
form, and can be considered the standard form for combat. Movement is
1 (2 while in flight for applicable species), and Armor is 25%.


c) Fullform - Known to many as Feral. Weaponry cannot be used, instead
relying on whatever offensive capabilities your species might have.
Damage taken is reduced by 25% due to tougher hide, but Evasion suffers
as a result of your increased size. (Possibly allow takedowns with a delay?)

[HollowOfHaze]

Almost done. Now, we wait and see what becomes of the oppression of the dice-roll censor bar.

[anoni]

The problem with this IMHO Hollow is the fact that it will be difficult to track things. Remember, in normal games we have a fluent display of stat elements, where we are currently (on a board), what are health his (represented by coins or something) and what we're currently doing. The forum doesn't quite have these elements, instead the forum just has an unordered sequential list of commands, with no map or stat tracker.

Lets take a simple example, consider health. If person A is attacking person B, person A may know his health from memory but how will he know the health of person B? Will he have to go through the entire thread with a piece of paper and track how person B's health decreases (that'll take too long and there's a high chance that he may make a mistake). Will YOU as the post-master track everybody's health? (Requires a lot of work from you, and you updating peoples health may be too slow). The fact becomes even more difficult when you consider how shields can regenerate and how armor affects health rates, not only do you have to track how much health goes down per post, but you have to track whether shield regenerates as well as what armor people are wearing. All of this from an unordered list of commands. You could potentially write a script to get that info for you, but then people would be forced to post in a very specific way which people probably won't.

That's not even mentioning movement, evasion, combat and so forth. Remember, if poster A and poster B are in some turn order, there's nothing stopping a poster C from posting out of the turn order. Turns are very difficult to keep consistent within a forum game because everyone is gonna want to post when they're available. Your game sounds like it requires a deterministic order of people posting, but that can't be achieved. If you used "locks", ie: forbid people from posting out of turn order, you're likely to not get a lot of posts because your game relies on everyone being active around the same time, or even active at all (some people may leave the forum or be busy for weeks and that'll hang your game). If you allow multiple turn orders to run on the thread concurrently, you're likely to get a giant cluttered mess of differing turn orders, person A is in combat with person C, person B is in combat with person D, but person D is also in combat with person C and so forth. It'd get really confusing really fast.

The medium is just too hard to maintain for a game this sophisticated. My suggestion is to either move it to a different medium or make your game considerably simpler.


Also I didn't know about this new feature so I'm gonna test it out: [roll]  doesn't seem to work xD

[Angder]

Rolled 5d8 : 1, 7, 6, 1, 5, total 20

Works fine here! 



I agree though, keep it as simple as possible, that is good advice for any game which does not involve a computer Doing the maths for you.

[HollowOfHaze]

So here's the changelog, my first attempt to simplify the game to the point of being playable.


Removed the Armor stat, replaced with innate 25% damage reduction for fullforms only.
Removed open movement, to be replaced with a better cover mechanic to allow for diverse scenarios without adding clutter/overcomplication.
Removed engagement state, players are free to attack anyone else currently participating, still taking suggestions to allow for weapon diversity to remain balanced.
Turns replaced with the ability to make your move after a set number of other people take their own turns, depending on number of participants.


I'm thinking about adding the necessity to post health, shield, and current action when a participant takes their turn.
This would allow everyone to see what they are doing, and what their current vitality is.


Ex:
Health-150
Shield-55
Currently- Taking cover/ready to strike/shooting at...


From this simple representation, it is possible to see that unless the next hit against this person makes contact, their shield will regenerate, or that they are fully capable of retaliation against another player.
Short, simple, easy to implement.


As always, suggestions are welcome.

[Ryan Naismith]

Well, here's how I think it should go, as an avid player of "HL2RP" (or  rather, I used to be)

On this, which technically had a health system, but was rarely ever actually used, because actual fistfights were typed out, you were expected to RP your damage (IE, if you get hit in the leg by a bullet, you are expected to RP the damage as such) This, was called painRp. That is a way to 'track' damage, and though it places a lot of trust into the actual players of the game, t is much easier and simpler, and with people who actually play it right, I think it can be much more fun.

Now, let's talk about rolls.
I'm taking this from my old HL2RP server as well, and though it may be a straight win/loose scenario, what exactly happens can be determined by who is attacking, and who is being attacked.
you roll out of a hundred, and if you roll above 25, you win if that was an easy action, 50 if it was a mediocre action, 75 if it was a hard action. (50 being the most common)
Here's a quick example
*Cop1 tries to kick down the door*
[Roll] Cop1 rolls: 99
**The door goes flying outward in a flurry of wooden splinters**
*badguy1 opens fire on the cop*
[roll] badguy1 rolls 76
**The bullet flies forward, straight into the cop**
((25 being an anti-crit, up to 90 being a normal hit and above that being a critical.))
[roll] Badguy rolls 92
**the 7.62mm bullet tumbles right into the officer's brain, killing him before he hits the ground**


Though this system may be rather easily abused, I honestly think it is easy to keep track of, and allows much, much more flexibility
(For example, plate armor , which makes you virtually immune to cutting attacks, would be poorly represented by a simple shield stat)
Plus, this also places more of a focus on actual RP than a simple text-based game. which, honestly, I prefer.