Hey hey, who said I've played Pokemon? It was more a reference to the cartoon in how the characters are actual people who throw out Pokeballs to battle for them against a foe (what, nobody has kids and has to watch this crap…?).

I was briefly considering using a card game based off KaVir's Great War as a form of social combat, and I had to deal with some interesting issues. I didn't see how you'd planned to implement turns, but I like the way Great War does it. Turns are simultaneous, and have a set duration. For a Great War, for example, each turn is 30 seconds. Doesn't matter if there are 2 or 50 players, each turn is 30 seconds. This might make it difficult to implement M:tG's endless string of counterspelled counterspelled counterspells, but I'm not sure I'd recommend trying to do that in a mud either. Also, a major issue I had was that games like this (and also Great War in particular) can get severely nasty when more than one person attacks an individual in a turn. Since cardgame-style battles are much more static than real time battles (you can't really flee, etc), my solution for this was to give the defender a bonus to defense for each person that attacked him a particular round. If 10 people attack him, he has +9 (+1 for each after the first) defense, et cetera. Usually people like to give bonuses to the attacker for such things, but I think it'd be necessary to favor the defender in a card game. If you need a thematic justification, multiple attackers could get in one another's way.

This a very cool idea, maybe if you wanted to make a simple trial run, you could do something first like FF8'sTripple Triad

I think it's pretty clear that the approach to one-off encounters is quite different than the approach to larger encounters, if anything in the tactics and strategy involved. Again, considering M:TG, there's some amount of set-up that takes place as both players build their position (or occasionally not, if they're using some kind of rushing tactic). But this isn't just about card games; consider a game like Starcraft (or other similar games). The standard gameplay is to be fighting against another base-builder who has basically equal opportunities available. Now, imagine your goal was to defeat a few lone enemies who don't have a base. Wouldn't it be an utter PITA to have to build your base every time just to be able to churn out a few units to defeat them?

A more reasonable approach (and indeed one that some RTSs implement for certain kinds of missions) is to change the rules of engagement and provide you with many units to begin with, but no base to build with. The comparison to a card game is somewhat hard to make, as it highly depends on how exactly the card game works. But basically, the approach – not just strategy but the actual game-play – for dealing with a full opponent should not be the same as the approach for dealing with random, small encounters. They are essentially mini-games, and should be treated as such.

Thanks, and thanks for the link. I actually never played that one. :)




Well, I agree that it's not really an option to do the full game mode for these micro encounters. The real question is how should game B play? My take on it is finding a solution that's as similar to mode A as possible.

I'm considering trying making the gameboard persist throughout these encounters. For example, if combating your way through a forest each time you hit another engagement the board would come set up exactly the way your last fight left off. Two things could reset your board. Leaving the area, or a mode A encounter.

This is why I think that having your own character be a permanent "card" in these battles would be very useful. You could just deploy "yourself" into the battle, at any time, just as you would deploy your dragon card (except that you don't need to draw your own card). This would let you use the exact same game logic for small and large fights, except that you'd have an immediate, actionable unit to deploy to get things over with quickly. Perhaps you could even collect other cards that improve your "card representation" (like a bonus to attack, defense, whatever).

You could let players designate a set of cards to use in quick mode; these cards would immediately be available to them. You could take the RTS approach I mentioned, and say that they don't get their normal deck: once they pick cards and enter a fight, those cards in their hand are all they've got. (IMHO, this is more "realistic" anyhow. It's like equipping your character and learning spells.)

Basically, whatever happens with the short fights, they must be expedient to remain interesting.

Your idea of building things up as you go would be interesting too. But to me it begs the question of why things only build up when you fight small creatures. ("Because it makes better gameplay" can of course be an acceptable answer!)

This could be an interesting idea. One of my concerns with it is the representation of the character through the interface. It might make more sense to me to give the character cards representing the things they can do instead. Perhaps always letting the player take a personal action per turn. I dunno, it's definitely an idea I'm going to work with though. If I decide to do anything with classes or actual character building this would be a desirable path.



That's a reasonable question. To me it seems like the battle itself actually never ended. Particularly, though, I think I'd want important encounters to be fresh. I don't plan on having a lot of mix between these encounters. In other words, I think if you're dungeon crawling you won't come to a high mix of mode A and mode B battles. It's very possible the entire dungeon is persisting micro battles. (It wouldn't be hard to balance that way, and if the concern is that players may stockpile the board to prepare for a more difficult encounter in the dungeon I think this is easily solved by mechanics already present in the game through cards which may go into play when a player enters these more difficult encounters…. Like a card that instantly goes into play reading "All creatures are destroyed." etc.

edit: And just to expand on that a little bit.. Because these micro encounters can be balanced in a way that it expects your board to persist they can scale in difficulty. In other words, it can play with a far more static scripted approach because after you defeat an enemy the rules of a single fight don't exist for the CPU necessarily. You enter the next stage of the battle with enemy already in play which may not have even had to pay costs to bring them into play. This could let builders design how the fights play out a lot more precisely than relying on building decks and luck/AI winning the day with them. (That's not to say that those fights won't happen, too.) But I'm really leaning towards this persisted board idea for dungeon crawling.

Yes, it could work or not work at all depending on how the interface works, I agree. I think that giving a set of always available "personal actions" is a good idea, I like that.


Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way. It would actually be quite sensible to build up as you go with mode B fights along the way, and culminate in a mode A fight with the boss at the end of the dungeon. Then it's quite sensible to expect that things you have done along the way stick around because you're still in the same dungeon, presumably without much time having gone by.

EDIT: I was thinking of random encounters as things you get while just wandering around, not necessarily small fights in a specific goal-oriented activity like dungeon crawling.

Another approach would be to make the dungeon itself an opponent - one which specialises in "monster" and "trap" cards. Thus exploring a dungeon is actually an elaborate turn-based combat encounter between you and the dungeon. You could still represent bosses as separate creatures of course, but this would allow you to deal with all the little critters and minions.

This could be interesting in a way because the combat engine itself could be highly interactive with the dungeon.

So I've been talking with people and thinking heavily of designing the system around the majority of the cards in the decks representing spells/skills available to the player. The player would then be able to customize it like that.

A big issue I have with this is that the majority of cards would then become untradable. This could take away some of the fun in the game.

Yugi-Oh. *sage nods*'

Edit to add: By this, I mean the show as opposed to the actual card game. This seems similar to what you want to do (although, I do admit to only briefly skimming over the whole topic).

Here's some of the things I've been discussing with friends over the past few months and some of the new takes I have on the gameplay.

Definitions for Card Types
- permanents (power sources, artifects, auras, and equipment)
- creatures

Definitions of Phases
- draw
- play / use instants/ abilities / cast spells
- creature attack
- mana regeneration

Definitions of Play Areas
- deck
- hand
- graveyard
- game

Cards Cost Something to Cast.
The cost of the card should typically based on a unit of mana. Avoiding the tap/play paradigm I've decided to simply go with power sources that continually add mana at the end of your turn with no cap.

There's no Concept for Tapping.
Card abilities can only be used once a turn each. There's no way to untap and it's unavoidable.

Creatures Have no Summoning Sickness.
Creatures attack the first round they're in the game.

Attack Phase is Automatic.
Creatures will automatically attack at the end of your turn with no option. If they're in game they'll act until killed or destroyed. The exception is when the creatures only form of attack is an ability. Attack phase is separate from ability use. Both a use and an attack can happen once a turn.

There is no Defend.
Creatures cannot target other creatures with their default attack phase. Likewise, creatures cannot defend against creatures.

Data Transitions at the Start of Battle.
Worn equipment comes into play as permanents. Ultimately this results in fewer equipment slots. Some equipment may not come into play but bestow other benifits. For example, an item may give +5 maximum health and be consumed before the battle starts. Pets, familiars, etc may come into play as creature cards already in play. Spell effects can come into play as auras, power sources, etc.

Additionally, persistent data is effectual. Health pools can be determined by experience levels, equipment, class, race, or any number of persisting data.

It's also important to note that careful balance in this area will be required.

One Group is One Team.
Multiple party members will use one set of turns, one pool of mana, and share phases. Specifically, though, each player will have control of what he puts into play. For example, Retnur can't use the ability of DavidHaley's Demonhunter even if they are in the same group. Futhermore, health pools are not shared, however, enemy creatures attack quite randomly. Abilities can be targeted to a specific target. Damage is not split.

The Combat System is Only a Representation.
In other words, instead of building a deck of cards you wear equipment, have things in your inventory, learn spells and abilities, etc. All these things will generate your deck as combat enters.

No Limit on Spells Learned.
Originally I had thought of limiting memorization. The current plan is simply giving an advantage to someone who learns fewer spells in that it's less random which become available to them in combat. Ultimately more inventory, spells, etc will yield less consistency.

Deck Size.
No limit and no down side to a small deck. The game won't end when the deck draws empty. It'll simply recycle and start over. A player with even only a few cards can do well.

Hand Size.
Initial hand size will be small. No limit and no discarding required, though. It could be exploited by other players, however, depending on the card abilities that go into play. Such as being able to steal a card from your opponent. More cards is more options.

Not quite what you're thinking of, but if you have a chance (free trial perhaps?), check out the MMO Vanguard before it disappears forever. They built in a diplomacy system that works like a card game, and it's really quite clever and fun. The tutorial areas mostly just have diplomacy advisers to teach you how to play, but later on players with high diplomacy skills can try to influence NPC's to alter the game. For example, a diplomatic victory against the right NPC in a dungeon can open shortcuts that allow the party to bypass a particularly nasty section of the dungeon.

Runter, are you going to implement this system in Ruby, or create a ruby module in C?
I'm sure right now your just thinking about CoralMud which is coming along nicely, but if you were to take the C route,
other projects could port your code with few modifications. Just a thought :)

I'm not sure, but it's likely I'll be working on a client separate from the server platform itself. In any event, this project won't become available as open source as far as the resources (sounds, graphics, or content) goes. The code I build it from will remain open source, however.

Speaking of which, if we have any resource people out there that's interested in the project. I probably have the audio covered, but I'm lost with graphics. :)