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Combat System
From ATS Wiki
This is the newly-created combat system, the introduction of which seems to be headed by Eleazor. Nicknamed: Zortal Kombat
Contents |
Combat
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
| target <name> | |
| act*ion <name_of_attack> | |
| show act*ions | |
| clear act*ions | |
| show eq*uipment | |
| wield <name_of_weapon> | |
| sling <name_of_weapon> | |
| revive <player> | |
| safetycheck | |
| focus <player|thing> | |
| use <item> |
Targeting
The command to select a target is "target <name>". <name> may refer to a player or an object, if the object is capable of combat. The target must be visible to the enactor.
The target must be either in the same room as the enactor, or visible through a transparent exit (which is not sealed for ranged combat, not valid for melee combat, need not be unsealed for psionic combat). CHANGE: unlike the previous system, targeting initiates combat. If your combat action queue is empty (this will be described later), the default action is applied (a no-feat attack with the weapon(s) you wield, or your bare hands).
Targeting will place the enactor and the target on the combat queue, which means they are considered to have state In Combat for purposes of determining what action the player may take (most notably not being able to do anything that combat may prevent, such as fleeing from the room, applying complicated skill checks, bandaging wounded friends, and so on).
A target continues to be checked for validity each time it receives an attack. An invalid target would be one that you cannot target as above, or one that is already defeated.
A target which is Disabled has no defense, is much easier to hit, and quite likely to be killed in short order. Just as we unlock weapons when a target in space is disabled to prevent accidental killing, your attack will stop when your target goes down unconscious. The target may bleed to death if untreated, or may recover naturally. A coup de grace must be administered to actually kill a target (this likely will have no meaning for an object). There is no defense against a coup de grace, and the effect is automatic.
The Clock
Combat rounds are currently one minute each. This is to give you time to add poses and non-combat actions to your combat. You may enter a combat anywhere within the minute, your next combat action will still occur as dictated by the combat clock. Each round, every combatant rolls for initiative, and actions are taken in the order determined by initiative. Initiative is improved by a dexterity bonus.
Healing
Hit points regenerate naturally over time at a very low rate. The higher your constitution, the more likely you are to heal. If a combatant is dying, bleeding, or comatose, healing will not occur. A fortitude saving throw can move a combatant to a stable condition, except if the combatant goes comatose. Damage is also repaired by the use of items, such as first aid kits, which will also bind wounds and stop bleeding. Getting a combatant out of a coma, however, requires the attention of a medical doctor.
RP Equivalents for points in the Medical Skill
- 1 pt = Basic First Aid
- 2 pts = EMT I
- 3 pts = EMT II / LVN
- 4 pts = Medical School / RN
- 5 pts = Resident
- 6 pts = MD
- 7 pts = Surgical Resident
- 8+ pts = Surgeon
Suggested Combat 2.0 Class for Doctors is Scout.
Equipment
Each combatant has nine slots which can be equipped with combat items. These are shown by "show equipment". Equipment may grant bonuses and penalties to just about everything. The most common equipment is weapons, which grant bonuses to hit probabilities and to damage, and armor, which increases defense. Some equipment, such as surgical kits and tricorders, is specialized, and meant to be used with skill focus, rather than a target.
Character Talents
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
| char help attr | |
| char tree feats | |
| char tree attacks | |
| char feat* list | |
| char skill* list | |
| char power* list | |
| char tree power* | |
| level*up | |
| char convert exp | |
| gen table <class> | |
| char backtosquareoneforme |
Skills
Skills are talents you can apply to non-combat tasks, such as picking locks, healing wounds. These can be improved by turning experience into higher rank, and can be boosted by items and equipment in the field.
Feats
Passive proficiencies that allow use of equipment, combat styles, weapons and other abilities that improve with experience from basic to master, and which typically grant bonuses to attributes and basic combat.
Attacks
An active combat feat, something you can place on the combat action queue. These typically impose bonuses and penalties, on the user and the target, and can change combat results drastically.
Powers
Static modifers to a character, such as having wings, being able to use psionics, or other special abilities.
Experience and Leveling
Eleazor's Raw Notes
...which need to be converted into a wiki-friendly format...
The combat system has talents. Talents are things you can use in your interaction with the players and objects of the MUSH. Talents fall broadly into Skills, Powers, Feats and Attacks. Some you may be born with, some you may choose at chargen, some you may learn as you level up and meet prerequisites.
Attacks are those feats you can employ actively in combat. In order to employ the feat, you must push it onto your action queue. You can queue up to five actions. The syntax is
act*ion <name of attack>
The action queue is first-in, first-out. When you add a feat it goes to the back of the queue. On each combat round, the feat at the front of the queue is used, and removed from the list. You can see your current queue with:
show*act*ions
at any time you are conscious. If you have no actions queued, a default action is taken, usually to attack with the weapon(s) you have wielded, or your bare hands (or whatever you hold your weapons with) if you have nothing equipped.
You can actually queue up all five actions before initiating combat with the target command. You can also clear the queue if you change your mind, using:
clear act*ions
Understanding the action queue will be important if you want to be effective in personal combat. Most attacks will give the attacker both advantages and disadvantages for some period of time, so selecting the right "next move" for the situation is a major influence on your success.
The combat clock is set to run every 60 seconds, which means that the game will only evaluate combat results at that long interval. You are encouraged to think ahead, queue actions, and spend the rest of the minute posing, talking and reacting as you see fit. How soon combat starts depends on where you are in the 60 seconds when you first use 'target'. Your passive defenses will be applied automatically, even if you do not use 'target'.
Each round, everyone currently in combat silently makes an initiative roll. Initiative is a d20 (most things are in a D20 system) modified by any dexterity modifier your character may have (discussed later under Attributes). Players resolve their attacks in the order determined by initiative.
At the start of each round, on your turn, your current target will be checked, and you will be checked to see if you are still conscious and able to fight. Any effects that may heal or hurt or otherwise affect you are processed. If you are able to attack, you will then make an attack with your main hand weapon, or fist. If you have a second weapon wielded, the main-hand attack suffers penalties to both hit and damage, but you get another attack with the second weapon, also at a minus. Certain feats, and the use of certain balanced weapons can reduce this penalty. Some feats may give you an additional attack with the main hand.
If the attack is successful, damage will be applied against your opponent. A natural 20 always hits, a natural 1 always misses.
If you score a 'threat', generally meaning you hit on a natural 20 when your to-hit roll is made, you roll again, and if you hit, you score a 'critical hit'. The critical hit will modify your damage, typically doubling it.
Weapons and feats may affect the 'threat range' by giving you bonuses to your attack roll (so that you score a threat on a 19 or 20, for example) and also to your damage (you might get triple damage plus 2d6).
This means even a 1st level character has a chance to hit a 20th level target, and inflict massive damage, but, it isn't a large chance.
Some weapons may also have special effects. These are applied last. For example your blade may be poisoned. If the opponent fails a fortitude save, he may suffer a d4 of extra damage every round for four rounds. Or your stun-baton may cause the opponent to be stunned and unable to attack for some number of rounds, or until the opponnt makes a successful saving throw of the appropriate type.
Combat will continue until a target is knocked out, or all parties break off combat.
Your character has several attributes that affect your chances of doing things under the combat system. These will be familiar to you, if you have played a D20 system like Dungeons and Dragons or SAGA. At chargen (1st level), you can allocate a pool of 'attribute points' to select your starting attribute values. This is a popular way to do it without rolling dice. At the moment there is only one character class, the Soldier. You can select a default setup for your class instead of allocating the points yourself.
As attribute scores increase, they will grant you bonuses to skills or actions based on those attributes, such as avoiding blows with your reflexes, or making saving throws against coercion with your will.
You can see the various commands for manipulating attributes by typing:
char help attr
You start with 8 in every basic attribute, as you can see with 'char attr list'.
Your chances of healing one tenth of one hit point are two in an hour. This is modified by your constitution bonus. I have increased it from one to two so that people with a -1 constitution bonus have a chance to heal naturally. (Natural healing is slow -- the usual means of healing will be via applying skills like first aid, paramedic, surgery, or items which restore health, or some combination of the two.)
This system is under active development and these notes are preliminary:
Each player gets nine slots for equipment. These slots can be displayed by typing
show equipment (any form that matches show*eq*)
You can equip a slot by typing
wield <name of weapon>
and clear it with
sling <name of weapon>
These commands work for non-weapons, and an alias like 'equip' may be added later.
If you have a weapon equipped, it will automatically be used to make attacks. The weapon may grant you bonuses and/or may inflict penalties. There are no prerequisites to wield a weapon in combat, however, if you are not trained in the use of a weapon, there is a -5 to hit penalty imposed. Training in the use of a weapon is represented by a weapon proficiency feat.
Weapons are broadly classed as single-handed, two-handed and melee or ranged. You could, for example, be proficient in two-handed melee weapons, but only in one-handed ranged weapons. Further training could give you an Improved proficiency which grants you a +1 bonus, or a Master proficiency which grants you a +3.
Wielding a weapon in the offhand is dual-wielding. You cannot wield an offhand weapon (at all today...) if the main hand is empty or holds a two-handed weapon. A dual-ended two-handed weapon would occupy both hands and also be a dual-wield. Dual-wielding means you get two attacks per round, both at a penalty to hit.
The bonus/penalty to hit and range for damage of each hand is shown at the bottom of the equipment screen.
The command:
revive <player>
will return a player to full health. This command will terporarily (at least) work for -anyone- if you are in a safe room with your target. A safe room is one with ROOMTYPE Holodeck or Training Area, which is set SAFE or Haven(Abode). A coup de grace is not possible in these rooms, by the way. My thought is that in future it will work if you have a feat like 'drill instructor', but perhaps that requires more players than we have to be practical. In any case, if you want to beat each other up while combat is being debugged, pick a safe place. A lot of melee weapons have become 'real' enough to use. We will be trying to balance these for play by giving them appropriate bonuses and damage, but for now they have a to-hit bonus of whatever their Hero system bonus was.
I have added the command
safetycheck
for untrusting souls who want to be sure they are in one of the safe areas previously mentioned.
Just a note to say that the talent trees and equipment are being actively built right now. So lists will be short for a while. And there will be a way to view the details of each talent and piece of equipment coming.
The chart of all available feats in a category is shown with a tree command:
char tree feats
char tree attacks
and you can see the ones you have with
char feat* list
char attack* list
The feats are color-coded as yellow (you have this feat), green (you can buy this feat now if you have the feat points to spend), or red (you lack one or more prerequisites -- level, attributes, and/or feats -- and cannot buy this feat yet).
Everyone has all skills at rank 0 (untrained). You can see the list of these skills and your rank and current bonuses with
char skill* list
and you can also list powers with
char power* list
char tree power*
but powers are not something you can buy or improve, and are likely to be static attributes of your race.
To use a skill you need to select a focus for your skill.
focus <player|thing>
will set your skill focus. This is basically choosing a non-combat target.
Applying a skill may work directly on the targeted object, automatically, such as a computer interface, or it may involve applying your skill with a $combat object from your inventory.
Let us say you have an injured companion named Toes the Cat, who is bleeding all over the deck, and you are carrying a First Aid Kit. You could do:
focus Toes
use First Aid Kit
and Toes would stop bleeding and start recovering health at a low rate determined by your Medical skill rank plus any bonus to that skill you may get from equipment. If Toes were comatose, you would have to get him to a medical area with a medical doctor in attendance so he can be treated with a surgical kit.
$help @combat will now show "char help class", and the class commands listed have been implemented and are in test. (The Noble class is intended for NPCs, you should probably avoid it.)
For people wishing to help us test, there are some undocumented commands, none of which are added to help as of yet, and only one which I plan to keep (levelup):
level*up -- Raises your level
char convert exp -- change old system experience to the
new system (will clear your @combat
experience to zero, and give you what
you had multiplied by the Starsmore
factor as new experience. This command
can be used more than once, since old
exp continues to accumulate.)
gen table <class> -- shows the progression of certain scores
for the given <class> by level
char backtosquareoneforme Yes, that's hard to type. Completely
zeroes all your (new) combat attributes
except your experience points, so you can
start over as if you had never done any
chargen at all.
You will be using the last one if you test levelup at all, because the granting of certain feats by level has not been settled yet. I expect it will simply be done by a set of bonus feat points (FP) in the tables and coding level sensitivity into the scoundrel's backstab attack.
Please @mail bug reports to Eleazor with enough information to reproduce the bug, and a brief description of the error.
Note that the table values are -not- the only increases you get with level, some totals will be due to attribute bonuses, choice of race, and feats.
Old experience awards should now be off/stopped. New experience will still accumulate from activity at the same rate as before, which means it is effectively reduced by the same factor we used to convert old to new.
This means there is no reason to hold off converting your experience any longer, and it is to your advantage to do so. An earlier post gives the command.
I plan to add commands shortly for the award of experience points by staff, and code to award experience as a result of combat victories. We are also considering some sort of @vote system for players to nominate other players for exp awards. My intention is that most experience in the future will come from accomplishing mission goals in tinyplots. That doesn't mean you can't put in for awards for those who do excellent roleplay of some other sort, of course. I'm telling you this so the sudden sharp drop in gaining experience from the clock won't be of concern.
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