Individual Combat
Individual combat models physical or magical conflict between two or more characters through the use of one or more combat skills. It will (we suspect) make extensive use of the more-complex abilities such as scripts and styles, and use roles to provide tactical decision-making.
Some of the ideas we've tossed around:
- Combat should be brutal, brief, and much more damaging.
- Damage systems should model shock, blood loss, realistic fatigue, unconsciousness, critical blows, loss of nerve, etc. The lack of these makes for combat that looks like two people trying to slap each other to death.*
- Combat should be much more reliant on the characteristics of the character, rather than the typing prowess of the player.
- It should place a much greater emphasis on stategy than it does on tactics. The character should do most of the (tactical) fighting in a semi-automated fashion, with the player providing high-level cues and strategies. This should be easy to implement with server-side macros (scripts, styles and roles).
— GedTheGreysHain - 20 Jul 2001
Added some minor changes to clarify some points.
*Slapping each other to death has some advantages for gameplay reasons (that's why it's been so popular ever since D&D introduced the concept of hit points). But the gameplay advantages can be achieved without the unrealistic "war of attrition" concept behind hit points.
— scotus - 24 Feb 2008
