An argument for turn based - The Magnificent Seven argument

[Xilonfon]

Re: An argument for turn based - The Magnificent Seven argum

Basically, this is a non-standard argument for turn based combat in CRPGs based on a movie, The Magnificent Seven.

Okay, the set up is there are scenes at the beginning of the movie that demonstrates why the Magnificent Seven are, in fact, "magnificent". One of them is a scene featuring a guy who specializes in throwing knives as his combat forte. He is challenged by a gunslinger as to whether or not he's faster with his knife throwing than the gunslinger is. They do a mock run at an actual duel and the gunslinger claims victory. The people looking on say they couldn't tell who won or who lost. When the gunslinger asks the knife guy to tell them who won, the knife guy says, "You lost."

So, the gunslinger gets angry, and tells the knife guy he wants to prove it by them dueling for real. When the gunslinger keeps on insisting, the knife fighter eventually stands up, and they duel again, standing about 20 to 30 feet apart. Long story short, as the gunslinger is drawing, he gets a knife hitting him and killing him.

The knife thrower was much faster than the gunslinger, capable of not only beating the gunslinger's weapon draw, but also having the knife travel accurately through the air in time to kill the gunslinger before he fired.

Turn based can do this situation flawlessly. Most turn based systems have a combat system based on how fast a character can act based on their agilty, or other attribute(s), the characters in combat are. Avernum does it. Geneforge does it. SPECIAL does it. I'm pretty sure GURPS does this as well. Because the knife thrower was more agile than the gunslinger, he won the fight. His "turn" came up first.

Now, consider this situation in real time. In real time, you have to deal with actions and animations also going on at the same time. You have three animation sequences for this fight. The knife flying through the air, the knife thrower drawing and throwing the knife, and the gun slinger drawing his weapon. Each of these animations will have a certain fixed frame count per second.

For most 2D games, the animation frames for the sprites is 15 frames per second. 3D games are pretty much the same, only they can blend the model movements with the frame rate, making the animations a litte more smoothly. Because of this, in real time, you'd have to set up a delay calculation for the gunslingers just to get the knife in the air for it to complete the animations of the drawing just before it fires the gun.

That's basically the problem here. You'd pretty much have to script this to work right, and it'd only work for that one event. You'd have a consistancy issue throughout the game. If you made it so the knife thrower was always that much faster, you'd end up with several balance issue problems as well as a problem with the timing of actions per "round".

You have to deal with the time it takes for the knife thrower to go through his draw and throw animations, and the animation of the knife travelling through the air. If it takes ten frames of animation for the draw and throw, you have to delay every gunslinger that he's faster than for 7/10s of a second, and possibly delay them even more depending on the travel time for the knife. That may not sound like much, but that's a fairly long time to delay actions in real time. Depending on the round length, or when time "recycles", this would result in long gaps between the next cycle or you'd have overlapping cycles, just to compensate for this effect.

Also, depending on whether this is a bonus or penalty of lag time due to an attribute like agility, you run the risk of having a narrow attribute system just so the round time isn't too long. It's it's a bonus or penalty of .7 seconds per agility point, and you have a attribute range of 1-20, you're talking a round cycle time of 14 seconds in real time, which would make it grossly slower than turn based.

So, basically, that's an advantage to turn based right there. It can allow a specialist character to actually be magnificent in his area of specialty, which wouldn't be possible in real time without a hell of a lot of fudging.

wtf? u can just maek teh guy with teh knife way fastr than teh gun guy.

 

[Lumpy]

SP, your argument is clearly wrong, for the following reason:
Your argument works under the assumption that the game is realistic, and either being hit by a knife or a bullet will end combat, probably in death. So whoever wins initiative will win the fight. Fine, but that's still not an accurate representation.
Let's say the Knife Thrower decides to whip out his Sniper Rifle, and deliver a finely targeted shot to his opponent's brains. Now, were he to try that in the movie, the less swift but more reasonable gunslinger would blow the Magnificent One's head off before he manages to carefully aim and shoot. But what happens in turn based? The Magnificent wins initiative, so he has a round (the equivalent of 20 seconds, perhaps), to do anything he wants while his opponent watches.
Your argument, ironically, works better for Phase Based than for turn based. The duel starts, a phase begins - both plan out their moves. One picks the knife throw, the other a gunshot. As the action starts, each reaches for his weapon of choice. The duration it takes each depends on his dexterity, and perception for aiming. The speed of the knife further depends on the skill of the user (and the weapon itself), while the speed of the bullet depends purely on the gun.
So, supposing both aim correctly, there are three possible outcomes:
- the knife hits the gunman before he can pull the trigger; the gunman dies
- the bullet hits the knife thrower before he can throw a knife; the One of Seven dies
- both use their weapons before being hit - both die.
Now, that's pretty much only possible in Real Time or Phase Based, the latter being preferable because it depends less on player reflexes and more (completely?) on character skill.

 

[someone else]

blah blah blah

You are six years too slow!

Edited to add: Oh Rosh used to post here eh?

 

[DraQ]

Now, consider this situation in real time. In real time, you have to deal with actions and animations also going on at the same time. You have three animation sequences for this fight. The knife flying through the air, the knife thrower drawing and throwing the knife, and the gun slinger drawing his weapon. Each of these animations will have a certain fixed frame count per second.

The knife flying is not an animation, but 2D/3D object moving through 2D/3D space. For this reason it doesn't have anything resembling a fixed duration.

Because of this, in real time, you'd have to set up a delay calculation for the gunslingers just to get the knife in the air for it to complete the animations of the drawing just before it fires the gun.

What for? Wouldn't adjusting the length of animations so that knife thrower can draw and hit the gunslinger before gunslinger draws and hits him over that particular (or shorter) distance suffice?

You have to deal with the time it takes for the knife thrower to go through his draw and throw animations, and the animation of the knife travelling through the air. If it takes ten frames of animation for the draw and throw, you have to delay every gunslinger that he's faster than for 7/10s of a second, and possibly delay them even more depending on the travel time for the knife. That may not sound like much, but that's a fairly long time to delay actions in real time. Depending on the round length, or when time "recycles", this would result in long gaps between the next cycle or you'd have overlapping cycles, just to compensate for this effect.

I don't get several things here. Why are you thinking in rounds? The default unit in RT engine is one engine 'tick' which is really short making the action practically continuous, hence the RT. Turns and rounds should be reserved for TB games and PnP RPGs, which might be one of the reasons why IE sucked so hard when it came to combat - it tried to be RT, but emulate TB mechanics. Actions don't have to be synchronous in RT system, they can be triggered anytime. Add bonus of 3D animations being scaleable in time which eliminates the need for artificial delays.

Also, depending on whether this is a bonus or penalty of lag time due to an attribute like agility, you run the risk of having a narrow attribute system just so the round time isn't too long. It's it's a bonus or penalty of .7 seconds per agility point, and you have a attribute range of 1-20, you're talking a round cycle time of 14 seconds in real time, which would make it grossly slower than turn based.

So, basically, that's an advantage to turn based right there. It can allow a specialist character to actually be magnificent in his area of specialty, which wouldn't be possible in real time without a hell of a lot of fudging.

Obsolescence of lag system and pointlessness of rounds aside, why use 0.7s per attribute point? It's freakishly long. Something like 0.1s would be far more natural. Of course we'd have another problem here, namely the need for good player's reflexes, but it's adequately covered by traditional pro-TB arguments and can alleviated using smart auto-pause system.

I can agree that RT mechanics limits the amount of god-like skill that can be displayed by a character, but it's hardly fatal to the RT. Not any more than side effects of time discretization that, while possible to be alleviated by use of epicycles upon epicycles like ability to utilize unused AP's to attack during apponent's turn (should opportunity arise), can't be eliminated, because non-simultaneous synchronous system (TB mechanics) will never emulate simultaneous asynchronous one (real combat), are fatal to TB.

There are many ways to overcome the limitations of RT (or, rather the limitations of the player) - movement rate, responsiveness and general agility displayed by character can be modified, random component can be used to mess player's aim, certain degree of autonomy can be given to character while performing certain actions (like melee combat), finally, autopause can be used, though the system becomes more of a continuous-with-interrupts than true RT then.

Main issue I see here is complaining that certain things can't be done in the same way as in TB, rather than first thinking how to make some scenarios work as in the movie/RL, then how to make them balanced and controlable.

 

[dagorkan]

:facepalm:

 

[Kingston]

Replying to a six-year old post seems fun. Like talking to the past.

 

[DraQ]

So, supposing both aim correctly, there are three possible outcomes:
- the knife hits the gunman before he can pull the trigger; the gunman dies
- the bullet hits the knife thrower before he can throw a knife; the One of Seven dies
- both use their weapons before being hit - both die.

You forgot the insanely improbable scenario where the bullet collides with the knife.

 

[DraQ]

Replying to a six-year old post seems fun. Like talking to the past.

*looks at the dates*
:facepalm:

...bloodyfuck...

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Yeah, we used to have good discussions back then. Then SP left us and all hell broke lose.

 

[Lumpy]

Replying to a six-year old post seems fun. Like talking to the past.

Yeah, it's cool. Imagine you could talk to George Washington and tell him the Declaraction of Independence is wrong. That's what we're doing here.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

You're talking about SP like he doesn't post any more.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

No he does, but not as much as he used to.

 

[RK47]

his argument is quite sound when comparing TB & RT. Lumpy's 'pull out a sniper rifle' argument does not apply in D&D. I tried doing that in TOEE, basically my rogue got first initiative, he was wielding a dagger and standing too far to get a melee attack in, I switched to the Heavy crossbow in his pack. This consumes a half round action, I cannot attack since firing it takes a full round action.

 

[Crichton]

his argument is quite sound when comparing TB & RT.

The argument is still garbage. The reason that the guy in the magnificent seven was able to kill his opponent was that the other guy froze; he was able to throw the knife before the other guy fired his gun (some people are quicker than others, life's a bitch, yada, yada, yada). This is not difficult to implement in RT; all you need is a variable "processing action" phase before anyone actually takes their action in a given round. The I.E. games had this over 10 years ago (coupled to an initiative roll) and I don't think they were the first by any means.

Basically, if it can happen in real life, it can happen in real time.

 

[RK47]

can you name me any RT-combat RPG that has it? That actually takes into account of character statistics when 'aiming and drawing weapons?'

you sound very confident of this RT implementation in working. Well it works in Baldur's Gate somehow, but how does it actually 'seen as working' in First person view? Pushing your mouse faster? VATS in F3? Left clicking an having attributes that affect how fast your character re-acts to it?

 

[Crichton]

can you name me any RT-combat RPG that has it? That actually takes into account of character statistics when 'aiming and drawing weapons?'

you sound very confident of this RT implementation in working. Well it works in Baldur's Gate somehow, but how does it actually 'seen as working' in First person view? Pushing your mouse faster? VATS in F3? Left clicking an having attributes that affect how fast your character re-acts to it?

I just named five if you'd bother to read the post;

BG 1+2
IWD 1+2
PS:T

They all use an initiative roll to determine just how fast a given attack occurs. (If you don't remember 2nd ed., you roll a d20, add weapon speed and dex modifier and hope for the best)

If you wanted to do it in a first person game, it's exactly the same, there's always a lag between you inputing an order and your character obeying, just make the lag dependent on some character/weapon stat.

This sort of thing happens in action games all the time, it's generally the slow player that gets knifed/shot rather than the slow character because few action games implement character speed differentials, but if you want to make it dependent on character stats, that's done too; it's called bullet time and it's been around for long while as well.

 

[Bluebottle]

BG 1+2
IWD 1+2
PS:T

Well it's been a fair old while since I last played any IE games, but I seem to remember almost all combats I got into started with the AI having the jump on my party, because I was a slow arse fuck who never pressed pause quickly enough. Now with the first few seconds of combat being really quite important, for a multitude of tactical reasons, this made a significant difference to how the entire combat played out. As such, because I'm a useless finger cripple I tended to have to rely on predictable and fairly cheap tactics that played out in a similar fashion each time. Obviously there were IN rolls each turn/phase/whatever after that to see who hit who first, but at the beginning the tactical landscape was determined (to a large extent) by how quickly I pressed pause.

Am I remembering wrong?

 

[Hory]

Is it just my quick reading of the original post, or does Saint's argument fail if you can simply vary animation speed?

Let's say the Knife Thrower decides to whip out his Sniper Rifle, and deliver a finely targeted shot to his opponent's brains. Now, were he to try that in the movie, the less swift but more reasonable gunslinger would blow the Magnificent One's head off before he manages to carefully aim and shoot. But what happens in turn based? The Magnificent wins initiative, so he has a round (the equivalent of 20 seconds, perhaps), to do anything he wants while his opponent watches.

Well, if the game IS realistic, "whipping out the Sniper Rifle and delivering a finely targeted shot" should take action points several times higher than just a quick knife throw, perhaps as much so that you can't do it only in one round. I played just one P&P RPG, and even it had a rule that you either shoot in one round, or you just "aim" that round, gaining a bonus in accuracy for the next one.
Also, a TB round should definitely not be the equivalent of 20 seconds. 5 seconds at most, in my opinion.

 

[Crichton]

Am I remembering wrong?

Yes and no. I'm sure that your memory is correct, but you obviously didn't know about the autopause settings like "autopause on enemy sighted" or "autopause at the beginning of round", enable those and you'll only need to press the spacebar to start things up again.

 

[Gnidrologist]

In JA2 + w.13 mod you can make one proper shot (shot with optimal action points/accuracy ratio) from most high range rifles not even counting a reload which makes it for another more turn.
It all depends on implementation.
Ibelieve it's possible implement decent initiative/quickness reproduction in real time fps game too, but it would inevitably rely on player twitch skills also.
I prefer to wield a cup of beer in one hand and mouse in the other while playing my crpgs, so naturally, it's less preferable system.

 

[RK47]

Quite right, there is always room for pause and think. Hm what do I do now? Autopause is awkward as hell and seems to break the flow of the game. I know playing BG I hardly gave a shit about the melee once I realize it's a crap shoot and formation means jackshit. Just web the fuckers and pin cushion. Especially when going into inventory un-pause the game in the original. Wtf is that?

JA2 had the right idea, right up there next to TOEE. It had that seamless 'movement phase and in-combat phase' thing going. And the best thing is that it works! Stealth is rewarded with a free one-hit kills from thrown knives or silenced burst of Mac-10. I know I grinned from ear to ear when Blood just snuck up on an elite, killed two of them in one round without any noise made.

 

[Dementia Praecox]

I miss Chris Beddoes.

 

[obediah]

can you name me any RT-combat RPG that has it? That actually takes into account of character statistics when 'aiming and drawing weapons?'

Look at the UFO After* games. They are not rpgs, but have the same combat as a tactical rpg. They model this much better than any TB game that I've played. Character stats ( reflexes, perception), stance, your aiming/firing mode, and the weapon you are using all affect who shoots first. I assume some of the other hardcore RTwP tactics games do this as well. It's trivial to model all sorts of variables like this in RTwP that shit all over what you can do with TB. Good luck making it fun for anyone that doesn't have 5 hours for each battle though.

 

[RK47]

Well fuck after playing the hell out of TOEE, nope I still cannot accept RTwP as superior options than TB for something like D&D translation.

Let's look at NWN2 vs TOEE scenario of an ambush. You rush into a room, getting accosted by 12 brigands, 1 leader, a pair of witches and a wizard.

NWN2: You walk in, your wiz gets pegged to 10 hp by 5 archers since you didn't hit space bar fast enough. Your cleric couldn't heal because while the stupid room was loading the goddamn witches cast silence on him. Woohoo. Combat ensues, where you try haplessly to 'body-check' the spear-wielders from poking your wizard to death but since it's in real time, and positioning is not even clear. One gets a crit from attack of opportunity when your wizard attempt to cast stoneskin.

TOEE: The wizard's high initiative feat pays off, allowing him to take a 5-foot step away from the brigand next to him to avoid attack of opportunity. Now you have a choice to do a mass crowd control spell or cast a defensive buff on himself...you know only 3 brigands can move after this, before your barbarian can react and body check them. You decide to web them. etc etc.

You want to escape? Sure you can.
NWN2: Click on the goddamn blue door icon before any one of your party dies.
TOEE: Wait for your turn and click the Flee combat; hopefully you roll successfully to escape.

 

[SilasMalkav]

Just wondering, but what if the real time combat was transformed into a slo-mo combat? You'd then get to do everything you described in your second example.