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Idly musing on TB vs RTwP ...

JarlFrank

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That doesn't make sense, you can have excellent simulation with TB or RTwP.

so I take it you're backpedaling on your claim that RtwP is better for immersion :smug:

lol no. Check my post above the one you made. There are roughly two things, and people often use "immersion" indifferently for both - there's absorption in the game, engagement, being in a gameplay trance state, having your head filled with the "possible moves" of the game, and there's the sense of being there, of tranlocation inside the virtual world and living through the story. The latter is the older sense of "immersion" that developers originally used (which now tends to be called "presence") and that's the way I use it (probably because that's what was current in the 80s and 90s when I first got into videogames).

So: RTwP leans more towards staying "in" the virtual world and "in" the story, and goes with more epic and intricate story, whereas TB leans more towards having something that's more like a series of absorbing chess matches linked by enough story to hold the interest, but with some detachment. Either way you can have more or less simulation, it's a different thing again. It's not a hard and fast essentialist rule, and as people have pointed out there are always examples of games that do it the other way round. It's just a natural going-together, a tendency, a natural fit.

You're assuming that turn based combat automatically takes me out of the game's narrative flow and makes me think of the combat section as a puzzle divorced from the gameworld as a whole.

That doesn't happen to me though. I don't consider the combat as a "separate thing" just because it's turn based. It's still the same game, the same world, the same story, the same characters. The things that happen in turn based combat still represent all the real, believable things that are depicted by the moving 3D models: my fighter is good at bashing heads in and his armor shields him from most physical damage. My wizard chick throws her spells around and buffs the party. My rogue sneaks behind enemy lines and attempts flanking attacks. Meanwhile, enemies also follow the rules that make sense for them: enemy archers stay in the back and behind cover while their melee dudes form a shieldwall in front of them. It all checks out.

In fact, in most turn based systems the tactical precision is greater than in most RTwP systems, so it actually feels more immersive than RTwP! Especially since it's much easier to program a reasonably-acting AI in TB than in RT. You can also design much more complex systems in TB because it's pace is slower and more deliberate, so you can factor in more simulationist aspects without overwhelming the player.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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However, is there even one WEGO classic D&D style RPG with positioning and melee combat out there which works? Or at least a wargame but which is quite close to that, not any wargame?

As someone who really doesn't like WEGO for several reasons, I can point to the ancient naval wargame Mare Nostrum as an example of why it doesn't work.

Mare Nostrum is a wargame with ancient battlefleets, from Greek naval battles to Rome vs Carthage naval battles. It has a hex grid and you command ships in squads as well as individually. You can set their direction and speed, and the game tells you on which tile they will end up in the next turn.
So far so good.
The problem is that ancient naval tactics relied a lot on close touching maneuvers: ramming enemy ships or shearing off their oars with a close "drive-by".
But in the game's WEGO system, both you and the AI make their movement decisions simultaneously, and then watch them play out.
You don't set a target for your ships. You tell them which tile to move to. That means you have to guess which tile an enemy ship is going to be at during the next turn. Will the enemy stop his ship? Will he continue rowing it forward at constant speed? Will he turn away? Will he turn to face you? You don't know. So it becomes a guessing game, and in most cases both you and the enemy will just maneuver your ships past each other. Because WEGO just doesn't work in battles that rely on close combat and maneuvering.

It would work much better if you could tell your ships to target enemy ships and adjust their course dynamically based on enemy movements (like, you know, an IRL ship captain would do), instead of having them target a specific tile. But you can't do that, so it becomes a mess.

The only games I played where WEGO works are games with a focus on ranged combat. Modern squad tactics, or spaceship battles, where it's all about moving into advantageous firing positions, moving from cover to cover, or aligning a broadside with your railguns. Those work because you don't have to predict the exact position of your enemy, just their rough location within the map space: as long as your guns are aimed northwards, your units will be able to fire at any enemy crossing north of you.

But with melee combat, it just becomes a total mess of soldiers running in circles around each other.
Mostly true, but phase based combat might also use some kind initiative order for resolution phase.
I think Ravenmark: Scourge of Estallion is an example of such.
I think I'll buy it from next Steam sale to see how well this works.
 

JarlFrank

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Mostly true, but phase based combat might also use some kind initiative order for resolution phase.

Or it could simply let you pick targets instead of tiles, so melee fighters wouldn't blindly walk past enemies but towards the one they've chosen as a target. They then fight it out at the place where they meet.
 

Johnny Biggums

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I feel like this cuts to the heart of what playing a RPG actually is though.

Your skills should not trump your characters skills.

When you can’t evaluate a game mechanic without a clumsy appeal to some RPG platonic form it just outs you as a low ranking autist. Seriously, you didn’t ask yourself whether the mechanic is fun, engaging, immersive, you didn’t ask how it effects player experience on any level, you asked yourself whether it manifests the true essence of RPGness. I’m sorry that the codex has done this to your brain.
 

Serious_Business

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I've said many times that the reliance on more or less linear narratives (even when they are structured around C&C - trees with branches are still trees) is a crutch for rpgs and they will not evolve before they go beyond it. However this is in part me being bored with the genre, so it's largely impertinent for the evolution of the possibilities of the medium. Intrinsictly it tends to generate a kind of conservative field, even though ironically PnP games are very imaginative affairs. Video games feed off that imagination but the systemic limitations obviously are what they are ; narration is meant to be "enjoyed" but to me it's clearly an expression of the limits of the information systems that are being constructed in a video game.

That being said, I can get into the idea that RtwP is more adequate to narrative driven games - which would be another proof that it is inherently inferior.
 

0sacred

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So: RTwP leans more towards staying "in" the virtual world and "in" the story, and goes with more epic and intricate story, whereas TB leans more towards having something that's more like a series of absorbing chess matches linked by enough story to hold the interest, but with some detachment. Either way you can have more or less simulation, it's a different thing again. It's not a hard and fast essentialist rule, and as people have pointed out there are always examples of games that do it the other way round. It's just a natural going-together, a tendency, a natural fit.

Simulation is paramount for immersion. Unless you're absorbed by just doing shit... which I gather is how you define it. Which is a really useless definition of immersion, as it's no different from saying a game is fun or gud.

But no specific grain of simulation is paramount for immersion. Is a storybook section less immersive for being just a few words, choices and a faux woodcut?

so agreed, we can have our immershun no matter how the game is presented. A problem existed with older TB titles where combat was presented on seperate screens different from the ones used for exploration. That takes you out of the world a bit. Combat that occurs in the same environment where NPC's and objects are presented doesn't take you out of the experience, wether turn based or real time.
 

Desiderius

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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
RTwP is TB, just with the turns taking place at the same time, as they do in reality which is what one seeks to model as a baseline.

Autopause achieves the purpose of TB without needlessly compromising that baseline.
 

Norfleet

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The problem is that ancient naval tactics relied a lot on close touching maneuvers: ramming enemy ships or shearing off their oars with a close "drive-by".
But in the game's WEGO system, both you and the AI make their movement decisions simultaneously, and then watch them play out.
You don't set a target for your ships. You tell them which tile to move to. That means you have to guess which tile an enemy ship is going to be at during the next turn. Will the enemy stop his ship? Will he continue rowing it forward at constant speed? Will he turn away? Will he turn to face you? You don't know. So it becomes a guessing game, and in most cases both you and the enemy will just maneuver your ships past each other. Because WEGO just doesn't work in battles that rely on close combat and maneuvering.
I think this is simply the effect of the resolution being too coarse. Every turn-based game can get a little janky when too much can happen in a single actor's turn, such that an extremely long, obvious action can be taken with no recourse from the opponent. This spawns interrupt rules as an attempt to patch this problem: Reaction fire, attacks of opportunity, etc.
 

Desiderius

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The problem is that ancient naval tactics relied a lot on close touching maneuvers: ramming enemy ships or shearing off their oars with a close "drive-by".
But in the game's WEGO system, both you and the AI make their movement decisions simultaneously, and then watch them play out.
You don't set a target for your ships. You tell them which tile to move to. That means you have to guess which tile an enemy ship is going to be at during the next turn. Will the enemy stop his ship? Will he continue rowing it forward at constant speed? Will he turn away? Will he turn to face you? You don't know. So it becomes a guessing game, and in most cases both you and the enemy will just maneuver your ships past each other. Because WEGO just doesn't work in battles that rely on close combat and maneuvering.
I think this is simply the effect of the resolution being too coarse. Every turn-based game can get a little janky when too much can happen in a single actor's turn, such that an extremely long, obvious action can be taken with no recourse from the opponent. This spawns interrupt rules as an attempt to patch this problem: Reaction fire, attacks of opportunity, etc.

An example of this in Wrath of the Righteous is the Mythic ability Leading Strike which puts a mark on the enemy with each hit that another party member can cash in for extra damage. In RTwP you end up cashing in nearly every hit while in TB each player acts separately so only 20% or so get cashed.
 
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good real-time is better than anything else, it's just harder to get right than turn-based
and rtwp isn't real-time, it's a homo bastardization of RTS. In many ways, it's a precursor to ASSFAGGOTS games.

yea I don't care how many people on the codex this upsets
 

Desiderius

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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
It might but you'll have to translate. Your first line is correct. Although if I wanted to play RT without Pause I'd just log off.
 

grimer

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Well, first, let's just disregard "immersion" as a meaningful argument, since people can't even define it clearly. Although personally, I'd define it as "willingness of the player to give up sleep to keep playing your game". By this definition, it seems clear that real-time or turn-based are irrelevant as both Diablo and Civ have the capability to induce players to forsake sleep in favor of playing them more.

Thus it comes down to "what better fits the game you're making". If you have a singular unit with a relatively limited moveset, it seems pretty clear that real-time works better. If your actions are basically commanding a single unit to move and/or shoot, you're not getting much out of turn-based. The first two Fallouts, as much as people love those games, are an example of TB used poorly: You only ever command one unit and his moveset is basically just "move" and "shoot". The entire turn-based combat business just drags down gameflow for no real gain in your control of the system. The flipside of this would probably be TOEE, where you have a small, but not too small, number of units that each has a fairly complicated list of possible move choices drawn from a large swath of the 3E moveset. This game is pretty much spot on for where TB hits best. At the very edge of the territory might be X-Com, where TB fits almost perfectly, but at the very endgame, the number of units involved can get so large that it starts to strain and flow starts to grind down because of it, which is probably why the franchise has flirted with RT combat. This here is pretty much where you're going to find the border between where TB works best and where RT becomes the better option, because you have a single game that is starts where TB works pretty much perfectly and expands to where you're seeing it fray at the edges, but when done as RT, the exact opposite situation occurs.

In short, there's some ideal sweet spot where TB works best, probably defined in terms of how many choices a player has to filter between. If the player has insufficient choices to make, dragging it out into a slow turn-based game makes it BORING. But if the player has too MANY choices to make, so most of the time he's just going to do the default action, then TB will slow the gameflow to a crawl. In the middle, you have this range where the player still needs to make detailed choices to get good results, and a real-time gameflow would tend to obscure these or turn them into a battle against the interface rather than the enemy.
brofist.jpg
 

Cugel

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What I learned in this thread is that no one actually knows what they mean when they talk about "immersion".
 

Desiderius

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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
When people talk about TB being too slow or RTwP being better for larger encounters you’re talking about RT without Pause. RTwP is designed to be played at the same pace as TB. If you want faster TB there’s no reason you can’t use the same scripts RT uses to speed up turns you don’t feel like controlling yourselves.
 
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the problem isn't exactly rtwp, the problem is that it's not very fun to micromanage multiple characters. These issues are alleviated to some extent in games that have gambits/tactics/whatevertheycallit such as DAO.

rtwp is probably more suited to multiplayer than turn-based games are
 

Desiderius

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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Some people like it. Just like some people like making their own party like IW Dale. Granted most are somewhere in the middle, which means that devs should be making more games with RTwP mode.
 

smaug

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Maybe rtwp isn't that bad, but some fucking retard decided to make IE games where micromanaging 6 characters during combat is hectic and retarded. not only that but some genius of indescribable intellect made houses/towns and dungeons FUCKING TINY AND CONSTRICTED COMBINED WITH AWFUL PATHFINDING AND MICROMANAGEMENT fuck that shit

like classic rpgs didn't seem to have this issuewtf
 
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good real-time is better than anything else, it's just harder to get right than turn-based
and rtwp isn't real-time, it's a homo bastardization of RTS. In many ways, it's a precursor to ASSFAGGOTS games.

yea I don't care how many people on the codex this upsets
ASSFAGGOTS are a pinnacle of fantasy team-based tactical combat. RPG players pootling around vs AI are pathetic in comparison.
 

smaug

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pathfinder's rtwp was more bearable than ie games that's for sure. generally speaking though I think dnd should either be phased based or tb just to alleviate all the hassle that comes with rtwp
 

gurugeorge

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the problem is that it's not very fun to micromanage multiple characters

lolwhut

(I wish I'd paid the dues so I could have the "Bro do you even lift?" button at this point :) )

I actually find TB to be the more annoying mode the more characters you have sometimes - the more turns you're forced to sit through, rather than leaving maybe about 1/3 of the combat to your wee guys' AI as you would in RTwP.

I suppose it depends a lot on the quality of the AI. With great AI, it feels much more like you're giving orders (to creatures with their own minds) rather than micromanaging them - and that's more immersive (in the "being there" sense, not in the "deeply absorbed in chess" sense). But even with shitty AI, unless the fight is really, really hard, some of your guys are just going to be autoattacking - but if you're forced to have a "turn" for them and acknowledge "yes, you're going to have to keep autoattacking there bud," it can be a little grain of irritation.

In this context, it's amusing to note that with the great AI conditionals in POE2, I sometimes find myself thinking, "Oh, A had better do x," then I notice A's tiny "what I'm activating" icon or click on him, and I discover that his AI is already in the process of firing up x :)
 

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When people talk about TB being too slow or RTwP being better for larger encounters you’re talking about RT without Pause. RTwP is designed to be played at the same pace as TB. If you want faster TB there’s no reason you can’t use the same scripts RT uses to speed up turns you don’t feel like controlling yourselves.
You are dumb or what?

In TB combat, when all three combatants aim at one target and shoot at that in their side's turn, nothing can stop them, because it's their side's turn.

In RTwP, because it simultaneously happen on all characters, in such scenario, there's a chance, a big chance, others' action affect those three's action to save that target DURING those three's action. it could be one combatant throw out an AoE spell/grenades and kill off those three, or nudge them badly off-position that they can not target properly, etc...

Example on IWD/BG engine game: one summoner call up a apocalypse bone guard. Now if it's tb, his spell is unstoppable and you are going to have a tough meatshield on your face. But since it's RTwP, the other side's archers can try to concentrate arrows on him and force a failure in casting. Or the frontline 2hand spearman try desperately and can reach that one with his halberd, his melee attack force a failure in casting.
 

cretin

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the problem isn't exactly rtwp, the problem is that it's not very fun to micromanage multiple characters. These issues are alleviated to some extent in games that have gambits/tactics/whatevertheycallit such as DAO.

rtwp is probably more suited to multiplayer than turn-based games are


I feel exactly the opposite is true rusty. RTWP is a pain in the ass for multiplayer, while turn based lends itself naturally to multiple players. Ive had both experiences somewhat recently

Doorkickers 2 - pain in the ass to play with just one other person

DOS2 - fantastic fun with a fully group.
 

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