An argument for turn based - The Magnificent Seven argument
Saint_Proverbius
Oct 30, 2002
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...urn-based-the-magnificent-seven-argument.192/
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.
