NWN like persistent world turnbased combat?

[Smashing Axe]

Divergent from the pathfinder thread.

I don't think you can mix persistent worlds and turn-based combat. A big city and suddenly somebody starts a fight in... the whole place changes from RT to TB.

There are a couple of ways around this that would facilitate TB in a persistent world environment that I've given thought to:

1. When combat starts turnbased is enforced within a defined radius. Non-involved parties can leave the area of effect easily so long as they do not engage with involved parties. The rest of the world continue in real time. In an enforced roleplay world there's a couple of problems with groups metagaming PvP combat and coming to the assistance of their allies swiftly when in turnbased mode only a few seconds have passed, yet I think that's fairly minour and is a metagaming issue for the DMs to handle. In order to buff yourself up for combat you'd need to lock yourself into the turnbased combat timestream and so take an appropriately long amount of time to intervene with combat.
2. Have small areas like NWN, so when combat is initiated only those in the area are affected, very similar to the above, which assumes a larger area in general like the previously mentioned city example.

Regarding handling combat once its been initiated, I like the idea of environment creatures having simultaneous movement like in ToEE. Each player can plan their character's actions out and lock it in, they'll have six seconds to change their decision once it comes to their turn in the initiative order in case the situation has changed, if they don't change their decision quick enough then their character will do the predefined decision they'd locked in previously and it'll be the next person's turn.

You do encounter some problems when you're dealing with ten or more players in the same area, yet the time interval I think significantly speeds up the game without necessarily sacrificing tactical mobility.

In order to speed up combat resolution combat would necessarily need to be more deadly than your standard-faire MMORPG, at low levels of D20 it works well. Higher levels become more dicey.

Anyone see any problems with how this would work?

 

[J1M]

The only "problem" with turn-based combat is getting publisher funding for it.

 

[tuluse]

Isn't the Shadowrun MMO going to have turn based combat?