combat versus multiple opponents

[gragnak]

Old school rpg......
The devs nightmare is to make a game too complex?
But what we are waiting for is JUST a complex game.
A lot of stats, strategic choices to consider and carefull character/story development.

I think bonus/malus combat positioning could be a good implementation.

... my opinion.

[jcompton]

I noticed in a recent interview with the developers of Broken Hourglass, they mentioned penalties for a character facing multiple opponents at one time. Strange almost no RPG's address this.

jcompton magically appears!

Did somebody say "The Broken Hourglass"?

To follow up on the rest of the discussion--for what it's worth, when applying the defensive penalty we don't care where the enemy is oriented, we just care how many people are currently in range to strike you with their equipped melee weapon. So three people standing in front of you penalizes you just as badly as three people in an equilateral triangle around you. Particularly in a realtime combat system, it would be ridiculously penal on both the AI and the player asking them to try to optimize/escape true directional facing... even in very slow, hands-on tabletop D&D it hardly seems worthwhile, hence the way they vastly simplified facing rules in 3e.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Basilisk Games programming.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Welcome, JCompton! Thanks for stopping by. The Broken Hourglass looks awesome and I for one can't wait to play it!

[screeg]

To follow up on the rest of the discussion--for what it's worth, when applying the defensive penalty we don't care where the enemy is oriented, we just care how many people are currently in range to strike you with their equipped melee weapon. So three people standing in front of you penalizes you just as badly as three people in an equilateral triangle around you.

Well, it's welcome. I guess Fallout was the game where this irritated me most. You could be standing in the desert with no cover and under crossfire from six or eight opponents, or surrounded by raiders with spears, and go round after round after round without a scratch.

It basically negated the need for any kind of strategy against groups of low level opponents.