Combat stance

[Gwydion]

What does everyone think about having combat stances? When you start the game you would have 3 basic stances:

-Balanced- basically what we have now with no penalties or advantages
-Aggressive- adds to melee/ranged to hit, penalties to dodge/block
-Defensive- adds to dodge/block, penalties to melee/ranged to hit

As you progressed you could get more stances through skill level in melee, marksman, and archery and also through Martial arts. Such as:

-Sniper- adds to ranged to hit, penalties to melee to hit, and close range dodge/block
-Heavy Strike- adds to melee damage, penalties to melee hit and increased melee attack time
-Quick Strike- faster attack time, penalties to melee damage
-Rapid Fire- Fire arrows in quick succession; faster bow ranged attack time, penalties to bow ranged to hit
-Precise Strike- adds to melee hit, slower melee attack time
-Quick Reflexes- increased number of dodge\blocks
-Brick Wall- increase block chance and block damage reduction, penalties to dodge

There would be an amount of time it takes to change stance so you can’t just switch quickly when an enemy is in ranged/melee distance, and while switching stances you would be left slightly open to attacks. Everyone has a combat style they like to use and this could be a way to put emphasis on it.

[Coolthulhu]

I thought about adding aggressive and defensive stances as alternative martial arts.
Possibly some sort of charge/push style that lets you move even when blocked, by having knockback+step in attacks.

No stance+martial art combos, that sounds needlessly complex and not really a good addition. Martial arts should be the same thing as stances.
Also no ranged martial arts/stances, this sounds like a terrible misapplication of the system. Different ranged attack modes could exist and even be unlocked by skills, but they shouldn’t be mixed with melee martial arts, but rather use the same mechanism as switching between single fire and burst.

The idea of stance taking time to discourage switching doesn’t sound good. Switching between melee and ranged stances shouldn’t be a thing at all as they shouldn’t compete with each other, instead being totally separate.
Switching between melee stances could be a thing if they were balanced well enough that you’d WANT to switch them in the middle of combat. Otherwise it would not be useful for anything, since putting an emphasis on something already heavily encouraged is totally not needed.

[kevin.granade]

The way I see this kind of thing working is you toggle attack mode* to say what your priorities are when fighting. Examples would be:

[ul][li]push: for making space and breaking away from enemies, choses techniques that move enemies around for tactical benefit.[/li]
[li]damage: the default, cause as much direct damage as possible to take out your target.[/li]
[li]defense: focus on not getting hurt, bonuses to defensive actions, but your attacks are limited to ones that don’t drop your guard.[/li]
[li]cripple: Make attacks that disable or impair enemies instead of trying to kill them, if you’re planning to disengage this might be useful.[/li]
[li]move: Attacks that allow you to maintain bonuses to evasion and/or move while attacking, possibly good for breaking through a group of enemies.[/li][/ul]

Martial styles would come with options for attack modes, and attack modes would have lists of attacks that would be triggered. Some styles might have unique attack modes, for example Toad style might have a mode that disables movement entirely but gives high bonuses to defense.

*Something like stance, but what’s normally called “martial arts stance” is already covered by selecting your current martial arts style, so we should avoid the term stance as it’s confusing.

[Neonwarrior]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:3, topic:14335”]The way I see this kind of thing working is you toggle attack mode* to say what your priorities are when fighting. Examples would be:

[ul][li]push: for making space and breaking away from enemies, choses techniques that move enemies around for tactical benefit.[/li]
[li]damage: the default, cause as much direct damage as possible to take out your target.[/li]
[li]defense: focus on not getting hurt, bonuses to defensive actions, but your attacks are limited to ones that don’t drop your guard.[/li]
[li]cripple: Make attacks that disable or impair enemies instead of trying to kill them, if you’re planning to disengage this might be useful.[/li]
[li]move: Attacks that allow you to maintain bonuses to evasion and/or move while attacking, possibly good for breaking through a group of enemies.[/li][/ul]

Martial styles would come with options for attack modes, and attack modes would have lists of attacks that would be triggered. Some styles might have unique attack modes, for example Toad style might have a mode that disables movement entirely but gives high bonuses to defense.

*Something like stance, but what’s normally called “martial arts stance” is already covered by selecting your current martial arts style, so we should avoid the term stance as it’s confusing.[/quote]

In a game where one bite can kill you without antibiotics, it seems to me like you’d just set it to “defensive” and leave it there until you feel armored enough. Maybe even leave it there the whole game to just avoid taking damage overall. I wonder how you’d balance this.

[kevin.granade]

In a game where one bite can kill you without antibiotics, it seems to me like you’d just set it to “defensive” and leave it there until you feel armored enough. Maybe even leave it there the whole game to just avoid taking damage overall. I wonder how you’d balance this.

In general, it should be very hard to completely negate damage, it should just be a matter of reducing it. As such drawing out every fight by being over-defensive would leave you even more vulnerable to special attacks like bites. Also drawing out fights would tend to get you mobbed, which is also problematic.

[Alec_White]

In a game where one bite can kill you without antibiotics, it seems to me like you’d just set it to “defensive” and leave it there until you feel armored enough. Maybe even leave it there the whole game to just avoid taking damage overall. I wonder how you’d balance this.

Out of my experience of games that has offensive, neutral and defensive stances, people generally go offensive all the time. Unless they are tanking for specific purposes(here it would be train dodge) or trying to scape.
In Cata I would imagine the same, if you want to kill stuff you’ll want to do it as quickly as possible, as each turn is another chance of getting a wound, and in general you want to kill stuff quickly, as it uses less stamina, less chances of getting your weapon stuck, generally less chances of special attacks being triggered on you, less chance of attracting more monsters.

And some of those points applies too to those other games I refer to. In general if you want to kill stuff, you would use the one that does the most damage, and if you are fleeing you will be using the one that gives you the best chances.

And regarding having more than 3 of them, I would really try to make all the extras ones actually useful and not situational.

[kevin.granade]

And regarding having more than 3 of them, I would really try to make all the extras ones actually useful and not situational.

If every mode is useful in all situations, they’re not adding value, making each mode “situational” is precisely what we want.

You might mean you don’t want to make them “too situational”, or to reword it “too niche”. We certainly don’t want modes that are never used, but it makes sense to have variations on a theme, especially if they aren’t available at once (for example if they aren’t all present in the same martial arts style).