As of the writing of this post, Toady is currently working on a system of splitting actions off from movement, and as part of that, is including the capacity to do more than one thing in a given turn, including the likes of having hydra heads that all attack independently.
How will "turns" take place when players can use abilities that take dozens of normal turns? Will we be able to cancel out of actions or give orders to followers during long wind-ups?
Conversely, what about "held" actions, like a snake coiled and waiting to strike, a crocodile waiting at the water's edge for an ambush, or a thief waiting to pounce on a passerby from hiding, with some sort of wind-up already taken place, and an action primed to go? Will there be a way for "turns" to take place at a pace that makes sense for a player to watch the action and understand what's going on? (Or will held/readied actions not exist at all?)
For that matter, if there's a difference between movement and other action speeds, when you skip a turn, which speed does the game use to determine when your turn comes up next?
If we can sit there waiting on a frame-by-frame basis, and we have "reactions" that let us interrupt the actions of another unit, can we just sit there skipping frame-by-frame to interrupt all the actions of an enemy?
What are your current plans regarding how combat penalties for pulling stunts to behave? As in, what sort of "flow" to combat do you want it to have? Do you want combat to basically be stand-up attack trading like now, but with just putting in penalties for doing crazy things, or can trying to be Jet Li wind up with you flat on your face?
Do you want to make combat less a matter of hacking at opportune times, or more of trying to knock the opponent down to get that opportunity to strike "the decisive blow"?
And if we have a lot of experience in the appropriate skills, can we Jet Li and make other people flat on their faces?
With being able to perform multiple attacks at once such as dual-wielding, will any special affects happen from kicking with both feet at once? Will we fall to the ground if we attempt this, or are we assumed to be ninjas?
Might things currently try to perform as many attacks as once, regardless of penalties? Can we set things to do that?
But seriously, will creatures be able to queue a combination of attacks and abilities? Or even attacks and jobs... It would be amusing to see one of my Deathcaster Sapiocoatl fire off a venom web at an attacker, then promptly harvest it for +frozen sapiocoatl venom thread+.
The only example I remember from upthread about an ability taking "dozens" of turns was the post-fire period of a ranged weapon, which probably shouldn't exist as such. That needs to be replaced by loading. But in general, I haven't set it up yet so that you can baby-sit your actions as they progress, and I don't know if you'll be able to do that. As a default, especially for movement, it should be that you do one action to completion when you start one action, and the next easiest thing is to queue a few actions and then let you commit to them, in which case you might get control back when either one or all of them are finished. Which way is best is probably action-dependent. The period-key wait is still used to pass a good chunk of time, so it just sends you forward 10 clicks. Reaction moments are an automatic event, independent of the wait structure, but they are analogous to things you'd be able to do if you had a 1-click wait, pretty much, once more options are in place. There could be some sort of issue about waiting for reactions if you had a 1-click wait, but since you wouldn't have an action, and the enemy would be mid-action, you are the one at a disadvantage, and you are dependent on the game to give you a chance to interrupt the in-progross enemy action, and that can be made character skill-based, which is a fine thing. It just might be abusable until it is set up correctly, taking 1-click waiting into consideration.
I agree that it's better to have a fight with some structure to it, where it feels like there has been a flow of what has happened, rather than a single opportunity that came up, but I think there was a characterization of that path as a "puzzle game" which I don't think is the direction I want to go, at least if that means there's an abstracted system (like the match-3 game in puzzle quest for an extreme example) that doesn't have much to do with fighting. I wouldn't want to play adventure mode if it were like that. This is related to the issue of player vs. character skill, though they are different problems. Anyway, it's not as if the fighting has been strictly attack trading up until this point -- you could wind up on the ground if you screwed up a charge etc., and I prefer to have that sort of motion going on. Adding more options will only make the fights more dynamic, and that was the whole purpose of reaction moments, but that's a really local mechanic time-wise. We lack some overall structure and some mechanics to force a bit of patience. Fatigue is probably the closest thing we've got for that, and through the years various things like being off-balance and so on have come up, but it needs to be placed in a framework that doesn't just make it like an opportunity strike. This is somewhat difficult, since there's a huge psychological aspect to fighting that isn't in the game at all (for example, learning your opponent's habits). If that's the "puzzle" that's supposed to be solved, it has to be done in a way that doesn't make the game completely annoying. If it happens in such a way that your options improve or degrade based on who's the better fighter, over time, as your character feels people out, it might be better, but that isn't much different from waiting for a ! to show up, it just takes a little longer, but that could be all the difference that is necessary to have a "cool fight" worthy of a legend. We'll have to see.
I don't have much to say about multiple attacks or how penalties for that would work. It's pretty complicated in the end. Certain things would be easy and effective (say, if you had needles you wanted to poison people with, or light sabers or something), and certain things would be wantonly silly, like a punch+kick maybe. I haven't really addressed this in any satisfactory way, and I'll probably be walking a fairly idiotic line until I actually focus in on combat a bit.
Because of that, he included talk of how players can order multiple actions to take place at once, but with penalties to their behavior.
The point of this system is to better formalize this system in a manner that helps the player understand the penalties, as well as makes it a mechanic that can be used to make combat as a whole more interesting by making attacks that drop an enemy's guard more possible than currently implemented.
Balance is a measure of how much you can physically do at any one point in time. Attacks, jumps, and various physical actions put you off-balance, and the more off-balance you are, the less swiftly, accurately, and powerfully you can move or act.
Hence, the more different actions you try to juggle at a time, the more imbalanced you become. Likewise, guarding or dodging makes you imbalanced, which gives a penalty to further dodging or attacks, making subsequent dodging less likely.
How much balance any given action "costs", and how quickly it recovers could be a measure of Kinesthetic Sense and Agility (although separating out agility and dexterity may be warranted).
Concentration is a measure of how much a character can multitask mentally.
Like balance, the more a character's concentration is divided, the less focus they can put into everything else they do.
How much of one's concentration any given task takes depends on the task in question, and their attributes. For example, giving commands or having a conversation may take up concentration according to Linguistic Ability and Social Awareness, whereas the concentration taken up by aiming a bow would relate to Spacial Sense, Intuition, and Focus.
Especially when we start involving conversations or ordering followers in combat, having the ability to cast more spells than just necromancy in combat, or doing other things like having to sing a song or pay attention to the fact that you are on the edge of a cliff when dodging, concentration can be a metric for how much you can do without not paying attention to that arrow coming towards your head or not noticing how close to the cliff you actually are.
Basically,
giving orders to your army while swashbucking with one hand and crushing a monster's skull barehanded in the other should probably take up more concentration than any one ordinary human being actually has to split.
Either one of these serve as short-term resources the player can spend - powerful attacks are unbalancing, for example, and if an enemy is unbalanced, you can shove them or strike to push them further off-balance or even prone. An unbalanced character defends themselves less well, and moves slower and more clumsily. Hence, you have to weigh the gains you can make with a powerful attack against the risks of being left exposed to counter-strike.
This also helps model a more dynamic combat than what we currently have.
By letting players actually see some indication of how balanced or imbalanced they are, it helps players understand the mechanics of combat, and can bring melee combat more towards a level like that seen in games like how Mount and Blade handles dueling.
In play, this could function as a simple multiplier to all rolls. If you have, say, 10,000 balance points when perfectly balanced and ready, you act with the full capacity of your character's abilities, but if you are off-balance by a bit, you might drop down to 9,800 balance points, and have a functional 2% penalty to all physical actions.
Such penalties don't necessarily have to be strictly linear, for that matter; They could be Logarithmic, which would cause largely ignorable penalties for minor imbalances or things you are concentrating on, but these penalties would begin to greatly compound the more penalties stack up.
Currently, combat largely revolves around striking at enemies where the random, arbitrary "!" appears, and you get bonuses for no explained reason to accuracy or damage against those parts.
Rather than using a system where you largely wait for the head to get a "!" mark and get the strike that wins you a fight, those "!" chances for critical shots can be tied to the current balance, concentration, fatigue, and stress of the character, as well as whether the target is aware of the attacker (if there's stealth in play). When a character is balanced, has full concentration, is unfatigued and unstressed, and aware of the opponent, they should have basically no "!" marks ever. As you wear the opponent down, however, they get sloppy, if they're unbalanced, they are not just less able to defend in general, but also specifically against those opportunity shots, so that part of the point of combat is to wear the opponent down, knock them off balance, or distract them from attacks from behind by your allies.
(In the case of stealth, having an option to wait and "study the target" or something may also be a good way to add more "!"s to backstab.)
As an extension of the notion of "player resources in combat", fatigue could also stand to be expanded upon. Currently, fatigue only applies physically.
Instead, we could also include a mental/emotional fatigue metric, such as "stress" or the like, (although we could also just use the tiredness metric we already have,) and make player characters need a break from mentally strenuous activities in the same way that physical activities wear characters out.
Again, this would be more important the more we go into concepts like magic in combat, but you could also include things like having to concentrate on avoiding traps fatigue a character mentally, performing accurate long-range attacks with bows mentally fatiguing (as well as physically), singing a song to keep some beast asleep while traipsing through its lair, or otherwise performing mentally strenuous stunts or tasks (such as repeated skill usages with crafting requiring an occasional break).
Likewise, experiencing pain or being under fire or just suffering a lot of abuse can increase stress.
Like how endurance mitigates physical exhaustion, will and patience can mitigate mental exhaustion/stress.
This, in turn, opens up some chances for things that adventurers could do that relieve some stress. Currently, adventurers can be abused however much the player wants (to the point where players do things like melt the fat off adventurers by purposefully sticking their hands in fires to make them more "fireproof" when that exploit still worked) without real consequence.
With a stress metric, there might be reason to try to have adventurers not just get by on the mere barest of necessities. If eating a well-made prepared meal and sleeping on a real bed relieve more stress (or have a long-term stress-reducing regeneration effect), then players won't always be going for eating just whatever random hunk of semi-rancid meat they last carved off a random wolf and sleeping in the dirt. 
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Topic: Balance and Concetration as a displayable metric, and Stress (Read 4539 times)