15 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
It's becoming a very common trend in major video games, RPGs in particular, to pretty much remove the concept of grinding through a dungeon by making it so that when out of combat a character heals very, very quickly to prepare for the next "encounter". This is especially noticeable in games that don't use Random Encounters – Final Fantasy 13 and Dragon Age: Origins come to mind as the best examples, but even successful and long-running Indie game producers like Spiderweb Software are turning to the model. And I, too, see the appeal of the idea in the style of group-combat that I hope to produce in my game: one where a fight generally isn't between one or two people, but rather a group of adventurers against a group of foes – say, goblins, since they usually do travel in packs. Allowing quick and automatic healing between fights reduces the sense of hopelessness and instead allows players to focus simply on winning each fight in a straight-up battle.

It should be noted, though, that these systems still have methods for healing in battle: Dragon Age employs potions (and there is a mage specialization to heal, which is good for conserving resources but generally not as powerful as the potions) and Final Fantasy 13 uses, primarily, a Healer class that several characters can switch to with the quicker but weaker method of using items as an early and quick fix to health problems. Both games also find a way to limit power useage between fights: Dragon Age with cooldown timers of the talents (though, to be honest, these rarely last between conflicts) and Final Fantasy 13 with a meter that a player can cast special skills and spells from that it only raised by killing.

I think a system using this concept could really work in a MUD. I won't re-hash what the most common ways of regenerating health are, I'm sure you all are all familiar with them, but if you've got a particularly interesting way of employing regen I'd love to hear 'em.

I plan on using a system that relies heavily on having a healer-type in the party (coding in an AI that is smart enough to heal friends, to act as an NPC cleric if your party lacks one, is a necessity for this system I think) though I think most classes will have small, quick-heal spells and skills. I feel like, outside of combat, what is the point of making a player just sit there twiddling their thumbs while their health bar slowly recovers, or force them to spend their well-earned gold on items to make that process quicker?
15 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
I'm trying to counter this whole dilemma by meeting in the middle. I've got a 'camping' system (that's not finished admittedly), which is going to allow adventuring groups to set up camp in the wilderness. This will do several things. First it will allow them to heal faster. Second it will make skills like cooking, butchering, etc… worthwhile and useful. Also it will allow for me to set up another system where wandering groups of monsters may "see" the campfire from far away and decide to ambush it, and other neat stuff.

That being said, I have also implemented micro-ticks, to try and ward off people timing ticks for sleep and such, as well as staving off the boring age-old 1 minute = 1 tick thing. Currently they work at around every ten seconds, and I personally think they heal too fast right now, but that's another concern for another day heh.
15 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
I went completely the opposite way. Players do not regenerate HP at all without the aid of an affect, potion, or spell. They are automatically fully healed whenever they are in their home town though.
16 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
I kinda like that idea actually…. although it does seem to be more of a 'hard-core' implementation heh, but of course you really don't want to have to hold everybody's hand in a game… it should be difficult to advance, or 'win'.
16 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
jurdendurden said:
I kinda like that idea actually…. although it does seem to be more of a 'hard-core' implementation heh, but of course you really don't want to have to hold everybody's hand in a game… it should be difficult to advance, or 'win'.

That is one of the reasons I am hesitant at times to enter these discussions since usually the implementation that I use in my game probably won't be even close to usable in others. Completely different goals for the most part which I probably should preface some of my posts with. There is a way to win in my game (along with several ways to lose). Recuperation, or lack there of, was close enough to the "this might be interesting to other games" line I threw it out there.
19 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Tavish said:
I went completely the opposite way. Players do not regenerate HP at all without the aid of an affect, potion, or spell. They are automatically fully healed whenever they are in their home town though.


Im reminded of the Avernum games, where whenever you entered certainly friendly towns, you were fully healed. It did lead to a lot of times where Id just draw particularly big baddies that would follow you to a nearby town and duck in an out to heal though. Its ironic that you mention them. Avadon is a whole other thing though, I think Jeff is responding to complaints Avernum 6 was too hard by going the entire other direction (probably too easy)

There's also the fact that this could make it dicey if you want player towns to be 'attackable' as some part of a war system. I've kind of gone halfway with that personally - theres certain parts that I call the 'heart' of the three city orgs that are safe, or as safe as you can be, and then the greater city area that surrounds them, are 'attackable'.

Im undecided about having players heal passively. The body is going to and it makes sense to a degree, but if you're bleeding large amounts of blood or have crippling wounds etc, you probably shouldn't be recouperating.

Maya/Rudha
19 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm not familiar with the games you mentioned but no time based healing is a fairly common design from the console RPG games I grew up playing ( Dragon Warrior / FF ). My game has a similar style where it is basically venture out as far as you feel safe for as long as you can then head back to the town to heal up. Rinse and repeat.
19 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Rudha said:
Im reminded of the Avernum games, where whenever you entered certainly friendly towns, you were fully healed. It did lead to a lot of times where Id just draw particularly big baddies that would follow you to a nearby town and duck in an out to heal though. Its ironic that you mention them. Avadon is a whole other thing though, I think Jeff is responding to complaints Avernum 6 was too hard by going the entire other direction (probably too easy)


I'm not sure Jeff is going 'too easy' with the change – DragonAge certainly isn't an easy game, though Final Fantasy can be (it's more about learning the system and exploiting monsters than super-awesome tactical combat, but the design is built to support this so it works) – but going in that direction does do a lot to make the individual fight more the focus of attention, rather than what in many cases is a dull grind through a dungeon. I thought FF did a better job of this; DragonAge has balancing problems between the classes and the enemies (good luck beating some of the bosses as a Mage main char).

It's just an interesting concept that I've seen crop up in several places, now, and one that I'm interested to explore within a MUD environment. One thing it requires, though, is group-based combat, I think.
19 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Unfortunately, Jeff has been talking a lot of the combat in Avadon being "a slow wearing down" process, which sounds like a big grind sandwich to me. One step forward, two steps back, I suppose.

I like the idea of the game world seeming harsh. Because at least in Elvenblade, its appropriate. Resources are scarce, big monsters like eating humanoid types, and proper healing isn't instantaneous. I AM going to have potions, but even they are going to be applied over time (such as by slowly causing a wound to clot) as opposed to magical instant healing (which never seemed a good idea both in gameworld and game mechanics senses).

Maya/Rudha
24 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
I liked the traditional 2nd edition AD&D rules. Everyone heals 1HP + their constitution bonus, per full day of activity, or per hour of sleep. A careful party will typically only have 1 or 2 encounters per day in normal wilderness areas, so this works out pretty well. Special rules apply to characters who are bleeding, poisoned, or otherwise incapacitated.

Clerics may pray for healing, as per their usual spell limitations. Bandages don't heal, but they stop bleeding and lower the chance of infection (if your DM does infections and such). Health potions are possible, but typically pretty rare. In our game, they could only be created by a mage and cleric working together, and the materials were pretty expensive.

I find it amusing that the new style of "instant healing" is somehow viewed as a way to reduce the grind in these type of games. If anything, it makes grinding even MORE mindless and ever-present. If you only heal slowly or at great expense, you tend to want to carefully plan your encounters (or at least how often you risk having them), and so whatever quests/storylines you have will tend to be a focus. If you pop back up to full health a few minutes after each fight, why not just grind through another 1,000 generic orcs? Idle time is wasted time, in that kind of environment.
24 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
I liked the traditional 2nd edition AD&D rules. Everyone heals 1HP + their constitution bonus, per full day of activity, or per hour of sleep.

I like that approach too - for a tabletop roleplaying game, where you can roll for a night time encounter or two, and then skip to the next morning.

But you can't fast-forward like that in a mud, so what you generally end up with is a bunch of players going afk while their characters sleep. I've played muds that made me do that, and it wasn't conductive to a fun experience - I would end up doing something else in another window while waiting for my character to recover, and after a few times I'd usually get caught up in something else and forget I was still playing.
25 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
But, why can't you?

Seriously. The MMO mindset we've used for the last 15 years is all about the grind. You want fast hit point recovery because you don't want to have downtime. You don't want downtime because, in most games, you can't DO anything but fight – thus downtime is typically AFK nap time. Yet, if you provide this fast recovery, it encourages players to do nothing but kill stuff, bringing us back to the grind.

I think the trick is to find things for the players to do while "sleeping" or "resting", so it isn't an AFK boredom fest, but also isn't the same thing they do while "awake". In tabletop gaming, you didn't just tell the DM you were sleeping and that was it, at least not in my campaigns. You set watch, you studied, you tried to plan for the next day, you did all the mundane stuff, and even when most of the party slept, somebody had to keep watch.

True, much of that won't directly translate to a computer game. But, I still think we can do better than what we have now. Instancing might help with this, to some degree. Rather than trying to have a fixed clock for everyone, what if each player (or group) had their own clock? So, if the group "sleeps" for 8 hours, their personal day/night clock advances 8 hours. When they return to a city, they can sync with the city clock to be back inline with everyone else.

Note that you could do real full instancing (where your group doesn't see other groups at all), or just via the clock (so your group might see it as night while another group standing with you sees it as daylight).

Just an idea to toss around.
25 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Passive healing doesn't have to be while sleeping, unless you're going the super-realism-to-the-point-of-retardedness route. It just needs to be while not fighting. Plenty of people will have things to do when they're not fighting that this generally works (buying supplies, organising another hunt with their fellows, doing guild chores, etc etc.)

Maya/Rudha
25 Oct, 2010, ATT_Turan wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
The MMO mindset we've used for the last 15 years is all about the grind. You want fast hit point recovery because you don't want to have downtime.

Instancing might help with this, to some degree. Rather than trying to have a fixed clock for everyone, what if each player (or group) had their own clock? So, if the group "sleeps" for 8 hours, their personal day/night clock advances 8 hours. When they return to a city, they can sync with the city clock to be back inline with everyone else.


What would be the difference between making you quickly regenerate whenever you're not fighting and saying "your clock fast forwards when you sleep so that you…quickly regenerate"? Aside from the nominal bit of RP/realism involved in saying you're going to sleep for it.

Until you posited that thought, I was agreeing with some of your post - I am all for supplying more things for people to do, whether that's crafting, managing your house, having some sort of political or merchantile system, etc.

I'm not sure where I fall on making people do that stuff instead of fighting, though. I think I would rather make it entirely possible for people to do any one of those activities all the time and advance. If the person only wants to fight…why force them not to?
25 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
ATT_Turan said:
I'm not sure where I fall on making people do that stuff instead of fighting, though. I think I would rather make it entirely possible for people to do any one of those activities all the time and advance. If the person only wants to fight…why force them not to?


I think this sums up my approach to the matter nicely: if The Group gets together to go clean out some Goblin nests for a few hours/levels/whatever, why force them to have constant interruptions to either return to town or to rest and recover? As far as RP/Realism goes, there's only so much you can do and still have a fun combat system, I think, so if you have different approaches to combat and to realism, ones that hopefully complement each other without constricting either too much, I don't think people will complain so loudly.

I'm not sure instancing is my most preferred method to go, either, as it encourages people to just wander off into their own encapsulated bubble. You can't have PK if you have instanced areas, or it'd be a tricky little devil to do at the very least. Also, if we're going for "realism" then, well… How often has a bad wound healed over completely for you after an 8 hour rest? This is one of those things that I feel like realism gets in the way of fun: nobody wants to be infirm for a week because some goblin beats the snot out of them, or if they do they can go ahead and RP that out without code-enforced standards on everybody.

It should be noted, too, that the "MMO mindset" is something that has grown stagnant and boring over the past 15 years, which is why you have games like Guild Wars 2 attempting to deviate so much from it, and why the works of that development are getting so much attention by several gaming blogs/critics. There's something about "Go out and fight the same thing the same way X times to level" that's just so boring for some reason to most gamers, but the million-dollar question is how do you fairly fix this without making everything too easy? I think the approach you take is to change the way you fight, and I further think that this can be done by taking the common issue of sustaining health over time out of the equation.
25 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
So wait a minute, if you dont have a concept of health, how are there meaningful consequences to failure or overextending ones self? Games these days already are easy enough without them holding your hands like a creepy uncle.

Maya/Rudha
25 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Health definitely remains, but how fast that health returns on its own after a fight is what is changed from the norm. I've also seen more severe death penalties than normal in the games I've given examples from: in DragonAge, getting 'knocked out' gives penalties to stats and abilities until a specific type of bandage is applied – and reviving people in the middle of combat is restricted to the specialized healer-mage class, while in FF XIII Phoenix Down's aren't as powerful as they normally are and I find myself reviving party members just to have them get knocked out before I can heal them up not infrequently. I think penalties can be more pronounced, really, given that failing isn't a matter of just not bringing enough potions, it's a matter of you not being better than the enemy in a straight-up fight, which is what this entire concept revolves around. With this system in place you, as the Dungeon Master, have to make each fight meaningful and difficult – something that DragonAge succeeds at far more than FFXIII.
25 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
I think Dragon Age is a bit of a bad example - the only time I really had my ass handed to me was that infamous dragon encounter.

Maya/Rudha
25 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
It's probably a bad example in that I've definitely noticed some classes are way, way easier to play than others. I couldn't beat that Dragon with my Mage, but found it a breeze with my rogue. It's certainly far from a perfect example, regardless.
25 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
ATT_Turan said:
quixadhal said:
The MMO mindset we've used for the last 15 years is all about the grind. You want fast hit point recovery because you don't want to have downtime.

Instancing might help with this, to some degree. Rather than trying to have a fixed clock for everyone, what if each player (or group) had their own clock? So, if the group "sleeps" for 8 hours, their personal day/night clock advances 8 hours. When they return to a city, they can sync with the city clock to be back inline with everyone else.


What would be the difference between making you quickly regenerate whenever you're not fighting and saying "your clock fast forwards when you sleep so that you…quickly regenerate"? Aside from the nominal bit of RP/realism involved in saying you're going to sleep for it.

Until you posited that thought, I was agreeing with some of your post - I am all for supplying more things for people to do, whether that's crafting, managing your house, having some sort of political or merchantile system, etc.

I'm not sure where I fall on making people do that stuff instead of fighting, though. I think I would rather make it entirely possible for people to do any one of those activities all the time and advance. If the person only wants to fight…why force them not to?


The main difference is the chance to be interrupted. Just like in tabletop D&D, you might always try to get a full night's sleep, but you don't always get one. Instant healing negates that chance of being surprised and ambushed entirely. Fast-forwarding the clock still allows for random encounters to happen.

As to why not let everyone fight all the time… it boils down to game design. If you have a game where people CAN grind all day and reap rewards from doing so, you have to design your game with that in mind. If you don't, you'll find the people who grind will out level all your content and run off the end, while the people who take their time are still complaining about it being too hard. That's a valid design, but it's the one we've been using for 15 years.

Note that if you do want to go the instant healing route, you might as well make hit points something that is only shown during a fight, and really instantly resets as soon as combat ends. That way, you can scale your encounters to be more deadly so people die quite often. In traditional RPG design, you tend to make the encounters more survivable than not, because you want to let the player decide how risky they want to play. If they're conservative, they'll rest and recover after every fight and thus find almost everything except a boss fight managable. If they're reckless, they'll rush through and be half-dead at the start of many fights.

This is where the difference in mindsets really comes into play. If you design your game to be about the journey and the storyline, you want the players to have that choice AND you want to penalize them if they're trying to push ahead of the story too quickly. If you want the game to be about the loot, you don't care about pacing at all. But, you want strength to come from that loot, rather than levels or hit points.. because the loot drops is what you're controlling.
0.0/26