Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development (
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vooood wrote:
> Milesss wrote:
> > In most of roguelikes there is fighter class, but I think playing
it is
> > boring. Fighters (especially humans) have no special skills or
> > abilities. The only thing they are good at is attacking monsters,
so
> > player's main task is pressing arrow keys in direction of hostile
> > creatures.
> >
> > I suggest adding some abilities like combos, elemental/magic
attacks.
> > Maybe that will make playing non-spellcaster classes harder, but it
will
> > bring fun.
> >
>
> a good change might be something like implementing a feat system as
in
> Dungeons & Dragons that have a ton of feats that can make every
fighter
> an unique character that is still fun to play..
I've always struggled with this very problem.
Sure, you can add "Feats" or "Skills" that use up say "Stamina" to do
special moves. Is this not just Spell by a different name? Are we not
just making another type of Wizard, but with a different themed magic
system and different magic point pool?
With POWDER, where, admittedly, I do not have a hard "Fighter vs
Wizard" distinction, I decided to concentrate on differences in play
style. A Fighter is the "Hit left arrow until it dies", whilst a
Wizard is "Select different actions to determine how it dies".
Thus, in my mind, Passive abilities are the realm of fighters, and
active abilities the realm of Wizards. Players, of course, can mix and
match their abilities between these extremes to match their playstyle.
In POWDER, I recently started adding special attacks for Fighters.
Traditionally, if you have a "Stun" special attack, you'd add an option
to "Attack With Stun" which will have slightly different damage/costs
than normal attacks. The theory goes that the player will get to
select between using this attack or not, and thus have an interesting
choice. However, if we recall the reaction to ABCGi's repeated Thump
proposal, this is a problem. One tends to do a LOT of melee attacks.
Choosing each time would get frustrating. This leads to all sorts of
complications because you need to make the Stun attack powerful enough
that someone will bother to go to the menu and select it, yet crippled
in some fashion so that they won't just always go to the menu and
select it.
My solution I stole from Crawl's Martial Arts. In Crawl, your
character can do punches with the off hand, or head butts with your
horns (if you are a minotaur) and so forth. The clever bit is that you
don't have to explicitly choose "Attempt Headbutt this round".
Instead, Crawl assumes your character is always looking for such
opportunities, and just procs the headbutt at a certain rate depending
on your skills.
I've generalized this to all of my fighter skills. If you have the
Stun attack skill and are wielding a weapon that can perform this
attack (say, a mace), 10% of your attacks will perform the stun effect
in addition to their normal attack. It is assumed one is *always*
choosing "try to stun" from the menu.
This, of course, keeps the Fighter role "boring". You still only have
to lean into the monster to keep hitting it with all of your ability.
But, this is a feature: if one wants to pick a different skill every
round, one should be playing a Wizard, not a Fighter.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)
It's their role, you
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