Lets try an experiment. I am currently figuring out my combat system. You may remember my recent thread about a turn based system. Well, I'm going with real time instead. What I want to do here though is get a list of ideas for spells, physical attack skills, defensive abilities, etc. Basically everything a player character could do in relation to a fight, start to finish. The idea here is I can't figure out a combat system if I don't know what I want to happen during combat. I might toss all this out like a crumpled wad of wasted paper, but I hope something here will jog some ideas in my head so I can focus my thoughts on this system. I want to focus most on mechanics, and not flavour. That means teleport my be magic or it might be tech. And While my game will be fantasy and magic based, I want to here tech based ideas too because they might be well adapted if they are good. I'll go first: Fireballs, potentially explosive or leaving an area burning. Might have uses outside of direct combat such as burning down cover or smoking the foe out of a hut. Sword fighting could be dynamic encouraging the player to move around avoiding hits, dodging, lunging, blocking then counter attacking. Teleport, nightcrawler style combat teleporting that allows for high maneuverability and evasion. The spell could start off slow at low levels allowing only for surprise attacks and out of combat utility usage, but become faster so that it is usable in intense fighting for quick evasion. Finishing moves Starting moves / suprise attacks different stances that allow different martial arts moves sets to be used P.SAnd guys, if you cant think of new things or lots of details, tell me the things that were fun and cool for other games or give me general ideas on what would be cool. P.P.S.Overall I am looting to create a system that feels dynamic and encourages the player to move around in a fight and make use of a variety of skills.

Smoke/Fog - Invisible things disturb the fog, revealing their presence and their movements. Line of sight is very short inside fog, and can provide smokescreen cover. Some creatures that can become invisible are afraid of fog, as an inherited survival instinct.

That's a good one! :) Similarly, invisible things could be given away by rain, foot prints, etc.

Not sure if you've looked at these, but here are a few (rather lengthy) threads involving RPGs and Magic. Mostly on ideas for the mechanism of spells, but there are a few spells in there as well, if memory serves correctly.

• Magic (mmorpg), is there any room for player's skill?


• Magic Design


• Rune System

Don't forget that one of the hazards of teleportation (teleporting into a solid object) makes it an extremely powerful weapon. You could teleport a rock into someone's head, or teleport someone into a wall, or (my favorite) teleport a bunch of bees into someone's lungs. Or even just teleport someone hundreds of feet into the air, or teleport a big rock into the air over someone's head. Actually, with some careful planning, you could probably make a good game around that one power.

The problem here is that you will get all kinds of ideas and then try to retofit them into some kind of system that accommodates all of them impossibly so.

The best way to make a system like this is to start small and simple and then let complexity emerge out of the interactions of the system's pieces. Games like chess and Magic the Gathering use this kind of design model. Another good thing about this model is that when a player discovers a new interaction they feel rewarded for finding it. I'll use the fog/smoke example : you design such a power that is mostly presented as a way to cover escapes and perhaps your Assassin like class might use a smoke bomb in combat. The players can then try using it in combat on other classes to some effect rather than being explicitly lead there by the game designer.

The basics of combat can boil down to ranged,melee and aoe combat and their interactions each other and with terrain. Come up with "core" generic abilities that fill as many necessity roles as you can think of, and from there you can make more unique abilities.