Oh, the rooms I imagined were not very granular, I was thinking it could be an instance of any size based on the location's rules. Because a jawa was involved, I expected the scene was a desert where one room could be an entire valley. In outer space each room would be a planet, because you'd want to travel faster, etc.

I don't know how this compares to the player experience you'd expect, so it probably sounds really strange.

Well, if the one room is an entire valley, how do you account for the distance between you and the jawa? So that melee would be different from ranged attacks.

Oh, the rooms I imagined were not very granular, I was thinking it could be an instance of any size based on the location's rules. Because a jawa was involved, I expected the scene was a desert where one room could be an entire valley. In outer space each room would be a planet, because you'd want to travel faster, etc.

I don't know how this compares to the player experience you'd expect, so it probably sounds really strange.

Well, if the one room is an entire valley, how do you account for the distance between you and the jawa? So that melee would be different from ranged attacks.

Sorry if this sounds hyper-realistic for a moment even at close range, ranged attacks tend to be more effective against unarmored targets because you will be outside their attack range. To answer your question, a melee attack is pretty useless if you don't bushwhack because you'll always need time to increase proximity. The Jawa is a fish in a barrel if I have ammo, and if I were a little crazy otherwise I could charge at him with a stick hoping he doesn't notice. Time = distance / speed, if he's already going the other direction I won't catch up before he is out of the room.

I guess the problem with how I pictured it is games tend to be broken into tiles instead of exact measurements.

I've watched the recent star wars episodes, if you include powers like reflecting ranged missiles back at your attacker or kinetic speed bursts that propel your entire body, there is no difference. You'd also be able to travel at a different speed and abide a different rule set from your average biped, at least temporarily.

Maybe I should be wondering how a Star Wars MUD differentiates Jedi force movement from regular walking.

The Secret of Monkey Island had a skill-based text combat system at one occasion. You had to insult the other pirate while fencing. The better your insult countered the other one's insults, the closer you'd get to winning. That was actually a quite cool idea.

And as you enter the room you may be given a description that includes other visible rooms. And probably there should be a range the character's vision can reach.

How can we display this information without creating huge text spam? From my experience playing with text adventures/RPGs, displaying the content of one single room generates quite a bit of spam already.

E.g. if your vision is just 2 rooms. North, south, east and west, no diagonals. There are 9 rooms of content to display. I don't think it is feasible. Imagine the amount of text spam just to display a line for each of those 9 room telling the player there is no one in any of them.

Imagine if you're in a heavily populated area.

You only need to describe the room you're in, the other rooms can go by with a simple mention, unless there's visible enemies. The player can have more info on request. I'm not experienced in MUDs, so I don't know how other people might tackle that. I still have to take a look at that star wars game. In my case, since I'll be dealing with a lot of outdoor areas (fantasy setting), the overall description will be of the area your in, not the room, since each room will be but a part of an area (village, forest, cave, etc), and the player can then request info on anything more specific if he needs. It'll probably be something like that.

I'm also trying to conceal the "rooms" from the player, because that's one of the things I always had a problem with MUDs (too much immersion breaking overall). And since I'm planning to have a directional view, the player will only see in "one direction", not all around him (unless you click the "look around" button).

EDIT: I must point out, though, that you made me notice a huge flaw in what I was envisioning for combat situations when I made this thread. I wasn't really counting on ranged combat, and this kinda shreds everything I was planning to pieces. Good thing you mentioned it.

You only need to describe the room you're in, the other rooms can go by with a simple mention, unless there's visible enemies. The player can have more info on request. I'm not experienced in MUDs, so I don't know how other people might tackle that. I still have to take a look at that star wars game. In my case, since I'll be dealing with a lot of outdoor areas (fantasy setting), the overall description will be of the area your in, not the room, since each room will be but a part of an area (village, forest, cave, etc), and the player can then request info on anything more specific if he needs. It'll probably be something like that.

I'm also trying to conceal the "rooms" from the player, because that's one of the things I always had a problem with MUDs (too much immersion breaking overall). And since I'm planning to have a directional view, the player will only see in "one direction", not all around him (unless you click the "look around" button).

EDIT: I must point out, though, that you made me notice a huge flaw in what I was envisioning for combat situations when I made this thread. I wasn't really counting on ranged combat, and this kinda shreds everything I was planning to pieces. Good thing you mentioned it.

Lets ignore MUDs for now. For a simple text based games, a simple mention (1 line) for 2 rooms in each direction (N,S,E,W) and the current room means 9 lines of text at least.

Where do we display this chunk of text, and how would we organize it? Also, it has to be presented in such a way that players can parse quickly enough to type "snipe east jawa" before the jawa moves off.

Directional view is one solution and is quite interesting. Too bad it is not a good fit for my game's current design. Although we still have the problem of how to select and target a moving mob/player for shooting with ranged weapons. In your case, its worse, since you can only see in one direction while I am assuming that you can move in at least all four directions.

For my text based RPG, I am not having any ranged weapons at least. As far as I know, text based browser RPGs like Urban Dead chose to make ranged weapons (guns) identical to melee weapons: you use them to attack players and mobs in the same room/area as you are.

For a simple text based games, a simple mention (1 line) for 2 rooms in each direction (N,S,E,W) and the current room means 9 lines of text at least.

Where do we display this chunk of text, and how would we organize it? Also, it has to be presented in such a way that players can parse quickly enough to type "snipe east jawa" before the jawa moves off.

Even though I'm inexperienced, I believe you're making it a bigger problem than it needs be. I'm guessing that will depend on how you're designing your game's interface. Is the whole screen just text like the typical Z-Machine game or that Star Wars game Adam Moore mentioned? Because that makes it a bit spammy indeed (and it's one thing I dislike about all those games).

Or are you designing a proper interface like in Dwarf Fortress or Cypher or other games that are heavy on text like Hacker Evolution or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The last two aren't text games, but they have a lot of it.

Cypher deals with that pretty well, even if quite simplistically. It gives you a lot of text but never makes you have to scroll up. Below the main description it tells you the objects you can interact with (and removes any that you can't interact anymore), and below that it gives you a text feedback on your actions. The feedback text will replace itself as it receives your input. All those 3 parts blend in with each other pretty well too.

Right at the beginning you'll have a sharpshooter looking for you on the rooftop of the building on the other side of the street. If you Look Through the Window you'll be given that much feedback on it. And it's all you need to know. By further examining the window you'll get to know there's an escape ladder outside of the window, but that sharpshooter... The game actually deals with that pretty well. But the story is quite linear, and you won't be shooting back at them, so that may be easier to do in that circumstances. But still... I don't see it as much of a problem. I guess it may also depend on the nature of your game.

In my case I'll have something similar, except I may have another text section for dialogues/battle feedback and maybe some other stuff, and I'll not be using only half of the screen like Cypher does. But I'm not too sure yet, I'm still planning this as I go, because I have other UI elements to think about and fit in.

And back on the topic, I'm now leaning towards resigning myself to accept dice rolls. I just don't know how I'd solve certain problems without them.

As Kseh pointed out, you can do without dice rolls if you know what output there will be on a situation the player may find himself in, but that's exactly what I don't want to know. I'm not making a linear story. I'm making an open story where the player may choose to flee from a fight, or stalk the prey in the dark while strategizing how to attack. Or even where the player may not notice he's being stalked, or if he does, he may get a chance to successfully hide.

This leads me to have to consider that the player must have a chance to fail as well as succeed in many different situations, not just combat.

I was thinking about what displeased me most about dice rolls in Oblivion and Skyrim: pickpocketing. And I realized why it displeases me, it's not really the "luck" factor, but the lack of nuance in the failure state. If that makes sense. For example, when you fail to pickpocket, you just ruined the game. The NPCs will be hostile to you and fight to the death because of a cheap ring. That will get all the guards on your butt, and you'll either go to jail or further increase your bounty. But even if you do time in jail and make everything go back to normal... you probably murdered an NPC already, and you might not want to. There's no chance to apologize and give the ring back, and to try to calm down the NPC, and maybe even make up for it and gain the NPCs trust back. There's also no such thing as a non-suicidal NPC...

That's usually the problem that needs solving, and after having realized that, dice rolls don't sound so bad now.

Another problem I always had was missed blows in old RPGs in the style of Baldurs Gate. The characters simply missed too much, making them seem like they were inept fighters that couldn't hit a cow in a corridor. I think this can be solved by not having such low probabilities of hitting, and better excused (or justified) if the enemy has a high agility and probability of dodging, which might be countered by the character's perspicacity, which might still not be enough to compensate for the enemy's reflexes, and so on through as many possibilities I'd put into it.

I also think this can all be translated into text in a nice fashion, as well, making combat interesting to read and fun to play (kind of like DF, but not quite as complicated in the numbers).

So, unless someone has a great idea on how to do all this and have unpredictability without dice rolls, I'm probably going to resign to using them.

Once again, thanks everyone for the great feedback.

Another problem I always had was missed blows in old RPGs in the style of Baldurs Gate. The characters simply missed too much, making them seem like they were inept fighters that couldn't hit a cow in a corridor.

That, however, comes from the abstractions made in D&D. Which, for its original purpose of being a table-top pen-and-pencil game wasn't a bad thing at all. They most probably didn't plan for D&D being ported to be a computer game years later.

Hitting does not just mean to hit the adversary, but to hit despite him dodging and to penetrate the armour and to do enough damage so a non-trivial wound (one that isn't a scratch to a "hero") results. It is not realistic, but it is reasonably easy to keep track of the numbers, and it lends for an interesting fight that isn't over after two seconds.

Missing does not mean you really missed, it may as well mean the hit bounced off the buckler or the shoulder plate.

A realistic fight is pretty much over after the first hit, in other words every hit is a technical kill (not necessarily immediately lethal, but incapacitating). Also a skilled swordsman will practically hit every time, unless the adversary is running away (and running faster!) or has a weapon suitable for parrying. There's no way you could reasonably expect to dodge a skilled swordman's blows. You may be able to avoid an immediately lethal wound from the first one or two strikes (the cost comes in the form of the "defensive wounds" typically found on knife victims), but this concludes the fight nevertheless.

All in all, that isn't very much fun to play.

Indeed. But I felt more or less the same when I played D&D. I used to play it quite a lot (both D&D books and AD&D tabletop, as well as Shadowrun), and it still stroke me as odd sometimes.

But at the time it was the best option available and it was indeed quite fun. But over the years I feel like I need something more "intuitive", and perceivable, which probably means providing that much feedback during a fight.

A good DM can still resolve this into something more interesting. If you need to roll a 12 to hit and your roll is a 10 or 11, he might tell you "you feel the vibrations in your wrist as your mace hits the plate, but it seems to have no effect other than making the orc more angry".

But the point is, he doesn't need to when it doesn't add to value. A good DM will make it a bit more colorful when it fits (such as when you fight The Dragon), but when you're just slaughering a dozen blind and leprotic, one-legged beggars, it does't get more complicated than it needs to be.

The resolution of almost everything that goes on during combat is as easy as it can get, and the modifiers are simple and intuitive, too. It also doesn't require you browsing the player book for 10 minutes to determine whether you've hit that kobold (this kind of changed in later revisions with so many different modifiers and special abilities and conditions).

Of course having the simulation run inside a computer program makes much of this consideration somewhat superfluous. Nobody cares if the computer has to browse some tables and consider 30 special cases which involves complicated math, it still happens instantly either way. Whether that really adds to the experience is still debatable, though. It might or it might not. Losing an arm because the computer is able to provide a detailled combat simulation in real time may add to immersion, or it may just suck and make you wish the computer only counted HP. Or even just 3-4 states ("healthy", "wounded", "seriously wounded", "dead").