Adapting mechanics from Sil to other (longer?) games

[Therem Harth]

My envisioned personal variant would be some merger of Angband and Grandia II through the lens of a tactical RPG system.

Oh how I wish.

[debo]

So I've started working on this project I mentioned earlier. I'm doing a prototype in Python using cocos2d + Tiled mapeditor.

I've decided to simplify things drastically by having the player control only one character, like in a standard roguelike. I don't want to deal with adapting the Sil mechanics to giving combatants "action points" or whatever -- that would be a fun challenge for a second game. (Another fun mechanic might be to have 4 characters in the party with different builds, but you're only allowed to deploy 1 per battle or something a-la NES Ninja Turtles 1 haha)

My first checkpoint is going to be a "battle scene" where the player faces off against N bad guys armed with longswords and leather armor No abilities, etc. Will post to github soon so people can make fun of me!

[getter77]

I haven't. So I suppose you like it? Is it a good, tough tactical RPG worth a try?

One of the few game projects thus far where I made the Ingame Credits.

It is certainly good and tough---so long as you enjoy lots of combat and a fair bit of looting. I can personally vouch for unusual gimmick builds often being quite viable as that was one of my great tests for the game from the very beginning, hence the relatively narrow selection of classes gains a bit of variety.

I would also recommend you play the demo even if you plan to buy, as it is actually a self-contained unique mini-module of sorts in a nice twist versus most games nowadays.

[Fendell Orcbane]

This is a great post. Honestly I'd love to see people do Sil variants in addition to people just using bits and pieces of it. I think of Sil as being a "game engine". Like Angband is a game engine that FA and NPP build off of but are still pretty different.
The time limit is both one of the best things about Sil and its one of the worst. But Sil without a time limit would be dumb IMO. THe only thing that makes the time limit suck is the fact that you could play a pretty good game and still not be able to kill Morgoth. Which yes isn't the goal, but its something that we all do. So really if you are just trying for that Sil then the time limit doesn't have a downside at least in 1.3. The time limit just sucks if you are trying to break the game.
Anyway thanks for all the hard work.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I haven't. So I suppose you like it? Is it a good, tough tactical RPG worth a try?

[getter77]

Played and then some...what's on your mind?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Has anyone played Knights of the Chalice?

[Derakon]

Check out Final Fantasy Tactics.

Yes, that was what I was referring to by "tactical RPG". Though personally I find FFT to be a horrible slog. If you want an actually fun tactical RPG, look up the Disgaea series.

My envisioned personal variant would be some merger of Angband and Grandia II through the lens of a tactical RPG system.

[fizzix]

or make positioning irrelevant to a greater or lesser extent (c.f. Final Fantasy for complete irrelevance, Chronotrigger for mostly-irrelevant).

Check out Final Fantasy Tactics. It's not at all the traditional FF game, but one that really played with terrain and positioning in a tactical combat situation. Speed and movement were separated. Speed determined how often your turn came up in the combat list. Movement determined how far you could go each turn. Lastly, making an engine from scratch to mimic the gameplay seems possible.

[Derakon]

I've been spending a little time thinking about how party-based combat could work within a roguelike framework. I do think that it's important that moving a single tile not take your entire turn. If you look at party-based combat games, practically all of them either allot multiple tiles' worth of movement per turn (most tactical RPGs) or make positioning irrelevant to a greater or lesser extent (c.f. Final Fantasy for complete irrelevance, Chronotrigger for mostly-irrelevant).

Most games also conflate movement and attacking, so you can do both in the same turn. Some require attacking to use up some of your "movement points"; usually attacking also ends your turn.

Of course this makes it harder to make tactical decisions that depend on fine positioning because things can change very quickly -- that balrog that's just out of LOS of your squishy mage could run around and suddenly be in melee range -- but it seems preferable to work on rebalancing that aspect than it does to deal with characters and enemies that can only move one tile, xor attack, on their turn.

[Scatha]

I've had a crazy idea I can't get out of my head lately, which is to borrow Sil's mechanics for use in a story-driven tactical JRPG.

Sounds interesting! A couple of comments:

- Up to 4 PCs would be found in the quest. This means turn based combat. Simplest thing to do would be to have the players move first, then the monsters. Actors with greater speed could get 2 actions a turn instead of one, lesser speed would 'miss' a turn.

A common trope in games where you control more than one unit is to make the turns blockier as a function of time than they are in roguelikes. This is probably sensible, because it means you can focus attention on each character in turn. You want to avoid the meaningless turns like wandering down a corridor in a roguelike.

You could probably cope with speed, to the extent that it's needed, by varying movement allowances per turn.

- I was thinking of having 8 skills:
...
- And 4 character classes, each with 4 'prime' skills

Aesthetically I'd want to have each of the skills be a 'prime' skill for 2 of the classes, given this set-up! I don't know if you could arrange that. There doesn't seem to be any need, for example, to have everyone so good at Evasion.

Sil's tactical gameplay + mechanics could be super fun for muggles (e.g. non-roguelike people) in this context, especially if you take away the permadeath aspect but make battles legit hard

I'm not sure it would be right for this game, but just a comment that I think permadeath could have good uses outside of traditional roguelikes. Faster Than Light is a recent example. It depends on things like how much you want to generate content procedurally.

Anyhow, good luck if you take this further!

[half]

My question to you all is, how dumb does this idea sound at first glance?

I'm not really the JRPG type, but this sounds pretty cool to me. The combat sounds a bit like Ultima III (and perhaps some other early party-based Ultima's) but with better tactics. Keeping the 'arenas' very small (9x9?) would help.



Anyway, sounds good to me, especially as the reason I don't like JRPGs much is the lack of tactical combat (and the grinding!). Feel free to use any part of Sil you like in such a project. We'd be very happy to see its design innovations spread.

[debo]

I told you I'd revisit this someday

I've had a crazy idea I can't get out of my head lately, which is to borrow Sil's mechanics for use in a story-driven tactical JRPG.

The idea would be that you walk around like in a normal JRPG, except the encounter rate is a bit lower. When you're attacked, it switches to 'battle mode'. I want this to be a throwback to old brick GB style gaming, so small screen (would also be good for mobile). Maybe 6x8 tiles, with random terrain generation. This battle screen would be similar to Sil/*band combat in general.

Some hitches:

- Up to 4 PCs would be found in the quest. This means turn based combat. Simplest thing to do would be to have the players move first, then the monsters. Actors with greater speed could get 2 actions a turn instead of one, lesser speed would 'miss' a turn.

- I'd like to have the same use of XP as in Sil, sort of -- stats are fixed, HP+Voice are fixed, but you can permanently increase stats via buffs of some kind (potions, pills, whatever)

- I was thinking of having 8 skills:

o Melee (Dex)
o Evasion (Dex)
o Gunnery (Dex)
o Stealth (Dex)
o Perception (Gra)
o Will (Gra)
o Song (Gra)
o Wizardry/Magic (Gra)

- And 4 character classes, each with 4 'prime' skills

Gunner:
o Evasion, Gunnery, Perception, (Stealth or Will, not sure -- depends on backstory)

Songsword (name required lol):
o Melee, Evasion, Will, Song

Assassin/Survivalist:
o Melee, Evasion, Stealth, Perception

Mage:
o Evasion, Will, Wizardry, Perception


You can spend XP to buy points OR gain abilities on Prime skills. You can only buy points in secondary skills, you cannot gain those abilities.

After each battle, you get fixed XP. (No XP for seeing a monster the first time, discovering a new item, etc, this is more trad JRPG stuff.) All dead characters are restored to life and maybe to full HP or something.

There's a bunch of open questions here (big one: How do character abilities interact?), but this is sort of what my pen-and-paper RPG evolved into. I always hated how JRPGs, even the "strategy" RPGs, really lacked in tactics. Sil's tactical gameplay + mechanics could be super fun for muggles (e.g. non-roguelike people) in this context, especially if you take away the permadeath aspect but make battles legit hard.

I see several challenges in actually balancing XP expenditure and combat rolls, some of which Scatha has addressed in the above posts. My question to you all is, how dumb does this idea sound at first glance? There are a lot more details I might fill in as time goes on (perhaps in a different thread), but would love to hear first impressions of my rambling lol

[Nick]

Firstly, is it obviously necessary that it be a good thing for the player? If it comes together with various other bonuses it could work well even if it's overall bad in itself. (I often like effects like this.)

Well, it's a specialty ability, and the player only gets to choose 3 or 4 of those - so it has to be competitive. There is actually (IIRC) an ego-item version which is a bit more two-edged.

Second, do I correctly understand that they can only see out to distance two in the dark? That sounds almost a disappointing handicap on an awesome-seeming ability. Would anything break if it let you see the whole dungeon as though floodlit? (possibly with an exception for lit places if you want to play with that route)

Of course this is what should happen - thank you.

[Scatha]

Visually it acts as if the player has a light radius of 2 (although you don't get the special torch light colour), because it has to be actually a good thing for the player. And it gives bonuses in the dark rather than hampering in the light - it's like the player can put darkness to good use.

Two uninformed and perhaps mutually opposed comments, I'm afraid:

Firstly, is it obviously necessary that it be a good thing for the player? If it comes together with various other bonuses it could work well even if it's overall bad in itself. (I often like effects like this.)

Second, do I correctly understand that they can only see out to distance two in the dark? That sounds almost a disappointing handicap on an awesome-seeming ability. Would anything break if it let you see the whole dungeon as though floodlit? (possibly with an exception for lit places if you want to play with that route)