D&D 5E Does a D&D Videogame have to be turn-based?

In light of my gloom ridden post above – believe it or not, I do have an idea or 2, with varying levels of feasibility.

1) Design the entire game around failure. Unlock content rather than prohibit it should you fail a skill check or lose a fight. Make success satisfying (“I overcame this challenged, YAY!” + Loot), and failure exciting (“You lost 2 party members and ran away, now a whole story chain has opened up to save them from something. You have 12 hours.”). This would probably mean 2 things: Combat would have to be rarer and more deadly, and the story/plot would have to be incredibly complex to chain, narratively, lots of success and failure possibilities together and make both equally fun to play.
2) Make the players control the bad guys AND the good guys. How you’d do it well, I have no idea, but you’d have to do it in such a way that the player can’t cheat, and there is some sort of satisfaction in playing the bad guy well. What this ‘might’ do (I’m not a psychologist) is make the feeling of rolling badly a lot both a good and bad thing in equal measure. It’s much harder to get frustrated with the feedback loop of roughly even probability when you feel both happy and sad with any outcome, depending on the context (Rolling for a hero/monster). This would, I suspect, take a lot of testing and innovation to get right.
3) Increase the pace drastically. There is a 4th way other than Real Time, Active Pause, and Turn Based – FFVIII’s Active Time Bar. In D&D parlance, this is akin to saying “You have 30 seconds to take your turn, after than you start slipping down the initiative order”. This is a sort of mash-up of the two solutions by giving a player time to plan, but moving them quickly onto the next action if they fail. Deadlines force people to reassess the measure of success and failure, this might just work….again though, you’d need a lot of testing to get the balance.
4) Trick the player into thinking what they are experiencing (the high-ish probability of failure) isn’t anything to do with probability and is, in itself, a measure of skill. Dark Souls is Effing Hard, but hardly anyone says it’s unfair. Give me a probability engine and a quiet room, I’ll have the most rational mathematician screaming foul play in under an hour trying to play a game of chance. If you can convince the player somehow that rolling a d20 is exactly like a high precision fighting game, you might make the hit and miss mechanic something satisfying, rather than a probability trip-hazard.
So just some ideas here – and if you’re wondering what the bejesus I’m going on about in point 4, I have an example of how that would work from when I was thinking about creating a dungeon crawling video game in Unity, and how I’d port my own homebrew combat system into it.

How to trick a Player into thinking probability is not probability while maintaining D&D mechanics.

So – a quick bit of background. [SBLOCK]Years ago, a few friends and I had a massive nostalgia kick and invested in Heroquest! However, after a few play-throughs it became harder for the game to test the players mechanically: After some questing, most players can end up with 5 or 6 defence dice and ….[Maths,Maths,maths,maths]….kill about 35 Gargoyles in a row. So for our next game I skinned some complexity over the top using a D12 and the HQ dice to approximate a simpl-ish combat system. They quite liked it, I got carried away and built 10 classes with 18 abilities each, and after a couple more games, haven’t played it since.

Wishing to revive that system I was sort of proud of, I started to plot out a rough video game mechanic as I was teaching myself Unity at the time. Turn-based, dungeon crawl, encounter based combat and I’ll skin the exploration RPG over the top if I sold it to bioware or whatever. But I wanted something unique in there that utilised Unity’s abilities (and taught me how to use it differently too, of course!). So, how about Line of Sight and grid movement was all done first person. Completely turn and grid based, but the POV was locked in someone’s head. Then it occurred it could be a great way of building immersion: You’d hear the monster moving behind you and spin around to see it’s attacking! And you’d have to defend by moving the mouse to control a shield quickly enough to block, but that would depend on your Defence skill and equipment and if you had abilities, controlling how fast you could move and how much time you had…..

There it was – I had a unique idea all of a sudden that I could program in using my existing maths, but felt mechanical and skilful.
[/SBLOCK]
The solution? Merge D&D with Golf! That’s right. D&D. And Golf!

Before you call the authorities, there is a method here. Golf games when I was growing up had one mechanic. A bar from -10 to +110 – a line would then move from 0 towards the top and you’d stop it depending on the power you wanted (anything over 100 altered the accuracy), it would then move back, and how close you stopped it to zero reflected accuracy. Simple. It outputted 3 variables: Power (0-110%), Accuracy (Distance from 0), and a Miss coefficient (how much over 100). Starting to sound familiar yet?

Power, Accuracy, and Miss Chance? You *could* swap in Damage, To-Hit, and Enemy AC. You could have a power bar where you need to stop in a range “To hit” and then near a point of max damage that gradates towards min damage the further from that point. The size of the “To Hit” Zone depends on the enemy AC. (and maybe the bar moves slower the higher the attack bonus)

OK, you say, but isn’t that a skill game, not random probability? Well, yes. Yes it is. However, due to the wonders of human fallibility and computer maths, we can tailor the expected range of result to closely match that of d20 probability. So let’s say that Joe Public under testing (and after some quick familiarity practice) consistently lands within 50 pixels of the target line. Great. Half the time, it’s within 20 pixels. Even Better. Now we can effectively create a gradient across the pixels where 50 equals Nat 1, 0 equals Nat 20, and 20 pixels away equals 10.5. Suddenly, you have a probability curve. And importantly, the likelihood of hitting certain numbers is somewhat randomised. And the same can be applied to the second Damage marker. Plus you can modify speed, pointer size, add multiple “To-Hit” markers, change probability curve size, rhythm game mechanics…….

The actual details of this I could ruminate on all day, especially how to modify gradations of damage to fill the gaps in the “Hit”/“Miss” damage spikes and lack of saving throw subtelty – however, the key point here is that you can assess a person’s reaction speed, and build probability curves off of that that equalise the likelihood of an outcome mimic a 1 in 20 dice roll. Not exactly, but close enough around the key ranges (6-13) for practical purposes.

So why do this? So now the player feels, even though we’ve built the probability into the system, that success and failure is under their control. There is a line you need to stop on, and you control it. It’s similar to how rolling a dice give’s you the illusion of control because you are physically interfacing with it – how many people blame themselves for consistently rolling badly, or know “That guy” who only rolls 15+? It’s a weird psychological twist that a physical interface imparts skill, while unseen probability tends to invoke luck (or unfairness). Ask yourself why no one wants the GM to make every D20 roll – because of ownership of the results and some odd illusion of control.

With this mini-game interface, turn based combat will flow just as well (golf is, after all, a turn-based combat system), balanced with the right maths it’s keeps variablilty, the interface can look incredible, you can add in variations based on the actions involved (Melee Attack, making a save, casting a spell, making a monster make a spell save, advantage/disadvantage, blocking an attack), and additionally the player does everything – he is also active in his own defence (GMs don’t need to roll attacks after all).

Anyways – that’s my wacky idea for solving the issue of large fail probability in D&D when porting to a video game.

I talk too much......

I haven’t played any video games beyond computer solitaire in years, so I have nothing constructive to add here, but I’m still a prisoner of your polling gags…

D&D is more about the adventure, or in this case nostalgia, since all the good adventures are from previous editions. So to be a good game, they have to chose and adventure that everyone has interest in, after that I do not believe turn or non-turned based will break the game. But as other posters have noted, it should include a resemblance of the rest system and/or how to regain class abilities. That is more iconic and speaks more for what D&D is versus anything else.

Im onboard with a DOS style game with 5th edition rules. The way 5th does spells doesnt work with NWNs or baldersgate style rpgs. And most people didnt like how SCLs put them on timers. Now Im totally cool with a dark alliance style sequel that didnt really use dnd rules but still had the flavor. DA 2 was one of my favorite xbox games.

You also need to remember that there are different types of turn-based games. Do you want a truly turn-based tactical rpg like Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem or Disgaea, where everything stops til you choose your character actions? Or a game like the older Final Fantasy games with their Active Time Battle system, where the game stops when you click on the menu to make a decision, but if you do not open the action menu, the enemies will continue to get in their attacks til you do open the menu and pause the action to make a choice? I think either of these would work and I would love to see a tactical rpg set in a D&D world.

Action rpgs, like the Diablo series or the two Playstation 2 Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games, are fun also. I would be happy with a Baldur's Gate 3 for the PS4.

And no new MMO. We already have the Neverwinter MMO and DDO and I do not find either one fun to play. But then I am not a fan of MMOs in general.

Agreed about Dark Alliance 3, but unfortunately Black Isle is no more.

If you took the Batman: Arkham Asylum mechanics and reskinned them with DnD lore, I'd be a happy camper.

If I want to play a game that uses the exact ruleset of DnD with turns and everything, I'll just play DnD.

No mention of X-Com? It's one of the most popular turn based games you can get these days.

MichaelSomething said:

No mention of X-Com? It's one of the most popular turn based games you can get these days.

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One is left wondering if you're ignored me or ignored me.