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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 5208490" data-attributes="member: 23240">There are several traits that may be included in an RPG combat system to make the use of powers more chess-like.1. Situational usefulness. The game needs to have a non-trivial state: it may be positioning, or timing, or status effects, or something similar. The usefulness of powers should strongly depend on the situation, with various powers becoming stronger or weaker in different states of the game. You don't use only your strongest power, because it's better to use other powers to set the battlefield up correctly and make it even stronger.2. Resource management. If your powers get used up (or, at least, there is a risk of them getting used up), or need some time to "reload", you need to choose your actions more carefully. If you use your biggest guns to early, you won't have them when they are really necessary.It's also possible to achieve a similar effects with powers that lock or weaken one another. By using a power, you risk not having another one that you need. A good example of this is how charm use limits and combos work in Exalted. If you boost your attack, you don't have a charm for defense, and vice versa. You can get around it by combos, but if you try put all your charms in a combo, it becomes too expensive to use. Thus, you may get a little offensive boost and still defend, but you still risk a lot when you use most powerful attacks.3. Importance of threats. It ties closely with both situational usefulness and resource management. As long as you have a big power ready to use, the opponent needs to take it into account in their tactics. When the power is spent, the threat is no longer. For example, once you used your area attack spell, enemies may group up without risk. Until then, their tactics is limited (or they get blasted). The tactical advantage of having the power ready may be more important than the damage done by it.Note that it doesn't work if one doesn't know what enemies' powers are. The less predictable the situation, the more one wants to just finish the fight before opponents do something ugly, because it's impossible to meaningfully avoid threats.4. Speaking of damage: Non-cumulative damage (or, at least, no trivially cumulative damage). If you win by dropping the enemy's HP to zero, the order of your attacks is less important. In chess, various pieces have different values, and the values depend on situation. In early game you don't use your queen much because you won't make a decisive attack anyway and you don't want to risk her by trying to take a pawn.The easiest way of getting this kind of tactical situation in a game is to have enemies come in waves instead of all at once. Another is to have things that need to be defeated in a different way than HP damage (traps, dangerous terrain features etc.), that make amount of damage irrelevant (minions) or that have strongly varied abilities, weaknesses and resistances.There's one important thing in all this, though. The more chess-like the combat becomes, the longer it takes (typical chess games take a few hours each) and the more abstract (more metagame, less immersive) it becomes. Some people may enjoy it, but definitely not everybody.</blockquote>

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