A recent article on the Pirates of the Burning Sea official describes the cinematic Swashbuckling Combat System and the nitty gritty details of how this system really works.
Since we added the Swashbuckling Combat System we've talked a fair bit about the high concept for the system: a cinematic, fast paced, sword fighting system. Today I'm going to talk about the details of our implementation of that system.
The Swashbuckling System is built around Defenses, Combat Pools, and Skills. There are three defenses: Block, Dodge, and Parry; three Combat Pools: Health, Initiative, and Balance, and a huge number of Skills (more than 200 at this point). All three of these systems working together produce our Swashbuckling System. Today I'm going to talk about the Defenses and Combat Pools, and I'll talk more about skills in part two.
When we designed the Swashbuckling System, we decided to make the basic defenses automatic. We feel there is too much uncertainty with regard to player connection speeds and reaction times to try and create a system where players are responsible for blocking every incoming blow. As a result, we give all characters a chance to first Parry, then Block, and finally to Dodge each incoming attack. Each of these defense types is equally effective in that they reduce the damage of an incoming attack to 0; however, they have secondary effects which make them significantly different.
Parry is the first line of defense, and the best result for the defender. If the defender Parries an attack he gains 5 Balance and 5 Initiative, and the attacker loses 10 Balance. The disadvantage of parry is that there are many types of attacks that bypass it, most notably attacks that target the Balance pool.
Read the full article here.
