I would rather see a turn-by-turn duel instead of 10 rounds all at once.

As a straight, slow chain of ten emails, or trying to get people together online at the same time to play it through? I’d like to see it as well, but I’m not sure how we could do it.

Make it to where you can’t heal while in a duel and make the posts sticky.

To answer your question, though.  It would have to be, as you so eloquently put it, “a straight, slow chain of ten emails,” but with it being turn-by-turn it could be more or less than 10 turns.

Ten moves all at once is better—things will actually move along quickly.

Maybe it’s worth adding an optional rule for turn-by-turn duels, and running one to see how long it takes.

It could easily take a week, though, between players in different timezones (who could end up being at a disadvantage, if other players are able to fight more often).

for now, in favor of a more versatile system that I am currently drafting, which, among other things, allows for multiple types of Duels, and the possibility of even more interesting effects.

.

I don’t like the inflexibility of the list-of-10-moves plan.  The solutions I see are:

1)Make it a duel to first blood.  First one to be damaged loses.  That way, a 1-move-at-a-time duel will usually end in one turn anyway.

2)Send in a deterministic strategy instead of a list of moves. (e.g. I alternate between Punch and Grab, unless I am Wounded or Crippled or my opponent has a worse Health than I do in which case I Dodge.)

Also, if both players do not start with the same Health, it allows whoever has more to use Dodgex10 for an automatic win.

First blood seems like it would rule out clever weapon combos. Changing the victory condition to “dealt most damage” makes a lot of sense, though.

I’d love to play a deterministic-combat game, with its own complex language, but I fear it’d go the same way as the robot-programming dynasty did a few years ago - it’d be a bit intimidating and dull to non-programmers, and not much fun for a human moderator to process.

My main concern with all of these combat systems is still the fact that hidden information is being acquired and controlled by players.  As a result, players can directly influence the outcome of these events, defeating the purpose of using hidden information in the first place.

If we’re going to employ the use of hidden information, then the method for gathering and tracking that information needs to be intrinsically neutral.  That means either appointing a person to be responsible for this information who has no motivation in influencing outcomes (the Patriarch I suppose) or programming an automated system for gathering and later providing that information.

I’m looking forward to Mortal-Kombat style combos, with finishing moves.

I’d be happy to hack together an automated system to accept move orders and only publish them after the second was received, although I might not have time to write it this week.

The Monkey Dynasty was code-oriented, and once Clucky had made a script for it things ran fine. It did end too early when Clucky had to idle, though.

If a Clan Lord is caught working with another clan member, we can take away their clan powers, no?

I was thinking about making a programmable combat list too, like Kevan suggest, but yeah, might be too intimidated to non-coders. Then again, I think this is a fair enough base to start building upon and I’ll start purposing fixes and improvements to this if it passes

Also, I could also create a python script or .net application to resolve combat if it gets too complex (or maybe even php, jsp or whatever so that we can integrate it on the sidebar too, I am not sure what this blog runs on).

CoV. It works, and we can iron out the difficulties later on.