How do you make combat interesting in interactive fiction ?

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I think visual games have a big advantage over text-based interactive fiction when it comes to combat. Most text-based games don’t really describe the fighting or help the player picture visualize what’s going on during combat scenes.

I’ve read novels that do it really well, like The Saxon Stories by Bernard Cornwell, where the battles feel cinematic and I can visualize everything that’s happening . I haven’t seen that kind of energy in text-based games. My question is, how do you make combat in a text-based game actually feel exciting, vivid and visceral?

Some games try turn-based combat, but the writing usually ends up flat, like “Derek hit Michael with a sword. Michael lost three HP.” That might work in a visual game, but in a text game it just feels empty. I want the player to be able to imagine the fight, to feel like they’re the one swinging the sword. I want them to see both characters locked in a fight to the death.

So how do you make text-based combat come alive? A lot of the time it’s dry and easy to skip, but there are plenty of actual novels with great, vivid fight scenes so I know it can be done in text form. Combat can be exciting in written form. It just seems like many writers haven’t figured out how to bring that same energy into a game.

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How to not make combat just a case of “choose strongest move” recently:

But back to the specific concerns of the post.

Are these battles individual or mass combat?

It wouldn’t work in a visual game, though. If a visual game just had health bars and maybe an attack choice dialog, that wouldn’t be particularly engaging.

Presumably by writing engaging text for attacks and damage? Yes, that’s generic and very much in the category of “easy for [me] to say”, but I’m not sure there’s a mechanical panacea to this? Any combat system can be done well and any combat system can be done badly.

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Agree with Dissolved: XIXth Century adventure fiction, from Dumas and Salgari down, gives a solid set of inspiration for engaging description of swordfighting.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I guess the first question is whether you’re writing the messages for a combat system, or if you’re writing an interactive narrative that happens to contain combat.

The second is more similar to a novelists job and there are lots of games that do it well.

But for a combat system, it’s probably a mistake to rely on the writing to make it exciting. If the combat system is any good, the numbers will be exciting by themselves. Games don’t use terse combat descriptions because they can’t do any better, they use them because they are better. Wordy narration would be the same mistake as a graphical game with excessively long animations. Players complain about that!

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Exciting is hardly the same as verbose.

Even something as workmanlike as “Derek slashes his sword towards Michael’s chest. Michael fails in his desperate evasion and is wounded (-3 HP).” is at least marginally more exciting than the earlier example while still being relatively terse.

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I agree with you insofar as you imply that the gameplay needs to be able to stand on its own merits, but I disagree with you when you say that simple and terse descriptions are better. Exciting writing can’t make up for boring gameplay, but boring writing can certainly ruin the appeal of exciting gameplay!

Good action scene writing is both brief and evocative, although that’s hard to achieve.

I have thought a lot about combat in IF over time, and I’ve condensed all my insights so far into these two games:

Ignoring gameplay considerations for now, the key to making the output text work is writing tons and tons of description code. And when I say description code, I really do mean code, because I don’t think it’s practical to try to assemble a series of static messages. Both of my games feature huge amounts of semi-procedurally generated text with randomly chosen syntactic patterns, context-sensitive prepositional phrases, etc.

EDIT: You can also look at the postmortems I wrote for the aforementioned games, where I elaborate on the actual mechanisms that power the combat scenes:

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Combat mostly has to offer interesting tactical options, but it doesn’t have to preclude good writing. To quote myself:

An armored… something is ambling towards you in the grinding of gears, puffs of steam escaping from various joints now and then. It’s big. And has whirling blades for hands. You will have to deal with it to continue, one way or another.

(This is a d12 creature armed with a +6/+6 weapon.)

  • Attack
  • Cast spell
  • Flee

Followed by:

You watch the approaching monster carefully, weighing your options. A well-timed swing finds a weak point in the armor. It sags to the side, with a horrible grinding noise, and you run past without a second thought.

Or, depending on how you roll:

You watch the approaching monster carefully, weighing your options. A well-timed swing connects with that huge breastplate. It rings hollow.

If not outright:

You swing at the monster. Between its whirling blades and jerky motions, it fails to connect. And then it counter-attacks. You barely have time to see it coming before getting hit.

(Eliding other combat options to keep this short) In the end it’s still about the numbers, but… they’re not alone, and don’t have to carry all the weight.

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One reason why a novel describing an immersive fight scene is different from a text-based combat system is that, well, the latter is a system. The player is expected to understand the underlying mechanics and execute on them countless times with predictable effects, while the novel is only read once or a few times.

The overall course of combat in a game is (hopefully) determined by more than repeatedly doing the “attack” action, but the challenge generally lies in responding to dynamic situations using a mostly-fixed set of choices with known (or knowable) effects. As a player does that repeatedly and gets good at it, they see the same outcome – including any text, static or dynamic – many times and get attuned to the underlying mechanics. Sooner or later any “flavor text” will lose its punch and be skimmed or ignored in favor of the salient information.

More generally: when you’re pressing the same metaphorical button hundreds or thousands of times, you engage with it differently than when you only press it once. Typical parser IF doesn’t spend lavish descriptions on moving between rooms or TAKE-ing/DROP-ing medium-sized dry goods, unless there’s something unique about this specific instance of it. Fighting game animations should look cool, of course, but skilled players learn about frame data and why that flashy super move is very punishable. Minecraft doesn’t make you solve a 30 second minigame to dig out a block, it’s just a couple button presses per block, so the player can focus on the bigger picture. Chess isn’t about the physical act of picking up and moving a piece. Et cetera, et cetera.

Similarly, IF often puts more weight on the gameplay and prose that happens only once or a few times per play-through. Solving any given puzzle is a one-off insight, even if it’s grounded in a consistent world model and involves clever application of e.g. standard IF verbs. Visual novels that expect to be replayed to experience multiple routes have a prominent “skip text I’ve already seen before” button. Fallen London has repeatable storylets for grinding resources, but their enjoyable flavor text can be (and mostly is) ignored on repeated trips through the carousel, while fresh stories are read carefully. In these contexts, prose can focus on what it does for a first-time reader, much like in novels, even if the reader is a player and the prose is very interactive.

Consequently, I’m a bit skeptical about IF that puts the bulk of its prose into a combat system and expects the player to keep engaging with that prose, e.g., to discern the mechanical effect of their last move. It doesn’t seem like the best avenue for stirring strong feelings with words. I haven’t tried it, but a possible solution may be still having combat but less of a combat system. Instead of giving the player a (near-)infinite supply of monsters to fight and trying to make the 100th fight still be engaging, pit them only against the evil overlord and their three generals, or against the seven evil exes. Each of those battles should be easier to make engaging because they’re one-offs that are allowed to differ in arbitrary ways. Even for the parts that are common, presenting unique combinations and applications should mitigate the “read this a million times” effect.

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Quality-based narratives like Fallen London have had to deal with this exact issue. As it turned out, small bits of well-crafted prose can be delightful no matter how many times you encounter them. I’ve certainly experienced it while playing.

As for my game, for one thing combat is brief. You won’t have to see any of those messages too many times. In particular, opponents only have one hit point. And if you get hit instead, you may well have to consider running away, which in turn will select from a different set of messages.

Sure, you’re likely to encounter the same monster several times during a playthrough. That’s another story. But I did consider these issues and worked to mitigate them.

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This is verbose! A playable game has messages like, “The magic dart hits the goblin.”

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Most combat in IF isn’t interesting, IMO, for all the reasons @Hanna outlined. Most recently, Cut the Sky was interesting because there’s nothing you can do in it except cut things with your sword and it made combat a puzzle. Traditional combat is just a bad fit for IF most of the time, unless you can do something novel with it.

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Thinking about my experience with real-life fencing, as well as combat-focused video games, I think that the time-limited, split-second nature of the decisions that you make in “actual combat” is a major part of the challenge & what makes it fun. I wonder how easily that could be reproduced in a text-based setting by putting a time limit on decisions? I’ve seen time-limited choices in text-based games before (Queers in Love at the End of the World being the canonical example), but obviously it’s hard to get the balance right because different people read (and, for parser games, type) at different speeds.

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Just a couple of cents after thinking about this thread for a couple of days and as someone who plays both video and IF games… (The U.S. is ditching pennies, so gotta use my cents while I have them!)

I’m really skeptical of trying to recreate types of combat that already exists in other, different games, and I don’t think IF is ever going to be able to give the same excitement you get from fencing (or the closest video game equivalents like Hollow Knight or Elden Ring, games that require you to analyze opponents’ movements & respond with precise timing). Playing a text game with timed input combat would feel, at best, like a dull and clunky rhythm game. I can get timed input excitement elsewhere, and done better. Other games, though, have turn-based combat that’s just as exciting (BG3, Into the Breach, etc), so I think an IF could have slower-yet-exciting fights.

I think trying to come up with something that works in IF would really depend on the interactions between story and the system. Is there a randomized number element (dice rolls)? How much are stats and/or equipment involved? How much control does the player have over stats? How much combat is there, and what are the stakes? Can combat be avoided, & are there consequences for choosing it? Have earlier choices I made led to this fight? Some answers will require exciting and varied writing, some will demand rigorous and polished mechanics that create a pleasurable gameplay loop.

Personally, I get more invested in non-real time combat when my customization choices affect combat outcomes, and/or when combat is optional and the choice itself has some effect or consequence, and/or when the outcome has real weight beyond “you live” or “you die.” I think that first and last one are probably the most important for the type of IF combat I’d be interested in (story-driven, multiple-ending type works), and probably the first and second are more important for rogue-like or combat-heavy IF games where the player will be fighting quite a bit trying to reach one goal or get a high score. In either case, though, the system giving real weight to player choice (the interactive bit) would make me more invested in the content (the fiction bit).

Again, these are just my dirty old pennies (personal opinions), and no one has to pick them up (pay attention to them) off the ground (this forum) unless they want to (this part isn’t a metaphor).

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There’s a big fight scene at the end of my game, Murderworld, that I’m very proud of (it’s a long game so likely not many people have seen it. lol.) It involves six characters with superpowers who, essentially, each get a turn attacking the “big bad”. The player can activate each character in any order and the order that they activate has textual effects. E.g. a character’s attack text varies depending on the characters who’ve already gone. Also, for every two characters that activate, a “super move” activates where the two characters team up; unique to each pair of characters and unique based on which of the duo went first. The “big bad” moves every turn with a variety of attacks, some of which temporarily incapacitate characters rather than wounding/killing them, or miss entirely depending on the preceding hero attacks.

Not that it wasn’t labor intensive to do all that, but more to say that using the text to use the player’s imagination instead of having to maintain intricate systems or tables is an effective way of implementing combat.

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I think Jon Ingold, from inkle, said somewhere that to make the combat more dynamic/tense in Sorcery!, they actually made the responses longer than shorter? Because if they are too short, people just skip it anyway or something? But I couldn’t manage to find it again.

Turn-based combat could already be seen as some kind of puzzle, right? So the main issue might really be the presentation, how to make the text fun to read, informative and not repetitive.

I remember some prototype of a French game where the puzzle was actually knowing if it was a good idea to initiate the battle or flee, depending on the player’s inventory and equipment. So if the player judged they had enough probabilty to win, or they wanted to use some resource or item or not for that one battle or save it for later.

Then the battle was on auto-pilot, a description of every move one after the other (separated by a keypress in the prototype); basically the player was controlled by the same AI than enemies. And it was really tense, because you couldn’t alter the way the battle was going, you just had to hope that your preparations paid off or that luck was on your side.

But the negative outcome has to be better than always “you die” for it not to be repetitive.

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I don’t think we can have a discussion about combat in IF without linking Gun Mute.

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Perfect timing! I was just circling back to do that (got sidetracked replaying it). Examples would help this discussion. My example message up above was from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (which is a roguelike polished by years of community development). Back on the puzzle side we could mention Hunter, in Darkness, too. I think there’s sort of a combat scene in Taco Fiction, and Eat Me has some. Midnight. Swordfight. could be a good source for combat writing although the combat itself isn’t a series of scenes, but rather a multitude of alternative scenes.

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I suspect that one way to make tactics more interesting in IF combat is to incorporate positioning. Relative positions are hard to describe in a useful way in text, but perhaps fun use of enterable containers and supporters?

Main hall (swinging on the chandelier)

Discrete locations are one of the things classic parser IF is best at. A combat system built around those might work well. Different positions have advantages or disadvantages against others, so you have to read the situation and choose where to move next.

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I’ve implemented something very similar to what you’re describing (discrete positions and movement) in my games, for the same reasons you just mentioned.

In particular, there’s a fight scene set on a pirate ship at the end of A Matter of Heist Urgency that includes the kind of swashbuckling action-movie tropes you seem to have in mind.

Hard, but not impossible!

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It would also be possible to just make combatants in adjacent rooms visible (audible, smellable). IF hasn’t traditionally made much use of cross-room visibility, probably because of the risk of information overload, but this would be a good use of it.

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