How do you make combat interesting in interactive fiction ?

[FLACRabbit]

@paul-donnelly

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!

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:

• A Matter of Heist Urgency
• A Smörgåsbord of Pain

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:

• A Matter of Heist Urgency postmortem
• A Smörgåsbord of Pain postmortem