Design: Principles - Combat

I've said recently that I'm going to change my approach a little from Fate of a City for its currently planned sequel Fate of an Empire. Given that some people have voiced concerns about changing the formula, over my next few posts, I'm going to explain what I meant by those statements and clarify my intentions for it. Today's post is going to be on the topic of combat. Note that if you haven't finished Fate of a City, there are a few spoilers in this post.

Combat
While I said I would include more combat in a sequel, I'm not planning to go overboard. As far as I'm concerned, a role-playing game should offer role-playing. Neverwinter Nights 2 is a role-playing game, and any module that I claim is going to be a role-playing module will be just that. As Fate of an Empire is the sequel to Fate of a City I want it to contain just the same amount of role-playing, if not more.

While I have ideas for other modules that might take on different forms, I don't have plans to turn Fate of an Empire into a hack-and-slash festival. I've played quite a number of mods that have had enough hack-and-slash to make the average Diablo player happy, and while I do like Diablo, I'm not playing NWN2 module to get my Diablo fix. While I like NWN2 combat more than NWN1 combat, it's still not the reason I play the game.

I believe the main difficulty in using combat well in a module has been explained perfectly others, in that combat should be there for a reason. Now, of course, the reasons are many and varied, but I don't believe that the hero or heroes should be wading through hordes of enemies without breaking a sweat. Of course, there is an exception to this if the enemies are meant to be weak in comparison to the almighty adventurer, but then surely the sight of the adventurer might be enough to inspire terror in those same enemies?


There will be sections in Fate of an Empire that will have a level combat closer to the keep assault in Fate of a City, but that's due to two main reasons - the increased flexibility for fights in this level range, and the increased scope of the module. I'll let you know now that the beginning of the module will start off a little more combat oriented, but the roleplaying won't take a backseat in the module.

The one thing I will say is that I'll do everything I can to make combat interesting and different. I tried to do this in Fate of a City, for example the mixed enemies in the keep assault or the confrontation with Kaladyr. Another example of trying to do things differently is the fight with Sergeant Mallum and his summoned shadows at the conduit. And finally, there are fights that don't actually need to involve combat at all, like the confrontation with the Shadow Being.

I'll be aiming to deliver more variety and unique fights given the increased durability of the heroes and the broader scope of Fate of an Empire.