Forum based RPG combat system

Hi all,

I'm in the middle of trying to devise my own version of a dice-based combat system, which can be adapted to a fit more or less any systems style game regardless of it's setting (just by changing the attribute names). It's taken me a while but I've more or less got it worked out how I want to actual combat to work, but I don't have much experience using these things either in real life or on forums, so I'm struggling with how to assign values a little.

The First question I have is how long should combat take, as in how many back and forth posts?

Naturally it will vary a little given that there is a small degree of randomness built into the system used to generate damage etc. and of course fights where one side has a large advantage over the other will be shorter. But for a forum based system, where there will be gaps between posts (could be minutes, hours, days), I don't want fights to be dragging out and taking massive amounts of time to finish because of delays in posting - as it would lead to boredom. Though equally if fights are too short they could seem unfair if you lose too fast.

Can anyone with any experience of playing an RPG over forums give me an idea it to how long a good length for a fight is?

Thanks in advance for any answers,

Mr. Sanderson ~

p.s. -- Please do not answer with what your face-to-face D&D group did or base your answer on that, face-to-face and forums are completely different mediums and your answer will not help me.

Mr. Sanderson said:

The First question I have is how long should combat take, as in how many back and forth posts?

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Combat? It depends. Since PbPRP (Play-By-Post-Role-Playing: forum role playing is part of this) leans very heavily on writing, this means pacing should take the reigns in judging how long any scene should last. Since combat is quick, brutal, and generally unforgiving, it should probably last no more than... Ten posts?

However, the issue here is that combat is as variable as any other thing there is. Combat between two heavily armoured juggernauts fighting defensively is far slower, and different, to a fight between two assassins, or two snipers, or two people in a fantasy environment, or two people in a realistic environment, or between more than two people, or...

In general: Go with the phrase "every action must have purpose." If character X attacks character Y, the attack must in some way succeed in doing something, whether that's forcing character Y to fall back until they're up against a wall, to block which makes them vulnerable to an assault from another nearby, to simply fatiguing themselves over the course of a couple minutes of excessive physical force... There must be resolution to action. If a character attacks someone ten times and there is no consequence, nothing happens as a result except that the other character dodged all ten times without showing any fatigue or minor injuries or otherwise, then those ten attacks amounted to absolutely nothing, and were a waste of time. Which kills pacing. Which ultimately kills whatever role play you're working on.

I've taken part in forum based combat tournaments/events.

Some fights went on as long as they needed to, each player having a score based upon their profile that was given to them by a judge for the event. Both sides would roll a d20 and add the score, whoever had the higher number won.

The other method was that each side had like 15 posts to complete the fight and a week's time, of course this was a team event so two other fights had to get done as well, after the fight a panel of judges for the event would grade the fights based upon a series of categories and the aggregate scores would determine the winning team.