Combat in CYOA/IF

I’m using an app called Wunderverse to make a CYOA/IF, and hit a stump with combat. Do I make my own system for combat? How can I have the Player be interested in the combat?

You might want to look at how lucid does it in lost heir 1, specifically the troll battle and the battle outside the demon ruins. imo these represent one of the best ways to do multi-round combat tied into stats without making it just a list of numbers followed by “you win”, - its a sort of hybrid system, both narrative and stats based. There are other ways to do it but I like lucid’s best.

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Well, I mean, the answer for this is always going to be “yes” simply because you necessarily need to code it, as it is you that is presumably doing the writing for your project.

As for how, there are a few different ways. Some people tie combat options to specific stat checks, but you could also factor-in random chance. It honestly depends on what you think would be easiest to write/implement.

Active language, varied sentence length, and onomatopoeia are helpful to draw a reader into a combat scene.


You might find some more relevant information searching through here.

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From what I’ve seen, there’s three ways to do combat.

Narrative: Going into heavy detail and making the combat encounter a scene in itself, With checks throughout, like in Samurai of Hyuga.

Fade to Black: Where the combat scene has maybe one or two paragraphs dedicated to it that could be summed up as “they fight” with a check or two to see who wins.

Game: Where you see your stats, brief description of the opponent, and you cycle through a series of choices and checks until one of your bars reach 0. Like Fight Club.

I think every game with combat can be generally described with these. Though it’s rare that a game only has one of them.

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