Multiplayer roguelike adventure?

Crazy idea occurred to me this morning: what if you had a proper turn-based Roguelike dungeon crawler — but with multiplayer (say, 2-6 players) co-op?

Some people (like me) enjoy turn-based games because you can go at your own pace. Need time to consider all your options when faced with a particularly sticky situation? Take all you need. Conversely, when nothing much is happening (e.g. walking through already-cleared areas), you can blaze right through — in fact most roguelikes allow you to indicate a target position, and they zip right through all the intervening turns instantly (unless something nasty jumps out on the way).

So the feel is very different from, say, a turn-based 4X strategy game, where each turn lasts several minutes. Turns in a roguelike typically range from instant to several seconds long (and take longer only when you want them to).

But with multiple players, how would that work?

The obvious solution is to not advance to the next turn until everybody has input their move. Maybe that's fine, but I worry about that slowing the pace of things down too much. Also, one player getting up for a bathroom break would block the game for everybody. Do we need some sort of timeout or override, perhaps if all players but one have finished their turn?

Is there any more clever design for allowing a group of friends to co-op in a turn-based dungeon crawler?

 

Well, you raise an interesting issue there. But I think you need to stretch your thinking a bit.

Is it really necessary to keep all the players' turns in sync? When does it matter, and when does it not?

For example, if you've returned to town, and you're all splitting up to sell your loots and do some shopping, there is no need to keep your turns in sync. Let everybody do their own turns at their own pace.

Down in the dungeon, it's more complex. If you're facing a particular monster, then yeah, you need to synchronize turns because the monster(s) should get to act at the same rate as the players. But if you've split up (always a good idea in any dangerous environment), then you could run different encounters, each with its own turn clock.

But I do worry about exploits this sort of relaxed turn syncing might allow, particularly for time-based effects. For example, status effects — hasted, poisoned, etc. — typically wear off in a certain number of turns. If you can just wander out of encounter range while your friends sit there, making the monster wait by not doing their turns, and then run through 50 turns off in a corner, that's an obvious (and not-fun) exploit.

But you seem like a clever fellow — I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you can come up with a solution. Or maybe somebody else will chime in with a better idea.

 

Turn based multiplayer games need some way of keeping the game moving. At minimum a turn timer, but when the turn timer is constantly running to timeout every turn it will still really piss off the players who are getting their turns done quickly. In every turn based game I've played inevitably someone gets up to cook dinner or use the restroom and you have 10-30 minutes of the turn timer running to maximum every turn.

So I would actually favor a slower paced real time game instead of a turn based game. This is one of the reasons I prefer EU4 over the Civ series for multiplayer.

 

Seems like the design of social mechanics, solution: playtest with people of the target audience and listen to their frustation point.

 

Perhaps use a readying system. When you finish your turn, you click a ready button. If everyone clicks ready, the turn starts. Upon the first person clicking ready, a timer starts to tick down indicating when all turns must be completed. That way, if you have a group of people that take long amounts of time to make decisions, the timer starts late to account for this.

As for someone going to the bathroom and other stuff like that, I can't think of a way very good way to fix this. In other multiplayer games, if you have to use the bathroom, you may just be screwed. Maybe every player would have a set number of timeouts. When a timeout is used, the game cannot progress for some set period of time (like 3 minutes maybe).

 

What about allowing everyone to play in realtime until something occurs that can cause damage? At that point, switch to turns until the encounter is over. Mixed with a generous timeout, I think that would give people the freedom to move independently while still handling the important events in turns. I recently finished Eon Altar Season 1 with three other players. They use a similar system, and it works pretty well, basically like multiplayer Dragon Age.

 

I think that works well if the party stays together. If they split up, though, maybe not so much? You could be in a perfectly peaceful part of the dungeon, and suddenly drop into turn mode just because your comrades halfway across the map have run into some trouble.

I feel like there should be some way to handle that, without introducing blatant exploits.

Perhaps the world is divided into zones, and time flows separately in each zone. It would mean that you could indeed cure your hangover (or whatever) by stepping into a safe zone, and rapidly going through turns (or letting them run in realtime or whatever) while your friends held time at bay in some other zone. But presumably the zone boundaries would be carefully chosen — between dungeon levels, or different parts of town, or whatever. So it wouldn't be just stepping away a few steps; in most cases, if you're in trouble, the nearest zone boundary would be many turns away. So the value of that exploit would be greatly reduced.

 

But then wouldn't you get some time desync? Like let's say I'm in zone A (turn based) and my friend is in zone B (real time). Zone B, on average, will progress faster. So what happens when some NPC on a predetermined path walks from zone A to zone B? From my perspective that is fine by from my friend's he NPC should've walked by a while ago because in-game time for him is going faster.

You could fix the problem by just not allowing any NPC's to cross the boundaries. This is just something to keep in mind.

 

Have you ever played Streets of Rogue? Because it's kinda like that, and I F***ing love it, and I would buy another version of it.

 

I got one of three options:
players can get X amount of turns ahead of anyone else
when waiting on player for X {seconds, mins, months}, movement is controlled by ai or player is dropped. drop in/out would be preferable
each player plays an instance where loot and enemies existence is networked and everyone is in real time.