Poly's Ponderings

[Flashlight237]

So, I played the Wander Stars demo.  The game draws inspiration from Dragonball with its visuals and world, though what I want to point out is its word-based battle system.

The words in the battle system is divided into three categories:  Actions, Elements, and Modifiers.  The player is required to include an action like Punch or Kick, but they do very little damage and you can only include one Action in a Move.  Elements add more damage and may include status effects, but only one can be used at a time.  Modifiers will change the Action in various ways and multiple Modifiers can be placed during one move, imparting effects from multiplying damage to reducing the cooldown of words.  For example, it is possible to put in Super Fire Punch that deals more damage than a regular Punch with a chance to inflict Burn.

So what keeps the player from spamming the same Moves over and over again?  Well, each word has a number of Slots and Cooldown with it.  Words can take up 1 to 3 Slots and runs can start with 3 slots but can have up to 7 slots in a battle, and the slots will be used up until the next Turn or if SP is used to free up a slot.  Cooldowns means the words can't be placed in those slots again until a number of Moves and Turns are used up, carried between battles and turns.  It is possible to use multiple Moves per turn.  Words can be acquired from enemies and the map.

When fighting enemies, they will use the same word system and they also possess Weaknesses and Resistances to certain Actions and Elements.  If you can hit those words, you can gain SP which is used to open up a slot, which is nice to squeeze in an extra Block or Item.  Enemies will also have a low HP threshold where they can be Peace'd instead of defeated, which allows those enemies to give you additional benefits like halving the chance of getting a status effect when equipped.  Bosses, on the other hand, have multiple thresholds where they can unleash additional effects if they are within certain HP ranges, which would require the players to plan their attacks well to avoid some nasty counterattacks.

---

So, a word-based battle system in a forum, how would that work?  Well, it may be ideal for the GM to keep track of the word lists but essentially, when the player uses those words in a Post, the GM figures out not only the potential damage but also whether those words are valid.  That is to say, the "effectiveness" of the attack may be weaker than what the player thinks by excluding words on cooldown or are longer than the slot allotment.

The question here is how would you go about it? Would it be like in Scrabble where there's a certain dictionary of words to follow? Or would there be things that would be a little outside the box (ex. Wrapture)?