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Here's what I would propose: Take the mods out of the rolling process as much as possible. Let the involved parties take care of it.

Rules of Combat:

Combat is engaged when one or more players commit a violent action against one or more other players.

When combat is engaged, roundtable turns will begin among all parties directly involved in the engagement. Turn order is determined by initial rolls whenever combat involves more than two players. The attacking player goes first.

At the beginning of his/her turn the player will make a choice to either: 1) propose an action and a roll, or - 2) dispute any of the actions/rolls which have been proposed by other players since their last turn. If no disputes have been raised since the player's previous turn, his/her previous turn becomes canonicall and can not be disputed.

A dispute will include a reason for the dispute, and can be approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute. A moderator can approve or deny a dispute but a disputed player can only approve the dispute.

If a dispute is approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute, the combat engagement reverts to the point immediately following the last approved turn and it becomes the disputed player's turn again.

Rolls are confirmed in IRC by either a moderator or all players involved in combat.

TL;DR - player-disputable turntable actions. By submitting an action, you approve all previous actions and rolls (check your opponent's rolls in IRC!). The game can proceed without moderator intervention.
Here's what I would propose: Take the mods out of the rolling process as much as possible. Let the involved parties take care of it. Rules of Combat: Combat is engaged when one or more players commit a violent action against one or more other players. When combat is engaged, roundtable turns will begin among all parties directly involved in the engagement. Turn order is determined by initial rolls whenever combat involves more than two players. The attacking player goes first. At the beginning of his/her turn the player will make a choice to either: 1) propose an action and a roll, or - 2) dispute any of the actions/rolls which have been proposed by other players since their last turn. If no disputes have been raised since the player's previous turn, his/her previous turn becomes canonicall and can not be disputed. A dispute will include a reason for the dispute, and can be approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute. A moderator can approve or deny a dispute but a disputed player can only approve the dispute. If a dispute is approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute, the combat engagement reverts to the point immediately following the last approved turn and it becomes the disputed player's turn again. Rolls are confirmed in IRC by either a moderator or all players involved in combat. **TL;DR** - player-disputable turntable actions. By submitting an action, you approve all previous actions and rolls (check your opponent's rolls in IRC!). The game can proceed without moderator intervention.

4 comments

[–] PMYA 1 points (+1|-0)

One of the major problems with the current battle system is the amount of time it takes to resolve conflicts. This would not fix that issue, and may even make it worse because there will be no framework to end the battle. In fact, it would definitely make it slower, because we automate the rolls now. We can complete 10 battle rolls at once, but rolls would need to happen one at a time under this more free-form system.

I do like the fact that it would give more control over battle strategy though. Currently, you can't really do anything once a battle has started except retreat. We need to find some sort of middle ground between the influence you can have over a battle vs getting it resolved as quickly as possible.

Another thing to consider is the difference in combat. If we are going to do this 20th century powers thing, WW1 and WW2 battles will be very different.

If we were going to use this, we would need a framework for it. It would need to be streamlined to push conflicts through very quickly.

There is also another issue with this. Both players have to be around at the same time to be able to finish a conflict, meaning we could end up with frozen conflicts for days on end, not because the system is slow, but because one or both of the players isn't available.
[–] [Deleted] 1 points (+1|-0)

The first conflict I was involved in I don't think ever did end up getting resolved, because we were waiting on mods for rolls. The other player and I were both on and ready to go but everything we wanted to do took a day or two to get a roll on, and after about a week we just lost interest. Been a while but that's how I remember it. We could have resolved it ourselves in half an hour. Mods told us to slow down because they were having trouble keeping up, which indicates to me that mods are a bottleneck to getting conflicts resolved.

I agree that battles need quicker resolution given the accelerated time of the game, but relying on a third or extra party to get involved when they have time slows it down instead of helping.

It also doesn't help that you can do 10 rolls at once when my second action should be dependent on the results of my first.

I think the whole game should work without mods doing the rolls. All they really need to do is step in when people are being unrealistic. But the rolls should be handled by anyone who happens to be on IRC and willing to do the roll and post it. This saves the moderators time, saves the users time, and allows for more detailed gameplay in an accelerated time frame.
[–] PMYA 1 points (+1|-0)

The first conflict I was involved in I don't think ever did end up getting resolved, because we were waiting on mods for rolls.

This usually happens for a couple of reasons. The most common reason is there is other stuff going on on the sub that needs to be addressed. Each day posts will be flaired, and there is one post that takes up 80% of the time mods spend sorting the posts, usually because it falls in a grey area between being technically within the rules, but bad or unfair for the game.

Another reason is there tends always be more than one conflict post. When someone posts a conflict post, other people are more likely to post. This meant that there was sometimes a backlog of 4-5 conflict posts.

I would also like to point out that we didn't even have the automated rolling sorted out until right at the end of the last season, we only used it for about 3 conflicts, so all of the others were done one roll at a time. Manual rolls took hours, the automated rolls took 5-10 mins.

But the rolls should be handled by anyone who happens to be on IRC and willing to do the roll and post it.

This would be ideal. Unfortunately, there have been far too many instances of people either not understanding or abusing the ruleset, so I don't know how we would let people conduct their own battles. In season one, players sometimes went weeks arguing their stance on a set of posts, though it didn't happen as much in season two because we were a lot quicker to draw the line on posts being flaired.

It results in an apathy for moderating the sub. Some conflicts, and not just the conflict posts, didn't get dealt with because nobody could be bothered to do them anymore. It could have been avoided by having a very comprehensive ruleset, but that just wasn't possible because it is very difficult to get people interested in a sub that has a 20 page long ruleset.

This is part of the reason why I suggested 20th century powers. Instead of having that 20 page long ruleset, we can actually point to real things that happened, and draw conclusions as to what should and shouldn't be allowed, and also what the outcomes of certain posts/actions would be. The entire process of flairing posts, conflict resolution, talking to players etc. would be far more streamlined purely because we can have policies based on actual events.
[–] [Deleted] 0 points (+0|-0)

What I mean to say is, the whole thing could be handled in a much more concise fashion if we just let mods say this thing happened, that thing didn't. A battle should be a single event. So do the battle and rolls in the comment section, and if mods haven't already they can just flair the whole post or not. Saves everybody time.
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