Taking Turns

PMDO is a turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler. Every time you move, the enemies move. When all player and enemy turns completes, this is called a Round.

The Turn Cycle

Under normal circumstances, a single Round consists of one full Cycle of player+enemy movements, ordered as such:

• The player's team moves
  • Members: Leader first, then everyone moves in list order
  • Guests: Everyone moves in list order
• Neutral NPC teams move
  • Members: Leader first, then everyone moves in list order
  • Guests: Everyone moves in list order
• Enemy teams move
  • Members: Leader first, then everyone moves in list order
  • Guests: Everyone moves in list order

It's possible for a player to rearrange their team order and change leaders before making a move, allowing them to choose the order in which their units move. Enemies also invisibly reorder their team order to mitigate chokepoint situations.

An example of a chokepoint situation is where an enemy team has a lower ranking member in front of a higher ranking member in a hallway. The higher ranking member goes first, but cannot, while the lower rank can, but moves after the higher rank member. This leads to a turn where one enemy moves forward, but the other one doesn't. Very unintuitive, so the enemies quietly reorder their turns to make this behavior more natural. This also happens with player allies.

Speed Changes and Turn Tiers

Under normal speed conditions, everyone gets to move exactly once. However, speed can be increased in this game. Specifically, Movement Speed. Rounds are actually broken up into 6 Turn Tiers, each of them having a turn Cycle detailed in the previous section. A character can only move in that tier if they have a Movement Speed that the tier permits.

The 6 turn tiers are as follows:

• Tier 0: All movement Speeds
• Tier 1/4: Quadruple Speed
• Tier 1/3: Triple Speed
• Tier 1/2: Double Speed, Quadruple Speed
• Tier 2/3: Triple Speed
• Tier 3/4: Quadruple Speed

Under normal circumstances, everyone would move at the turn cycle on tier 0 and the other tiers would not be used. But when someone speeds up, they can use the other tiers.

For example:

So if a player team consists of the following:

• Leader: Double Speed
• Partner 1: Normal Speed
• Partner 2: Normal Speed

And an enemy team consists of the following:

• Leader: Quadruple Speed
• Partner 1: Normal Speed

The turn order would look like this:

• Tier 0:
  • Player Team:
    • Player Moves
    • Partner 1 Moves
    • Partner 2 Moves
  • Enemy Team:
    • Leader Moves
    • Partner 1 Moves
• Tier 1/4:
  • Player Team:
  • Enemy Team:
    • Leader Moves
• Tier 1/3:
  • Player Team:
  • Enemy Team:
• Tier 1/2:
  • Player Team:
    • Player Moves
  • Enemy Team:
    • Leader Moves
• Tier 2/3:
  • Player Team:
  • Enemy Team:
• Tier 3/4:
  • Player Team:
  • Enemy Team:
    • Leader Moves
• The Round ends

When a character's movement speed is decreased, they will still always perform movements at turn tier 0. However, every time they do, they incur a cooldown of X turns reliant on how much they've slowed down. A Half Speed character will have to wait 1 turn after moving. A 1/3 Speed character will have to wait 2. A 1/4 Speed character will have to wait 3.

Attacking

All movement speed changes only come into effect if the player moves. They do not apply to attacking or using items. If a player at slowed movement speed attacks, they do not skip subsequent turns. If a player at boosted speed attacks, they can no longer participate in higher Turn Tiers for that round. This can be exploited slightly:

Let's say a player is moving at double speed against an enemy at normal speed. On the player's turn at Tier 0, if they move, the enemy moves. Then on tier 1/2, the player can perform an attack. The round then ends, and the player can act again.

However, if the player chooses to attack on Turn Tier 0, he will not be able to move on Turn Tier 1. It would simply play out as if both entities were moving/attacking at normal speed.