endless Thorn (deal damage when taking damage) effect

Question

I'm developing a card-based combat system for my game. (imagine a game like Magic The Gathering, or Hearthstone, or any CCG) I was writing the logic of the effect that I call "thorn". If a player has the thorn effect, everytime he got struck with some damage, he deals damage to his attacker.

I already had an event raised everytime a character is being damaged, so it seemed logical to me to use it.

the thorn effect starts to listen to the onDamage event and then it deals its damage.

The issue with this solution is that it can create an endless chain of thorn effect, if both parties have the thorn effect.

Player 1 attacks player 2.

Player 2 raises onDamage event.

player 2 resolves its thorn effect, and it deals damage to player 1.

player 1 raises onDamage event.

player 1 resolves its thorn effect, and it deals damage to player 2.

and it goes on.

There are many solutions I can think of, but none of them are actually satisfying to me. Any suggestions? Thanks for the answers

Answer 1

One option is to create a damage type called Reaction Damage, and construct your rules so that Reaction Damage does not trigger Reaction Damage.

The Thorn effect then becomes "When another player deals non-Reaction Damage to you, deal X Reaction Damage to that player"

This way you can cleanly separate initial effects from follow-up effects, and strictly restrict the depth of recursion for this class of abilities.

Once this is a keyword that you use consistently, it opens up new avenues for other cards to interact with these reaction abilities, like...

• Careful Strike: take no Reaction Damage this turn

• Counter Master: whenever you deal Reaction Damage, double the amount of Reaction Damage you deal

• Reactive Vampire: heal 1 health point any time you deal Reaction Damage

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Another strategy is to use diminishing returns, so each invocation of Thorn or similar effects does less damage than the last (eg. by subtraction or division), and eventually the recursion "bottoms-out" at zero.

This can be more brittle than the hard recursion limit described above though. If there are enough damage-boosting/vulnerability effects in play, those could potentially counteract the diminishing returns and get us back into an infinite regress.

Usually in such a case one player or the other would eventually be defeated, and we could terminate the loop that way (halt all card effect events emitted by defeated players), but again there could be exotic effects in play that somehow interfere with this soft limit (eg. a zombie effect that lets the player finish one last turn after being reduced to 0 health).

So I think the hard limit on recursion is more robust to other comboing effects.

Answer 2

It’s a feature! More accurately, it’s a measure of protection via mutually assured destruction. If one of you attacks the other, you both immediately die. Instead, you must both continue to build up your army while waiting to find a way to remove the other’s thorn effect.