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You generally have to find a balance or at least an equillibrium:
If the fighting is too slow it won't appeal to many people who like a dynamic kind of fighting.
If the fighting is too fast it won't appeal to people who like to use more strategy to win instead of pure reflexes.
Scripting in a way alleviates the second problem, a player can design their strategy before the actual fight happens so they can get both. Of course, the pace is too fast, players will all but be forced to resort to scripting to respond to such a player.
Generally, the depth of combat is determined by the variables (or states/afflictions/whatever) and the excitement by the pace. Too much of either and you're veering off the golden middle.
A note on variables though, they can be done well and they can be done badly:
- badly if all the variables are very uniform and disconnected from each other, meaning each must be addressed in a simple, linear fashion.
Example of bad variable:
- being rendered prone is always a detriment and is unaffected by other variables. Obviously all you ever need there is to mechanically input 'stand' or somesuch.
- Good variables connect to other variables in non-uniform, sometimes non-intuitive ways, eventually forming a web of dependancy that's non-trivial to decrypt, meaning an 'optimal decision' is not always present or obvious.
Example of a good variable:
- being rendered prone can be detrimental or advantageous (i.e. being prone means you can be hit more easily or grabbed, but it also means you'll be missed by certain attacks) and is dependant on other variables (i.e. broken legs, dizziness, paralysis) that either must be cured before the state of being prone can be reversed or can cause the state of being prone.
Or something like that.
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