[Newworlds]

I'm curious as to why you want turn based combat in a multiplayer continually moving scenario? I mean it would be akin to a turn based emote mush, where no one can emote until you have given your twenty line descriptive emotion.

I believe the only viable turn based games are those that are online "posting" style games, like chess. If you look at the example given, where you choose your actions. All of this could be done in an ongoing combat sequence without turns, you simply have defaults and modify those defaults during combat by actions. Example:

Enter room
Troll in room.
(combat begins and your default is defense)
You defend against a slash by troll.
Troll misses.
You defend against a slash by troll.
Troll hits you and blood spurts (or whatever your spam is)
(Enter: combat attack jab)
Troll misses
You jab troll in the gut. Ouch!
(Enter: combat special inferno)
Troll hits you and blood sprays
You send a magical inferno into Troll. WHAM!

etc. etc.

All of this occurs while combat rounds transpire without turns and the rounds of combat can be as slow as you like (10 seconds per round if you wanted or even 30 seconds, speeding up if someone hits a special key like Xdone or something then it skips to the next round). Of course if your goal is for chess style play then you have the entire beast of dealing with logouts, interference, exploits, etc.

The other option is to have a timer on your rounds that end the players round after x number of seconds. This is done in chess as well. If the player fails to choose a sequence, your system chooses a default for them. NWA actually has several functioning locations that use this style and one is a game in one of the city taverns.