But have you checked it twice? 
Yes.
I should point out, not only have I put significant thought into how one might go about making at least some of the combat mechanics work in Paragon Chat, I've also put significant thought into
why you'd want to do that. Or rather why I'd want to do that.
Paragon Chat isn't a chat system, or rather its not *just* a chat system. Codewalker and company have built a
platform. And platforms can be powerful things. Within days of announcing it, and without even releasing it, Codewalker got players thinking about using it as a virtual environment to run pen and paper games, with just some minor extensions to help with PnP mechanics (vis a vis dice rolls).
There's several successor games in various stages of development. There's a group of players trying to actually acquire the rights to the actual game itself. And I'm certain Codewalker hasn't stopped thinking about how to make a real server that does real combat and runs real missions. So why bother adding combat mechanics to Paragon Chat?
Well, because Paragon Chat is a relatively open platform. For all its limitations, its far easier to tinker with than even the real game was. There are things we could make PC do that would be much more difficult to do even if we had the actual game servers back. Consider for example making animations. If you're a budding Samuraiko, the learning curve to make videos in the actual City of Heroes game was pretty steep. Separate from all the post production, just getting what you wanted out of the game itself was a lot of work. It usually involved a combination of having real people log into the game and do things you could record, combined with editing demorecord files and seeing if you could get the playback exactly the way you wanted.
Imagine if you had a platform that looked exactly like City of Heroes, worked basically like City of Heroes, but every single entity within it was a bot, fully controlled by relatively easy to write scripts. Furthermore, you could edit what was going on
on the fly and see in real time what your changes did. Having powers work in some capacity could make that a reality. You wouldn't even need to write the scripts yourself: you could have someone write some basic ones for you that you could then modify to get the behaviors you want.
What if you liked City of Heroes, but were a budding Positron instead and wanted to design your own game. With Paragon Chat, some critical modifications for powers, and a lot of bots, you could make your own MUD. You could even run the thing out of your own house, and let friends play it.
Paragon Chat will never replace having the actual game back. The architecture is likely going to impose limits on how closely and with what fidelity you could recreate City of Heroes itself. But as a (relatively) open platform for experimentation, its actually
superior to the game itself. The community itself could do a lot, without Codewalker having to write it all. That would leave him free to maybe do more interesting things.
After he gets my list done, of course. But after that, Paragon Chat could become the Paragon Platform for the community to contribute to itself. We've only been brainstorming around this for about a week. Who knows what great idea someone out there has, but has no way of realizing it now, because they are not a Codewalker-class client hacker. But almost anyone with any programming experience whatsoever in any language whatsoever could learn to write a Paragon Chat bot, and could run their own XMPP server to try out ideas. Most will suck. But a few won't. It would be nice to know what they are. And every good idea will probably spawn a couple more.
