I had forgotten about all this forum business, but I happened upon it again in the course of unrelated searches, so I thought I might respond to this rather angry outburst:
Now to finish by adressing the drivel I read that prompted me to write this abomination:
In reality, most modern roguelikes have already abandoned true turn-based combat, even the angband line.
No, they really haven't. At all.
It's no longer you get a turn then the monster gets a turn (or you get a turn and the monster gets two if it's faster than you). It's more like for every eight of your turns the monster gets 5 spaced in a certain way among your 8. This is not turn based in any reasonable sense.
Would I be breaking any rules if I flat out told him to eat shit?
That is still turn-based. Do you operate a different definition of turn-based from the rest of the world?
If you're going to try and be cheeky by claiming that turn-based is defined by the player and the opponent taking actions in sequence, please don't. Or do and admit you're a troll while you're at it.
Turn-based quite simply means that the entirety of the gameworld is arrested untill the person whose turn it is has input his action. I, for one, don't give a FUCK whether that entity gets to take 128 turns back-to-back, it's still turn-based as long as all other possible actions are PAUSED untill that entity inputs and executes its chosen action. THAT is what turn-based is about.
I think this poster has misunderstood the point I was making. My claim is the kind of mechanics in which actions taken by the player and by monsters have a certain amount of cooldown time after execution which is pegged to a relatively fast moving (as compared to, say, the cooldown for a newly created character -- often something like 10 or even 100 ticks) game clock are not truly turn based. The poster above finds this outrageous because, indeed, single player roguelikes do block on player input -- in other words, they wait for the player to do something, when the opportunity exists, before letting anything else happen.
Elsewhere in the original post, I mention this issue of blocking vs. nonblocking input and game timers. Let me clarify: What I, and I think many other people would call "turn-based play" is the following: All actors (including game controlled ones, e.g. monsters) are given the opportunity consider their moves and make them according to a well-defined and transparent system whereby, except perhaps for information privileged to particular actors (e.g. what cards they're holding) or randomized information (e.g. dice rolls), all actors have full information about what other actors can do between the time they take one turn and the next. In particular, if you cannot reliably determine how many times a monster can move between your move and your next, this is a sign of non-turn based mechanics. This is the situation I claim exists in many prominent modern roguelikes, e.g. angband and crawl. This was not how it worked in older roguelikes, e.g. moria. The point is, if turn order involves rules significantly more complicated than "for each of my moves, you get this many moves," (for example, if movement is based on a hidden clock and it's not possible to determine at what point in its turn cycle a given monster is in when you are asked to move) it's not really turn based in the sense of, for example, board games, card games, or, I would say, computer games.
I'm not saying these somewhat mysterious movement/action mechanics are bad. They allow for more flexible speed mechanics, etc. What I'm saying is there is a reasonable definition of turn based mechanics that is typical of games of all kinds and that many indisputable roguelikes do not have them. What single player roguelikes really have is an input model in which the system waits for user input before proceeding when the player has the opportunity to act. Other games with considerable affinity to roguelikes, e.g. dwarf fortress offer the same kind of mechanics, but don't require them -- the player has the option to let the game proceed from tick to tick according to a possibly adjustable timer. Multiplayer online roguelikes (at least ones with sensible mechanics, e.g. mangband and tomenet -- which suck for other reasons) simply require the game to proceed from tick to tick via a set timer. There's a spectrum of possible input mechanics.
If you want to hang your hat on blocking input mechanics as a key feature of roguelikes, it's problematic, especially if you're talking about a definition broader than affinity to classic examples. Mangband and tomenet have rock solid roguelike pedigree and the right kinds of mechanics all the way down the line with that exception.
On the matter of permadeath -- I think the right way to think about this is not whether you can resurrect your character or revert to a save. The real point is that when your character dies (without items that prevent death, which is obviously not what the discussion is about, btw) it's the end of the world in the sense that the gameworld as it exists in that instance of the game is forever gone and future characters cannot revisit it. (In some cases, e.g. player ghosts/bones files in crawl, some piece of the world persists for random inclusion into future games, but the bulk of the gameworld is still gone.) It's not so much that the character cannot be revived as that there is no one there to revive him. This kind of solipsism makes no sense in a multiplayer setting. The focus on the death of the character makes sense psychologically, but the real point is that the world is regenerated for future characters. It's the circle of life. My point in saying this is that insisting on "permadeath" (the game has to try to delete the save data!) fails to consider alternate interpretations of what happens when a roguelike character dies and is a poor argument in the context of multiplayer games.
Another, perhaps more straightforward argument, is that in fact there is permadeath in mangband and tomenet, there are just items that can be used by other characters to avert permadeath after character death in particular instances. If they aren't used within a span of time governed by complicated rules, the death is permanent.
