My inspiration:
SaGa Frontier II.
This is designed for close-in skirmish-style combat. Anyway.
Every weapon has a set of basic bricks. They vary from weapon to weapon, but there are always at least 6. You get them all to start with, and they form the core of the combat system.
You can queue up a lot of bricks, but your execution speed is a factor of your stats, weapon skill, and weapon of choice. When you activate a brick its chance to hit and damage capacity are influenced by whatever brick your opponent currently has activated. Your own bricks (such as Focus or Charge) can affect the next attack brick you use.
Some weapons have good defensive bricks against other weapon types - let's say Staff has a brick called "Spin" that's good defense against Unarmed. But these bricks have a weakness - they can be "broken". Breaking is a one-way operation, and happens when your next queued brick can "break" your opponent's next queued brick. If your opponent sees you unarmed and queues "Spin", you can queue a brick called "rush" that will break it. When your "rush" fires, it automatically pulls your opponent's "Spin" brick out of the queue and shoves a brick back on called "rebalance" - your opponent spends his next turn essentially doing nothing.
But all bricks that can "break" can be "counter-broken", so to speak. If your opponent anticipates your "rush" and queues the "thrust" brick, when your "rush" fires it'll be wasted, his "thrust" brick will execute immediately, and a "rebalance" brick will go on your queue.
But but, all bricks that can "counter-break" can be "recounter-broken". If you think your opponent is going to break you with "thrust" you can queue "kick", which will do a little jump-kick over the staff thrust and give your opponent "rebalance".
There is no staff brick that can break "kick". But if your opponent has "spin" going, your kick will likely not hit or do much damage - and if he had "spin" queued again, it'd go off and you'd have a poor chance of landing more unarmed strikes.
Special techniques require a specific combination of bricks to be executed in succession. If you chain together "charge", "feint", and "kick" bricks, immediately after the kick executes you chain on the special "spin-kick", which isn't affected so much by the hit/damage adjustments that your normal bricks are, and does more damage to boot. Of course, if your opponent manages to read your combo and "break" one of its elements (if he's not using a staff, for instance) and shove a "rebalance" brick at you, it'll break the combo chain and you'll have to start again.
Further, after you've had a "rebalance" brick shoved into your queue, for a small number of bricks after that, you can't "break" your opponent's attacks since you're still finding your rhythm. So if your opponent breaks your combo, he may be able to land one in return that you can't break. But since your opponent sees your current attacks (though not your queue) and can figure out your combo, you may want to fake starting a combo, cue a brick to "counter-break", knock him off balance, and then follow up with a real combo.
Magic bricks go into the system the same way, as their base elements. This would need either a trinary or pentad element system - fire weak to thunder weak to ice weak to fire, or fire weak to water weak to earth weak to wood weak to metal weak to fire. That preserves the "one-way" nature of combo breaking. Magic bricks can chain to cast spells or even chain into normal combat bricks for magic-infused combo arts.
Against multiple opponents, bricks still come off the queue one at a time. If one opponent draws a "break" from you, the next brick in your queue is queued and you're considered to be using the attack you used to "break" the first opponent. Whichever opponent strikes you first draws the break; however, once you've been hit without a break or counter-break, your queued brick can't be broken. So if you're facing two unarmed opponents with your staff and the first queues "grab" and the second "kick", if you have "thrust" queued and the "grab" opponent strikes first, you break. If the "kick" opponent then hits you, you've already thrusted, and won't get broken unless you queued "thrust" twice (though "thrust" may not be as good at defending against kicks as "spin" was). If the "kick" opponent strikes first, you get broken. If you had "spin" queued and the "kick" opponent struck first, the "grab" opponent wouldn't be able to break you out of your spin.
Two questions:
First, what problems are there with this system?
Second, is this the way Matrix Online combat currently works?
--GF