Game Mechanics Question (about Fighting)

[wecksell]

I got KOTOR yesterday (for the Mac, BTW) and have a question about the game mechanics:

 

Does my characters location on screen effect the fighting?

As in:

If I duck behind a wall, or a column before shooting bad guys...

If I move away, or towards, bad guys in the room with me...

 

Does any of this effect combat?

 

Or is the difference between a turn based RPG and, say, Quake, that I no longer need to concern myself with the minutia of fighting on the grounds that my characters intelligence, speed, and dexterity will determine if he can dodge or take cover effectively?

 

---matt

[stoffe]

Does my characters location on screen effect the fighting?

As in:

If I duck behind a wall, or a column before shooting bad guys...

If I move away, or towards, bad guys in the room with me...

 

Does any of this effect combat?

 

Your character's movement does not affect if you get hit by blaster bolts, force powers and such. Saving throws and Defense vs. Attack takes care of those. It does allow you to dodge grenade blasts though, and you can duck behind walls to prevent enemies from shooting at you as long as they don't have line-of-sight to you. The line of sight detection is quite rudimentary though, they either see you or they do not, so hiding half-way behind a pillar or a wall is no better than standing out in the open.

 

The game uses a form of turn-based combat system where everyone runs their combat rounds simultaneously, each round lasting 3 seconds of real time. Each such round you can only use one force power, toss one grenade, or perform the number of attacks with a weapon your character is capable of doing per round (normally just 1 attack/round, 2 with dual-wielding, 3 with dual-wielding+flurry, 4 with dual-wielding+flurry+Force Speed etc...).