An early mockup of the combat system, stance was tracked by the bar on the top of the screen, and the combatants would move side to side and swap sprites to reflect the stance change. We decided that removing players from the game map for combat interrupted the flow of the game too much, and scrapped this system.
Our current proposed combat system. We are still using the book UI from the first mockup as the combat menu for selecting actions, but keep players in the world map so that they don’t lose a sense of their surroundings.