14 replies to this topic

[dextermovies]

I was thinking, and doing some reading on these forums, and others, and was wondering if would be better to make it so after so many deaths you are dead permenatlly or if I should go with the standard for most of the other mmos out there and just make it so you respawn an infinte amount of times...

I am thinking of making it so players can control cities, and of course gain various things from it, and other players can take control of the city from other players and npcs (the cities start out as belonging to an npc army, expect a few cities) ... so I mean if other people are going to be fighting over cities then it might be wise to make it an infinte number of lives, but it would certainly make people think twice before attacking if they could only die so many times...

any feedback/help is greatly appreciated

[Methulah]

There are several ways. One is a perma-death system like in most pen and paper roleplaying games where the person simply dies. that is good on one level, as it makes people think twice before being stupid, however, MMO gaming requires ou to trust people you don't know, and that can be an issue if your trust is misplaced. Dying at a high level would generally result in your guild or group taking you for a ressurection, so you wouldn't always end up losing a character you had put years into.

Another way is the perma-spawn system that is popular in popular MMORPGs. You just respawn and respawn, often loosing a little experience and gold. That system makes players happy (and that is what commercial MMORPGs want).

It would be wise not to make a system where after a certain number of deaths, you die for good. That makes people have to make severe permanant decisions that can affect their character years and years down the track. One thing that would be cool would to have a Fable-esque system with "lives" that you can buy. These lives would allow you not to have to make permanant decisions, but would instead allow you to have a bit of freedom, whist still being careful about not being caught with a few lives up your sleeve.

A system that I though up as I was typing would envolve the player dying, and getting a chance to remake a character. The player can choose to make that character identical to their old one, and would start at one level lover that the player was when they died. The player would then have five (or whenever) days to pick up their corpse and perhaps ressurect it, or indeed loot it for all it is worth.

At the end of the post, these ideas are yours, and this is a major design decision that you and your design team have to do. Good luck with your game, and if you need any more advice, please PM me or post again.

Once again, good luck.

[dextermovies]

ok, well at the moment I have nothing as of yet ... I am still working on the story board and browsing around to see what seems to be popular for mmos, and what people want to see, and what the big time ones are missing ... I would say I would not even consider it a possibleity to make my idea into a game until at least a few months down the road if not more ... Thank you for the advice, I will definetally take the buying lives into consideration, as it at somewhat makes you think twicw about what you are going to do ... but you do not have to be to carful ... I was thinking about the looting corpse thing too just like diablo, but with an extended period of time for people to be able to obtain their corpse ... but lets say the server crashes after some one dies, then they would loose all thier stuff they had on them ..

[Methulah]

Your server shouldn't be crashed for more than a week, and if it is crashed, surely your gametime would stop, as the game doesn't progress when the server is down.

[dextermovies]

ok, I was just curious ... I do not have experience making my own game ... but I have worked with muds (text based games) and had the server crash a few times, and for some reason peoples stuff came up missing, or the could not re train their avatar, and other things to that effect ... so I did not know if the same would happen on the server ( asuming some will have pitty on my story, and help once I get it to the point where I feel it might go some where ... If I ever get it to that point)

[Nodlehs]

I would never suggest limiting a players lives if there is not some way to recover to a state just before death(xp/gold loss is ok in moderation, never item loss). A gamer isn't playing a game to be punished, and the demographic of gamers who enjoy a so called 'hardcore' mode(ala some Muds, Diablo II) where one death = permadeath is a very small portion of the possible player base for any given game. Methulah suggested a way to have permadeath for a character but there are tons of different ways to do it, try some on paper and see if they make sense. In all of this, you have to remember people are playing your game over the internet, which inherently has 'lag'. Is it fair to perma kill a character because he lost his connection? Is a person getting corpse camped going to be happy he used up his 3 'lives' and now has to start from scratch? Just some things to think on!

And on the muds you played on usually if the mud crashes in the middle of writing out pfiles it will end up in corruption, causing a lot of the problems you describe.

[Ed Mack]

I'd be interested in creating a game where the main character cannot die. Plenty of close shaves, but no real death and re-incarnation.

[Methulah]

Quote

I'd be interested in creating a game where the main character cannot die. Plenty of close shaves, but no real death and re-incarnation.

This isn't really possible for MMO games, but Planescape: Torment, the main character was immortal. Great game, as far as I can see, the best cRPG ever.

[Nodlehs]

mmm, Planescape: Torment, yummy, just replayed that about a month ago, always motivating to play that game. As well with the immortal character, they worked it into the story as well. You didn't have a hard time believing you would never die when your main character always awoke more scar ridden and mutilated than before. Whatever system you do decide on, make sure it works into your games lore and play style.

[Methulah]

Amen to that.

[dextermovies]

ok, after giving it some consideration (as much as I can working two jobs) ... I think I have come up with a soultion to this that will please me and most of the players.

"Players start out with 10 lives, the can purchase more lives. If they run out lives they can be resurrected by another player (resurrection is a skill). If no one will resurrect them they can return to the start point but they lose all of their item they have on them (that is not equipped). They can purchase extra lives, for power points. Players that are resurrected lose a certain amount of exp. Players that choose to go to the start point can choose to either loose exp or power points. Players that loose their items have 5 real time hours to claim their body (which has all the items they lost on it, after that any one may pick up the body and the items)"

***** Edit ******

Until level 10 the player does not loose lives if they die, they do not loose anything else either. Players that are killed under level 10 auto respawn to the start point.

Do you think that would be to steep and drive people away?

[Axehilt]

It sounds like "lives" in your case are merely safeguarding against item loss if when they're out of lives and nobody will resurrect, "they can return to the start point but lose all items..."

Personally I don't think a MMORPG can be widely popular with a Permadeath system. The combination of lag, performance, and crappy teammates means that players will be permanently taken back to square one for very irritating reasons.

I feel City of Heroes/Villains and WoW have decent death systems, as they penalize you mostly in acceptable amounts of playing time rather than any really huge penalty.

COH uses an XP Debt system, which is a genius way of hiding the fact that they outright subtract 5% of your level XP when you die:
1. When you die, you accumulate 10% of your level XP in 'debt'.
2. XP earned after that point is earned at a 50% rate, with half of your XP increasing your bar, and half going to "pay off" your debt.
3. You can only accumulate debt to a certain point (I think it's 80% of a level or something). After that, dying doesn't add any more to your debt.
4. Aside from XP, when you die you can either use a purchaseable (cheap) powerup that self-Rezes you, or another player with a Resurrect power can Rez you. Various modes of Rezzing have different effects - some leave you very vulnerable and shouldn't be used in combat, but others are explictly made to be used in combat by providing 60 seconds of awesome combat buffs.
5. If nobody is around to Rez you, and you can't self-Rez, your only other option is to spawn at the Hospital, which means you have to walk to wherever you want to go.

WoW's system is also good. Instead of penalizing XP, it penalizes in terms of Gold and Time:
1. Upon death, your equipment loses Durability. This costs money to repair. When Durability reaches 0, the item can't be used, so you can't just ignore durability loss.
2. You can be Rezzed by certain classes, with no additional penalty. Most Rezzes cannot happen during combat, which is one of the methods WOW uses to balance encounter difficulty.
3. If Resurrect isn't available, you have two choices: run back to your corpse as a Ghost (at the cost of Time), or spawn directly at the Graveyard (at the cost of even more Durability and a harsh 5-10 minute debuff that effectively prevents you from fighting...and if you want to go back to where you were, you would have to run there all over again.)

Neither system is terribly harsh, but certainly harsh enough that it's irritating to die. Although it might just be my perfectionist gaming attitude; I honestly can't think of a game where I wasn't irritated that I died. And perhaps that's the real reason why a permadeath system is bad: death is irritating enough already in games with "light" penalties.

Again, I think permadeath can work a lot better in other genres, especially non-online genres. Where the objective of the game is to attain a higher score than your last life (Nethack) or where you control multiple characters whose deaths are permanent (Final Fantasy Tactics). When you start adding lag, performance, and poor teammates to the list of factors that cause death, that's where I start getting really frustrated (and games should be about fun, not frustration.)

[Methulah]

I don't think irritating is good enough though. I think that it should be an experiece, something that is really avoided (so that people have to think before doing things) and also not posing too much of a set-back. Thats why I think a system where you "buy" lives, perhaps from a god or temple or something, (it could be by donating to a temple, and you respawn closer aligned to that deity, thus permanantly changing your character. If you die with no lives, perhaps a system where you do go to a different plane of existance (a hell or heaven) and you can either choose to start from scratch, find a body to inhabit on earth that you like (an NPC that is eligible, thus giving you some of your original power, in a body that doesn't have the look you want. You have to get back your prior power by training), or find a way (and there should be several) to get back to the plane you lived on.

I think it was NWN: Hoards of the Underdark that made you go to hell in the second chapter, then find a way out of it to savew the world. Perhaps in your game you could have an epic quest that gives you no benefit apart from living again.

Anyway, just some ideas.

[Axehilt]

Again, the main issue here is it's a MMORPG. Those ideas would work great in a non-MMORPG.

You don't have very much control over the strangers you party with in a MMORPG, and they could very well be the reason you die. That alone means that death can't be that irritating a penalty. A "set-back" is exactly what death should be; either in time, money, or XP.

The most important thing here being that MMORPGs are social games. "Sorry, my character died and I'm level 1 now so I can't party with you anymore" is very non-conducive to social gaming. It very harshly separates players from one another.

Admittedly I don't care much for the social element of MMORPGs myself; I just want a game I can have fun in. But in my observations, for other players that's one of the primary reasons they stick with the games for so long. You don't want a mechanic in your games which abruptly breaks up these social connections, since they're the reason a majority of MMORPG players stay with and enjoy the game.

I might even suggest going one step further than the City of Heroes/Villains system. Rather than a slightly-hidden death penalty, remove Death Penalty altogether and instead add a Lifespan Reward - like an XP multiplier that gets progressively larger the longer you live (obviously a character's life length should be measured by Base XP earned, rather than Time.) The bonus would reset back to a 1.0 multiplier upon death.

The game's levelling curve would assume that 1.0 XP is slow (perhaps it would be considered 50% normal XP in a Regular MMORPG.) It would be somewhat quick to get the bonus up to 2.0 (normal XP), and after that gains would be made at a slower and slower pace, but there would be no maximum. This would also make it a nice "ego stroke" feature of the game, for players to brag about the longest they lived and the highest they got the multiplier up to. Naturally it would have to be tweaked carefully by whoever was in charge of the XP curve so that progress isn't made at insane rates, but that's the genral concept anyway.

[Methulah]

I like that. My option didn't allow for the complete death of a character though. They died and could respawn if they were in the favour of the gods enough, or they could go to the "underworld" and find a way to get out, or they could possess another body and get a significant XP penalty.

Anyway, I like the idea of an XP multiplier, though it would have to be able to curve downwards aswell, so that a character that dies several times in a short period of time should suffer consiquenses. I like the idea of survival times helping gain XP, because that doesn't punish the player a huge amount, but it rewards for intelligent and tactical gameplay.

Nice system and well worth considering.