Death oOooOOoOo!!

I know this is an old thread but I have to give my 2 cents. I like option 3 I play on a UO server and its very tough when you die in a dungeon and try and go back for your stuff YOU CANT ITS GONE. I play alone but like people around me to help but I am a loner. When you die don't put a time limit to get your stuff. You could have a repair option on all items costly but no loss. Maybe 50-100% item decay. I would like it if you lost your gold you were carrying and had to repair your armor, but didn't loose it to the happy person who happens to find it.

 

Totally in line with my thinking. When you lose ALL your stuff, with no recourse, it's frustrating. All of these fears will be modified by how much my stuff really matters, and how hard it was to get, but the higher those two values, the more it will suck to be told "nope, it's gone".

If I have some reasonable way of recovering my gear, whatever actual penalization I face from death will still sting, but it won't cause a stroke, or make me cry.

Let's all remember that this IS a video game, the point is to have fun. If you want a world where you could die permanently without warning at any moment, and all your stuff could be taken and never seen again, there is a handy bit of technology in your home that can do this. It's called a front door. For hardmode, enlist in your local armed forces.

For those of us who want to PLAY at fighting and dieing and stealing and so forth, the penalty for failure shouldn't be a hard wipe. If people want a hardcore shard, and voluntarily place themselves there, well, I'll really respect the most successful and longest lived players there. But I'll still do it from a distance, in my cozy world where I come back from the dead and get my gear back.

 

You need to get that on a plaque as a house decoration.

 

Written in runic.

 

I don't have 10 hours a day to play and dying and a wipe takes hours to recover. the game is for fun to get away from kids and real life

 

Dieing would only take a long time, I think, if you insist on making a corpse run. I would presume we will have the option of resing by other means, which would just entail the loss of your gear, not your time. If you are strapped for time, stock extra gear and don't do a corpse run.

 

First, I apologize if someone's already brought this up already. I've been trying to catch up on the boards and am not sure I've found all the related threads yet.

My thought is less about looting and death and more for those who like a more hard core death consequence, and is an alternative to perma death. In another game I've seen this system used and I really loved it. When a character dies they obtain some sort of injury (concussion, broken arm, etc. This could even be an illness depending on what you were fighting when you died.) This injury/illness sticks with the character and has a negative effect on your stats.

To diagnose and get rid of this you have to find a healer with the knowledge to treat the injury. Injuries also stack. If you got a concussion and decide to run back into battle without being treated and die again, then you have a concussion AND a broken arm which means even more negative stats for you. Eventually you can't fight at all without seeking help.

Healing had two parts. First was a diagnosis. A player might know they have a fever, but a good healer with a lot of skill would know if it's The Black Death or just the flu. A fighter would be told their arm is severely injured but a healer could tell if it was broken or not so they could treat it accordingly.

For treatment, healing had it's own gump, like crafting, and you had to try to do the right 'treatment' to heal the person. Horribly messing up could have negative consequences (you could effectively make the matter worse) but a good healer who knew what they were doing (but trial and error or learning from another healer) could make the status injury or illness go away. There were quick ways to 'heal' someone, like cauterizing a wound, which required less supplies but didn't heal the wound as quickly or as well. There were also more intense methods, like sewing up a wound, which took more supplies and skills but healed faster. When this started healers carried around bags of supplies like bandages made out of cloth that could be dipped in water to make a cold compress, needle & thread to sew up gashes, candles and other flames to cauterize wounds, honey for disinfectants, twigs for splints, etc.

I like this for many reasons.
1. Healing isn't JUST about magic. There is a skill to it.
2. It makes healers valuable.
3. It gives consequences to PVP and death without completely losing your character.
4. It means the powers that be can add in new diseases as game continues that require finding new cures.
5. (My favorite reason) It promotes RP. Fighters get 'injuries' to play out. They interact with healers on a more meaningful level. You also get a really great RP between healers who teach each other treatments or apprentice aspiring healers. Think of the research as healers across the globe scramble to find a way to cure the plague! All the people they could send out to find herb supplies because you go through so many trying to combine them into a cure. The resulting research journals. Mmmmmm. RP.

Edit: This would also allow a way to add in things like heat exhaustion, starvation, hypothermia and other things that could be treatable (possibly by something as simple as drinking water or eating.) Not EVERYTHING requires a healer after all. Some things are common knowledge.

 

I like the idea proposed by AuroraWR (there is a game Kenshi that has something similar but it's not as complex due to it being a single player game)

 

The time lost to a death should include not only the corpse run, but also the time required to get back everything that was lost, including, if the game has gear decay, part of the value of every item that took a durability hit in order to cover the item devaluation. For example, if the only penalty for death is gear decay, and if after 20 deaths the character's gear goes from pristine shape to destroyed, then you need to add to the time lost to death the time required to earn 5% of the value of all the gear you use.

My own rule of thumb is that, if the penalty for death is over 15 minutes - in other words, if it takes more than 15 minutes to reclaim everything I lost on death - then I tend to just leave the game. My actual preference, though, is for the game to be hard enough that death is common, with safeguards to prevent zerging from being a viable tactic, but with little to no actual death penalty.

 

Maybe you should work on dieing less often, and I really don't intend that comment to be snarky (well, maybe a little bit snarky). When it comes to PvE, people die most of the time because they've done something unwise. The same is true of PvP, but PvP is inherently more difficult and more unpredictable, so greater preparation and care is required. Even if you are well prepared and careful, sometimes you just plain get your butt kicked.

Consider it a learning opportunity.

 

I always die a lot because I typically have to push myself in order to have fun. If my victory is assured I can't find fun in the game (which is why I have the strange behavior in PvP of giving up on fights where my opponent can't fight back; I have no fun, at all, unless my opponent has a reasonable chance of beating me).

And this is specially true for single player games I play, BTW. I tend to not use the best weapon I have, to not use the consumables that can be used to skip specific bad situations, to pull into the fight more enemies than is wise, etc. If I find myself prevailing every time, I try to do things to increase my difficulty until I can't be sure anymore that I will win.

It's not that I can't play cautiously, avoiding every death. I can. I just find that play style to be utterly boring, so I tend to leave any game that attempts to make me play that way. Heck, I play Dark Souls recklessly

 

If you can't play cautiously, avoiding death, then don't complain about how long it takes you to recover from death. You have a good bit of control over that, so don't criticize the game if you die a lot.

 

Owain, stop being a troll. You've cited the "I wanna play my way." arguement more times than I can count. Silent Strider wants to play risky and not get a massive punishment for dieing, I respect that and would want to see the game allow it.

A punishment at ALL, such as having to rez and recover, is appropriate, but if the game tries to force someone to play a certain way, there had better be a good reason for it. Something better than "Owain thinks you are doin' it wrong."

 

Death penalties don't force you to play a certain way but they shouldn't be meaningless for anyone either. I more or less stay out of discussions like this since I figure there are plenty of opinions to go around and really this isn't a huge area of interest for me... but I will try to add my perspective anyway.

I am a cautious player.. not because I fear heavy death penalties.. but rather I get my sense of suspense not from the fight.. but by overcoming the odds. Entering into a situation where I know I can die if I act recklessly.. (and I do sometimes get cocky and that's usually what gets me killed in most cases) and coming out alive because I went in prepared, kept my wits about me and kicked butt.

The victorious warrior wins first and then goes to war, while the defeated warrior goes to war and then seeks to win.

I'm quite happy to say that dying is a rare event for me and I hope to keep it that way. Cheating death means little if death itself is cheap. No risk, no reward and THAT translates well into games. Death is the risk and it needs to mean something but not be so harsh as to keep you from progressing.

 

Perhaps you meant "Death penalties SHOULDN'T force you to play a certain way but..."?

Cause I've seen death penalties that force you to play a certain way. That's actually part of what we are discussing here, eg. What will the death penalties be?

 

I can play cautiously. I just don't find it any fun, so I tend to just leave games that attempt to force me to play too cautiously.

BTW, I can tune how daring I am both up and down. This is where my preference for defeat to set me back 15 minutes or less comes from; I tend to tune my daring so I die roughly once per hour or two, in which case having to waste 15 minutes per death still allows for reasonable progression.

 

I'm aware of the intended discussion.. but my statement stands as is. Death penalties might compel you to act out of fear of them.. and this doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing.. but in games like this it's extremely difficult to use mechanics to force players to do things a certain way. Let's say for example that even though I'm usually cautious I get too comfortable with my success lately and just jump into a situations recklessly and die. Did the game force me to keep being cautious? Obviously not.. since it was not being cautious that got me killed.

Ok I've suffered a harsh penalty.. I start being cautious again because I don't want to die again right? I get comfy.. do something reckless again.. maybe I'll die.. maybe I won't. It's MY choice.. Regardless of how bad the death penalties are.. my choice is still mine. Here we go back to the 'living with the consequences' some people like to keep throwing out.

I'm not saying the penalties should be uber harsh.. but they shouldn't be a slap on the wrist either. Where is the risk in a battle if failure is nothing more than a fast and free trip to the nearest town for example. If death means nothing than death will be abused for fast/easy transportation or whatever players can find to do with it. I remember back in UO you used to have to worry about ghosts spying on you cause they couldn't be seen unless they spoke and could walk through walls and such. (just one example)..

 

Guess what? The death penalty has been hotpatched since last you saw, and now it's permadeath. Let's see how THAT affects your caution.

 

Guess what? It's still your choice how careful or reckless you want to be. Death doesn't kick in until AFTER you've gotten yourself killed.. not before. How you get there is still up to you. Besides, we're not talking about a single player offline game with save and load options. If they did go perma-death they'd have to balance the game to make it extremely difficult for you to die even if you're reckless.

I'm pretty sure I posted this very early on but I don't expect anyone to go reread from the beginning.. but the system we had on our NWN server seemed to work pretty well. If you died and choose to rez without a cleric.. you lost a good amount of gold and XP.. maybe 20 - 30 minutes worth depending on what you could kill and how quickly. You also received stat penalties that would recover over time.. this took about 20 minutes if you left the healer's or about 5 minutes if you stayed at the healer's. If a cleric rezzed you there was no stat penalty and no loss of gold.. the XP loss was also reduced.

Nobody wanted to die and when they did they preferred to have a cleric come pick them up off the ground.. of course this also sometimes meant waiting for awhile. When they did die it wasn't a major set back. Oh also there was a rick of item breakage on death.

Personally I dislike the idea of flat out money loss or random breakage chances but it's an example of death penalties that were harsh enough to want to be avoided.. but not so much as to frustrate the players over getting killed once or twice in a day.

Before that we had a system where you had to find your way out of a maze in the afterlife and return to pray at your gravestone where you died to recover some of your XP. People hated the maze.

 

Perma-death just wouldn't work well just because there's a story in the game, and you don't want to start the story over from the beginning. Having some type of successor wouldn't work too well, either, because I'm sure a lot of the story is based on reputation.

I agree with you though. I got in a habit at one time where I didn't put to much planning in games, but when I kicked that habit I actually ended up enjoying the games a lot more; I had to actually think about what I was doing. So when people say they don't like to be cautious, or plan, in games, it just reminds me of my own experience. I can't speak for others, but I think I just personally got accustomed to lazy game-play.

Its why I'm comfortable pushing for other types of realism too... speaking of arguments about stat fatigue, and darkness in dungeons, and item breakage.