Perma death in an MMORPG would have a very limited appeal to most people, especially if PvP is thrown into the mix. I have nothing against special ruleset servers for perma death i just don't think the demand would be very high.
World War II Online has perma-death, PVP, and probably has one of the strongest (though comparitively small) and most consistent-playing player bases in the genre. It's got none of the preconceptions most people in this thread have assumed are necessary for an MMO, like building stats and and collecting inventories, and though there is leveling of a sort by advancing in rank, anyone who volunteers for High Command skips straight up to Colonel. Y'all need to broaden your horizons a bit.
Yeah, because general experiences in games involving PvP souring us on the idea of being able to lose all of your progress due to game glitches, ganking techniques, etc. is totally a narrow horizon.
I'd quite rather be shot than participate in a perma-death MMO. See, what that tells me is that the game takes itself way too damn seriously. The usual perma-death fans I've met have been the same ones who... say... have insane naming restrictions (I'm all for it, but my character uses an alias, so first and last name are generally unused ever. A concept they appear to be unfamiliar with.), eating systems in play (Sheesh, I have to remember it in life AND a game? Sigh.), and various other things designed to arbitrarily increase difficulty and/or "realism" with no regard to general fun levels at all.
Now, it's a generalization, but it's one that's quite well proved itself in my experience.
Either way, I am not losing an entire character because some idiot who twinks all day decided to pick on someone.
First I want to thank the author of this article for writing a thought provoking article.
Originally posted by heerobya
it all depends on how much of a MMORPG you want it to be building a character from weak to strong, from level one to level one hundred, from swinging around a wooden stick to swinging around a mighty greatsword.. these are what makes a RPG a RPG. The feeling of advancement. Single player RPG's also have the luxary of a storyline that players advance through towards some end goal, the conclusion of the story. MMORPG's miss that because the story never ends, there is no end point or great, over reaching goal. You can't feel as if you've advanced the world you play in because you share the world with thousands of others. how many people will sit and replay the same single player RPG over and over? what's the point, you know the story, you know how it is going to end. What Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic did was genius, give players a second story, a second path to follow. But how many people are going to play through more then twice?
actually in neverwinter nights 2 I do exactly this my friend. If I anweser a question wrong to an NPC and see my alignment descend then sometimes I replay that scene and make different responses. cant wait for mass effect. anyway this is what makes bioware/obsidian games so replayable. i have also started over NWN2 a lot have yet to beat it cause i started over soooo much
Clones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
I am not sure perma death is what is needed but there needs to be some sort of penalty for death. Or you end up with the stupid set up in SWG, where death becomes a type of transportation for those to lazy or to impatient to travel the right way. What is the big punishment for death 5000 credits in a game where you can make that back in less than 30 seconds. You should lose your character for 24 or 48 hours or some time frame that will not completely turn players away from a game. Since most games have alt characters this will not completely stop your game play just alter it.
But this should only kick in at some predetermined level that gives a player time to learn the basics of the game.
Myself I have never seen the big deal to pvp if all you have to do is go to the cloner and be just as you were a few minutes ago in the battle. True pvp would institute a kill system of some type like I mention above.
Although with today's trend to dumb down every game so that every 6 year old (physical or mental) in the universe will play and not get pissed off I doubt if this will be seen in game for quite awhile.
And Maybe as a good side effect of this you would not have as many of these 6 year olds (physical or mental) standing in one city pestering you with challenges for a dual, if they would not be able to play their character for 2 days or so upon death.
Just my $.02
Jyd
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
Paper and Pencil RPGS have been dealing with this issue for a long time now, and many old school gamers like myself define one of the main differences between pnp rpgs and crpgs as the fact that death is never permanent. Still, some paper and pencil games have come up with some interesting ideas on the matter of character death: The DC Heroes RPG (the original one published by Mayfair Games) as well as other superhero RPGs have always tried to include safeguard against death, since characters in comic books rarely die unless the storyline dictates it.....and then of course they eventually come back again. The DC Heroes rpg mechanic was simple: all damage is nonlethal, unless someone specifically decides to engage in lethal attack damage. Nonlethal damage can knock you out, but never kill you. Frankly, most of the MMOs I've played are essentially doing this with their rez system; I mean, is the WoW universe full of people dying and being reborn.....or full of people who are close to dead and having out-of-body experiences, followed by a sudden recovery to consciousness? In game terms we understand it. In logical story terms....it gets kind of funky. Now, imagine a MMO in which characters had a choice of dealing and receiving lethal vs. nonlethal damage. Just like the choice of PvPing, they can decide to flag themselves or not. The game's default state is nonlethal. Anyone playing can choose to go "lethal" when playing, flagging themselves as such. The restriction for lethal damage would be for environment and other flagged lethal players, so unflagged players can't permanently gank flagged players, for example. But a group could have a mix of both, possibly. Now, the advantage of being flagged for lethal damage: characters get bigger rewards; maybe they get double XP, or extr askill points, or are eligible for better gear (or first pick or something) as well as "hardcore points" which accrue like honor points over time and bestow amazing titles on those players. I suspect a surprising number of people might occasionally opt for lethal flagging to give themselves that extra bonus.... Now, I think any game system which has a feature like this will have to have a play mechanic which is, while still allowing for levelling and advancement, not so unbalanced that, like in WoW, characters of more than 4 levels' difference will never want to face off due to power scalng being so dramatic. Characters in a system like this should have an edge in improving skills and abilities, but most characters should retain a static or nominal growth in hit points or whatever mechanism is used to record damage; in other words, to take a paper and pencil example, characters could advance in performance but not endurance ala Runequest or HARP, isntead of becoming physically monstrous like D&D would allow. Under such a system, bragging rights would not be "I have 2200 armor and 3500 hit points," but instead, "I have 150% on my swordsmanship and I have 95% on my dodge an parry." In other words, the escalation in the game is based on proficiency with things and skills, rather than escalation in damage dealing and absorbption......thus, it would be possible for a low level character who is verrrrry lucky to occasionally snuff a high level character. But high level characters could easily have all sorts of talents and skills which help mitigate such a demise, while still having them take damage. Anyway, I think such a system is quite doable, but it's really going to require thinking outside of the box which most CRPGs and MMORPGs are currently trapped in. Game designers for these systems should really try to get away from the infinitely-overdone D&D model and try looking at other pnp rpgs like Runequest, GURPS, and HARP that manage to provide a strong framework for play and advancement while still retaining realistic combat and threats for characters. I'd play that game..... you're a genius...why are people like you NOT making games (for people like you and me?) lol
"To remove levels and gear is to remove RP from RPG" Seldom you hear such an amount of drivel. Ok, all you know is EQ and in PnP maybe.. maybe know D&D. But it is clear you dont know how many kinds of RPG systems there are. But its great, put another nail in the coffin of MMO evolution,. really go out there and make sure no developers EVER dare to create something different from the plethora of RPG influences, but instead continue to copy the same old and tired system over.. and over.. and over... again. Really, I am amazed at how everyone that write for a site pretending to be supporting MMORPGs, are doing their best to kill the genre, telling everyone over and over again to "Creat a copy of the last one, innovation doesn't work" Its like a flipping old folks home with 90 year old men sitting around a table muttering "Everything was better in the old days.. None of that new mumbo jumbo"
Thread winner. This post should be permaclued to the front page of mmorpg.com.
I once ran a "roleplaying intensive" MUD based on the Age of Reptiles comics series in which players portrayed Deinonychus'. I modified level max from 60+ to around 30 max (based on stats) and the setting was perma-death, though inventory was non-existent for the most part. Death was commonplace since more than a few predators would attack, kill and eat players at all levels of ability. PvP between two packs of characters also occured but combat led to knock-outs with "killing blows" being by choice at that point.
What made it work was the community of players and the fact that roleplaying was enforced (and rewarded) by IMMs. Granted, the populace for such a game setting was limited (my record high was maybe 50) but it worked pretty well. Griefers and players that wanted to generally run around on killing sprees were not tolerated.
I like the sound of an inheritance concept but I also would like to have an adult-only MMORPG that had a birth code that could generate a playable character file for children.
There is a very complete discussion of Perma- Death in Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds". He convinced me that online games have to move towards true character death (no resurection, inheritance etc) as this is the only way for your actions in the games to truly have any excitment and meaning. If you just want to do something repetative with no end then the current crop of MMORPGs are for you, but they are all untimately unsatisfying - you mught as well play solitair and chat on MS Messenger.
If you want an adventure and a true possibility of failure to make success worthwile then you nead story arcs; endings and permanent death.
I am not sure perma death is what is needed but there needs to be some sort of penalty for death. Or you end up with the stupid set up in SWG, where death becomes a type of transportation for those to lazy or to impatient to travel the right way. What is the big punishment for death 5000 credits in a game where you can make that back in less than 30 seconds. You should lose your character for 24 or 48 hours or some time frame that will not completely turn players away from a game. Since most games have alt characters this will not completely stop your game play just alter it. But this should only kick in at some predetermined level that gives a player time to learn the basics of the game. Myself I have never seen the big deal to pvp if all you have to do is go to the cloner and be just as you were a few minutes ago in the battle. True pvp would institute a kill system of some type like I mention above.
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Clones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
That's not perma-death. Its just another death system. Like I said nothing stops anyone from having perma-death in a game. You either have the willpower to delete the toon when you die or you don't. Play the game the way you like it and let others play it the way they like.
Laura Laura Laura. If a "game" had "perma-death" then it wouldn't be an RPG now would it? Nobody plays the role of death, or better put: none-existance. Then you wouldn't be playing a game then would you?
This has been hashed and re-hashed time and time again. It's not worth going there, then, now or ever.
Clones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
That's not perma-death. Its just another death system. Like I said nothing stops anyone from having perma-death in a game. You either have the willpower to delete the toon when you die or you don't. Play the game the way you like it and let others play it the way they like.
inheritance is a form of perma-death your original toon has died. its okay you're not down for permadeath but not sure why you bother to post if you dont have any ideas to contribute. what you just posted has been stated a lot of times already
Clones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
I like the idea about cloning but it is already done with SWG and maybe more games, Crackdown is a game that is gonna be released 20th feb. 2007 so abviously that game copied cloning from other games, but all in all i think Crackdown is a pretty cool to be game. But perma-death would be really hard to realise in today's MMO's but then again it might separete the real gamers from the wanna-be gamers if it is done correctly in game.
Permadeath is the one thing I would like to see implemented in an MMO more than anything else. The one important thing, though, is that levelling does not have to be removed or replaced.
A permadeath based MMO does not have to have levelling stripped from it, but there are several radical departures that must be embraced for a Permadeath MMO to become a reality. Take the following ideas into consideration as a model for what might be an exciting change in an MMO in the direction of achieving an acceptable Permadeath model.
1. Character Aging: When you create your character, he is given a finite number of years which you as a player will not be told about. Depending on the race you choose, this could be a long time or not very long at all.
2. Character Slots: When you first start out in the game you are given but one character slot. You can earn extra character slots by starting a family. To facilitate this, developers could provide for in game weddings between characters (since you only get one slot to start this would be an agreement between 2 players or a player who has multiple accounts). Periodically, the female character would be allowed to have a child (new character slot), and the game could track your family tree for you. The two players would decide who got the new character slot, either divvying by gender or taking every other one, up to them.
3. Levelling: Levelling would would out of necessity have to be very rapid, if levels were indeed used. Even if levelling WERE used, higher level should not make one impossible to kill. A coupe de gras facter should always be included in a Permadeath game.
4. Diseases, Curses, and Other Infirmities: Ailments which can temporarily incapacitate a player, possibly even kill them if not treated, should be in a Permadeath game. This includes curses that can alter a player's actions or choices, poisons, impairments such as amputations, getting blinded or scarred, etc.
5. Legal Options: A player should be able to leave a will, granting his belongings to his loved ones (or alts) should he die. This does not necessarily mean everything he or she has on his person when he dies will necessarily make it into the proper hands heheh. Lands and other assets should inevitably revert to his or her alts.
6. Rule of Law: Players who violate the laws of the land should be subjected to jail time, floggings, or whatever punishments are dished out locally (yes there actually was a game once, by Sierra, called The Realm, that actually slapped you in jail if you were a PKer and got caught by the guards in certain areas). This would be especially useful if your personal belongings were stolen or your corpse were pilfered. The idea of rule of law also firmly entrenches the idea of a bounty hunter type of character.
7. Retirement Options: Since characters would be forced into an aging model, there should be included in the game the option to retire a character, ie the character could only be played after retirement in the direst of circumstances. Such retirement models should include things like starting up a business, or becoming ruler of a township or better.
Again these are only my ideas or suggestions, but I feel there are valid points in here that any developer could make excellent use of in bringing Permadeath to the forefront of the MMO market. Were a majority of these ideas incorporated, I would be sorely pressed to not leave my current game for the new one.
I am not sure perma death is what is needed but there needs to be some sort of penalty for death. Or you end up with the stupid set up in SWG, where death becomes a type of transportation for those to lazy or to impatient to travel the right way. What is the big punishment for death 5000 credits in a game where you can make that back in less than 30 seconds. You should lose your character for 24 or 48 hours or some time frame that will not completely turn players away from a game. Since most games have alt characters this will not completely stop your game play just alter it. But this should only kick in at some predetermined level that gives a player time to learn the basics of the game. Myself I have never seen the big deal to pvp if all you have to do is go to the cloner and be just as you were a few minutes ago in the battle. True pvp would institute a kill system of some type like I mention above.
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Never played it, but it sounds as if it is on the right track if that is the way it works! Never claimed to know anyathing about Eve just giving an opinion on perma-death
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
What about something different; like if you are killed by a zombie you become a zombie, or vampire etc. It would be a permanent change, but you are still progressing so not really permadeath. Your game play would change (say its pvp between zombies and living). I know there are balance and mechanics issues (like lots of zombies and a few living noobs), but I'm sure a solution could be found. If you could toggle between warring pvp factions by being killed, that could be interesting.
I am sick of people making sweeping statements about what can and cant be done, as if we were analysing the bible or something. If one more person quotes Bartle as if he has some sort of great insight I swear...
I am not sure perma death is what is needed but there needs to be some sort of penalty for death. Or you end up with the stupid set up in SWG, where death becomes a type of transportation for those to lazy or to impatient to travel the right way. What is the big punishment for death 5000 credits in a game where you can make that back in less than 30 seconds. You should lose your character for 24 or 48 hours or some time frame that will not completely turn players away from a game. Since most games have alt characters this will not completely stop your game play just alter it. But this should only kick in at some predetermined level that gives a player time to learn the basics of the game. Myself I have never seen the big deal to pvp if all you have to do is go to the cloner and be just as you were a few minutes ago in the battle. True pvp would institute a kill system of some type like I mention above.
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Never played it, but it sounds as if it is on the right track if that is the way it works! Never claimed to know anyathing about Eve just giving an opinion on perma-death
Thats cool man you were writing your honest opinion. Back on the EvE thing- you earn ISK and eventually can purchase bigger and better ships. Well at the top of the food chain is a Titan ship in which takes an entire guild to make. These ships exist online even after you log I have been told. You can lose the entire ship completely in a battle and your wrechage will stain the cosmos forever (its a rare event when a Titan dies). Now, I am not sure how high the chances are that you lose all of your skills from battle but I do know you can lose your entire ship. you can have more than one ship in your garage of course. Not sure how close to permadeath EvE is but I think it deserves props for devising a logicial system thats pretty close cause you can *permenantly* lose ships, etc
Perma-death switches. You turn it on for greater rewards, turn it off when you dont want to risk everything. Can be altered at the start of each dungeon or instance or triggered as an event so you know ahead of time what you are doing. Its flagged to that event and its mobs, so no grief killing from outside (only your friends). POssibly allow insurance of various kinds, level insurance, item insurance etc... good money sink. Allow tomb markers that would be turned into quest adventures for high level resurrections, but these missions would automatically be perma-death ones, so the rescuers risk something also.
There are plenty of soft-perma death options if you want to think about them, and they become attractive when you get into the end game - you are gonna quit soon anyway so this adds a new thrill.
There are plenty of leveless game systems around in the pen and paper genre, levels are just one mechanic for character progress, skills are another, equipment another, knowledge etc etc. There are plenty of ways to create challenge and differeniate characters, if you cant see that then you lack imagination.
Clones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
That's not perma-death. Its just another death system. Like I said nothing stops anyone from having perma-death in a game. You either have the willpower to delete the toon when you die or you don't. Play the game the way you like it and let others play it the way they like.
inheritance is a form of perma-death your original toon has died. its okay you're not down for permadeath but not sure why you bother to post if you dont have any ideas to contribute. what you just posted has been stated a lot of times already Inheritance is a form of death penalty. Maybe I read to much Knights of the Dinner table, but Playing Joe, then Joe1 where you get most of your father's things and start out with less xp isn't very pema-death. Pema-death is starting from scratch with nothing.
I think what most of the people posting in this thread are missing is the idea of permadeath wouldn't work in the games we all know already. They're designed so you can die and be resurrected or whatever. You can't expect to understand the system if you're just trying to tag it onto RandomRPG1.
I would have no problem with permadeath if (like someone on an earlier page said) it was quite hard to actually die. For instance, take free-for-all PvP combat. If you knock the other guy down and he doesn't get back up, do you stand and watch him or look out for the next sword-wielding psycho? So how do you know that player is dead rather than just incapacitated? Unconsciousness is an easy way around it in combat situations, with the ability for your group or raid members to drag you out and mend your wounds to get you back on your feet. Maybe (as was also said before) you could incur an injury that would need proper treatment to avoid a full death.
Or, you could limit permadeath to PvE situations, meaning all PvP combat doesn't affect your life counter (for the reasons listed above). Or you could reverse that and have permadeath only when in PvP, so that if you choose to get involved in PvP you risk it all - the excitement of gambling with your hard-earned gear.
I have read various game ideas centred around permadeath, and most of them were fairly sound. Additional lives (or respawns if you like) awarded each month of play, so you don't need to be afraid of new and difficult challenges, is a very good idea too.
I'm totally against mindless grind in all games, because it's boring as hell. I'd much prefer to be running all over the place than standing waiting for mob01 to spawn again. Take out the levels, base the entire system on player skill rather than stats and gear, and you have a permadeath system where your death isn't quite as frustrating as if you had to earn all your stuff again.
There will never ever be a succesfull MMORPG with "Permadeath", how to make your Game suck and your company fast out of business?
Create a permandeath-game! ROFL...
interesting opinion. Although lacking in any constructive criticism. You will not be laughing when the ideas become reality because the many different methods of perma-death are an inevitable reality of the evolution of gaming online. The market will soon be ripe for it and its developement will put another nail in the coffin for the existing templates for mmorpg. Any publisher/games company will be aware of the potential of incorporating some sort of permenant character death. Space Invaders has been doing it for years!
As i read through this thread, I found the majority of people dislike permenant death, and under the current MMORPG system, that is 100% true. Who in their right minds would play a game where if they made a mistake, would lose everything? Well, to think about it, we all play the game of "REAL LIFE" don't we? but that can be for another discussion.
The point is, the current MMORPG system, or be it, RPG system cannot accomadate a perma-dead system. However, that does not mean, a NEW RPG system which is completely tailored toward perma-death and other new aspects cannot work in the current market. While I have the system nearly completely planned out, I won't go into to much detail as I have every intention of developing the game. However, I'd like to say, that the system intends to take the focus off the character, and place it somewhere else. The player will no longer grow attached to the character, but simply the legend and story that he or she creates, which will last far longer then the lifetime of the individual character.
I'm really interested in developing this design, and at the momemt i lack to framework to make it happen.
Comments
I'd quite rather be shot than participate in a perma-death MMO. See, what that tells me is that the game takes itself way too damn seriously. The usual perma-death fans I've met have been the same ones who... say... have insane naming restrictions (I'm all for it, but my character uses an alias, so first and last name are generally unused ever. A concept they appear to be unfamiliar with.), eating systems in play (Sheesh, I have to remember it in life AND a game? Sigh.), and various other things designed to arbitrarily increase difficulty and/or "realism" with no regard to general fun levels at all.
Now, it's a generalization, but it's one that's quite well proved itself in my experience.
Either way, I am not losing an entire character because some idiot who twinks all day decided to pick on someone.
First I want to thank the author of this article for writing a thought provoking article.
actually in neverwinter nights 2 I do exactly this my friend. If I anweser a question wrong to an NPC and see my alignment descend then sometimes I replay that scene and make different responses. cant wait for mass effect. anyway this is what makes bioware/obsidian games so replayable. i have also started over NWN2 a lot have yet to beat it cause i started over soooo muchClones- You can also give players the option to somehow 'store' a clone of their toon at somepoint like I hear EvE does. then if your toon gets smoked well he can revert to a stored copy. I see a lot of games starting to use a sort of clone idea like Crackdown (xbox360) etc. can work for a futuristic scebnario
Inheritance - allow players to have a 'family' of toons. baasically let them pick first and last names. If their main toon gets smoked they could revive into a different toon. this feature is for the extreme role players. their original toon is R.I.P. but his memory lives on in the form of his son or brother.
I am not sure perma death is what is needed but there needs to be some sort of penalty for death. Or you end up with the stupid set up in SWG, where death becomes a type of transportation for those to lazy or to impatient to travel the right way. What is the big punishment for death 5000 credits in a game where you can make that back in less than 30 seconds. You should lose your character for 24 or 48 hours or some time frame that will not completely turn players away from a game. Since most games have alt characters this will not completely stop your game play just alter it.
But this should only kick in at some predetermined level that gives a player time to learn the basics of the game.
Myself I have never seen the big deal to pvp if all you have to do is go to the cloner and be just as you were a few minutes ago in the battle. True pvp would institute a kill system of some type like I mention above.
Although with today's trend to dumb down every game so that every 6 year old (physical or mental) in the universe will play and not get pissed off I doubt if this will be seen in game for quite awhile.
And Maybe as a good side effect of this you would not have as many of these 6 year olds (physical or mental) standing in one city pestering you with challenges for a dual, if they would not be able to play their character for 2 days or so upon death.
Just my $.02
Jyd
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
i disagree - although the comments are obviously precise and clever they are antangonistic and negative.
The winner is the one with the best solution(s). I vote Mr tyranassaur as front page dude
I once ran a "roleplaying intensive" MUD based on the Age of Reptiles comics series in which players portrayed Deinonychus'. I modified level max from 60+ to around 30 max (based on stats) and the setting was perma-death, though inventory was non-existent for the most part. Death was commonplace since more than a few predators would attack, kill and eat players at all levels of ability. PvP between two packs of characters also occured but combat led to knock-outs with "killing blows" being by choice at that point.
What made it work was the community of players and the fact that roleplaying was enforced (and rewarded) by IMMs. Granted, the populace for such a game setting was limited (my record high was maybe 50) but it worked pretty well. Griefers and players that wanted to generally run around on killing sprees were not tolerated.
I like the sound of an inheritance concept but I also would like to have an adult-only MMORPG that had a birth code that could generate a playable character file for children.
There is a very complete discussion of Perma- Death in Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds". He convinced me that online games have to move towards true character death (no resurection, inheritance etc) as this is the only way for your actions in the games to truly have any excitment and meaning. If you just want to do something repetative with no end then the current crop of MMORPGs are for you, but they are all untimately unsatisfying - you mught as well play solitair and chat on MS Messenger.
If you want an adventure and a true possibility of failure to make success worthwile then you nead story arcs; endings and permanent death.
Feel the fear and do it anyway ;-)
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Laura Laura Laura. If a "game" had "perma-death" then it wouldn't be an RPG now would it? Nobody plays the role of death, or better put: none-existance. Then you wouldn't be playing a game then would you?
This has been hashed and re-hashed time and time again. It's not worth going there, then, now or ever.
This is my sig...
inheritance is a form of perma-death your original toon has died. its okay you're not down for permadeath but not sure why you bother to post if you dont have any ideas to contribute. what you just posted has been stated a lot of times already
I like the idea about cloning but it is already done with SWG and maybe more games, Crackdown is a game that is gonna be released 20th feb. 2007 so abviously that game copied cloning from other games, but all in all i think Crackdown is a pretty cool to be game. But perma-death would be really hard to realise in today's MMO's but then again it might separete the real gamers from the wanna-be gamers if it is done correctly in game.
Permadeath is the one thing I would like to see implemented in an MMO more than anything else. The one important thing, though, is that levelling does not have to be removed or replaced.
A permadeath based MMO does not have to have levelling stripped from it, but there are several radical departures that must be embraced for a Permadeath MMO to become a reality. Take the following ideas into consideration as a model for what might be an exciting change in an MMO in the direction of achieving an acceptable Permadeath model.
1. Character Aging: When you create your character, he is given a finite number of years which you as a player will not be told about. Depending on the race you choose, this could be a long time or not very long at all.
2. Character Slots: When you first start out in the game you are given but one character slot. You can earn extra character slots by starting a family. To facilitate this, developers could provide for in game weddings between characters (since you only get one slot to start this would be an agreement between 2 players or a player who has multiple accounts). Periodically, the female character would be allowed to have a child (new character slot), and the game could track your family tree for you. The two players would decide who got the new character slot, either divvying by gender or taking every other one, up to them.
3. Levelling: Levelling would would out of necessity have to be very rapid, if levels were indeed used. Even if levelling WERE used, higher level should not make one impossible to kill. A coupe de gras facter should always be included in a Permadeath game.
4. Diseases, Curses, and Other Infirmities: Ailments which can temporarily incapacitate a player, possibly even kill them if not treated, should be in a Permadeath game. This includes curses that can alter a player's actions or choices, poisons, impairments such as amputations, getting blinded or scarred, etc.
5. Legal Options: A player should be able to leave a will, granting his belongings to his loved ones (or alts) should he die. This does not necessarily mean everything he or she has on his person when he dies will necessarily make it into the proper hands heheh. Lands and other assets should inevitably revert to his or her alts.
6. Rule of Law: Players who violate the laws of the land should be subjected to jail time, floggings, or whatever punishments are dished out locally (yes there actually was a game once, by Sierra, called The Realm, that actually slapped you in jail if you were a PKer and got caught by the guards in certain areas). This would be especially useful if your personal belongings were stolen or your corpse were pilfered. The idea of rule of law also firmly entrenches the idea of a bounty hunter type of character.
7. Retirement Options: Since characters would be forced into an aging model, there should be included in the game the option to retire a character, ie the character could only be played after retirement in the direst of circumstances. Such retirement models should include things like starting up a business, or becoming ruler of a township or better.
Again these are only my ideas or suggestions, but I feel there are valid points in here that any developer could make excellent use of in bringing Permadeath to the forefront of the MMO market. Were a majority of these ideas incorporated, I would be sorely pressed to not leave my current game for the new one.
Rage On
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Never played it, but it sounds as if it is on the right track if that is the way it works! Never claimed to know anyathing about Eve just giving an opinion on perma-death
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
What about something different; like if you are killed by a zombie you become a zombie, or vampire etc. It would be a permanent change, but you are still progressing so not really permadeath. Your game play would change (say its pvp between zombies and living). I know there are balance and mechanics issues (like lots of zombies and a few living noobs), but I'm sure a solution could be found. If you could toggle between warring pvp factions by being killed, that could be interesting.
I am sick of people making sweeping statements about what can and cant be done, as if we were analysing the bible or something. If one more person quotes Bartle as if he has some sort of great insight I swear...
I think in Eve when your avatar gets killed if you did not buy an expsnsive clone then you will lose skills.plus you lose your ship how is that not intense pvp you must not know anything bout Eve?
Never played it, but it sounds as if it is on the right track if that is the way it works! Never claimed to know anyathing about Eve just giving an opinion on perma-death
Thats cool man you were writing your honest opinion. Back on the EvE thing- you earn ISK and eventually can purchase bigger and better ships. Well at the top of the food chain is a Titan ship in which takes an entire guild to make. These ships exist online even after you log I have been told. You can lose the entire ship completely in a battle and your wrechage will stain the cosmos forever (its a rare event when a Titan dies). Now, I am not sure how high the chances are that you lose all of your skills from battle but I do know you can lose your entire ship. you can have more than one ship in your garage of course. Not sure how close to permadeath EvE is but I think it deserves props for devising a logicial system thats pretty close cause you can *permenantly* lose ships, etc
Create a permandeath-game! ROFL...
Perma-death switches. You turn it on for greater rewards, turn it off when you dont want to risk everything. Can be altered at the start of each dungeon or instance or triggered as an event so you know ahead of time what you are doing. Its flagged to that event and its mobs, so no grief killing from outside (only your friends). POssibly allow insurance of various kinds, level insurance, item insurance etc... good money sink. Allow tomb markers that would be turned into quest adventures for high level resurrections, but these missions would automatically be perma-death ones, so the rescuers risk something also.
There are plenty of soft-perma death options if you want to think about them, and they become attractive when you get into the end game - you are gonna quit soon anyway so this adds a new thrill.
There are plenty of leveless game systems around in the pen and paper genre, levels are just one mechanic for character progress, skills are another, equipment another, knowledge etc etc. There are plenty of ways to create challenge and differeniate characters, if you cant see that then you lack imagination.
inheritance is a form of perma-death your original toon has died. its okay you're not down for permadeath but not sure why you bother to post if you dont have any ideas to contribute. what you just posted has been stated a lot of times already
I think what most of the people posting in this thread are missing is the idea of permadeath wouldn't work in the games we all know already. They're designed so you can die and be resurrected or whatever. You can't expect to understand the system if you're just trying to tag it onto RandomRPG1.
I would have no problem with permadeath if (like someone on an earlier page said) it was quite hard to actually die. For instance, take free-for-all PvP combat. If you knock the other guy down and he doesn't get back up, do you stand and watch him or look out for the next sword-wielding psycho? So how do you know that player is dead rather than just incapacitated? Unconsciousness is an easy way around it in combat situations, with the ability for your group or raid members to drag you out and mend your wounds to get you back on your feet.
Maybe (as was also said before) you could incur an injury that would need proper treatment to avoid a full death.
Or, you could limit permadeath to PvE situations, meaning all PvP combat doesn't affect your life counter (for the reasons listed above). Or you could reverse that and have permadeath only when in PvP, so that if you choose to get involved in PvP you risk it all - the excitement of gambling with your hard-earned gear.
I have read various game ideas centred around permadeath, and most of them were fairly sound. Additional lives (or respawns if you like) awarded each month of play, so you don't need to be afraid of new and difficult challenges, is a very good idea too.
I'm totally against mindless grind in all games, because it's boring as hell. I'd much prefer to be running all over the place than standing waiting for mob01 to spawn again. Take out the levels, base the entire system on player skill rather than stats and gear, and you have a permadeath system where your death isn't quite as frustrating as if you had to earn all your stuff again.
The point is, the current MMORPG system, or be it, RPG system cannot accomadate a perma-dead system. However, that does not mean, a NEW RPG system which is completely tailored toward perma-death and other new aspects cannot work in the current market. While I have the system nearly completely planned out, I won't go into to much detail as I have every intention of developing the game. However, I'd like to say, that the system intends to take the focus off the character, and place it somewhere else. The player will no longer grow attached to the character, but simply the legend and story that he or she creates, which will last far longer then the lifetime of the individual character.
I'm really interested in developing this design, and at the momemt i lack to framework to make it happen.