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A way for permadeath to exist in an MMORPG
DocBrennis
Member UncommonPosts: 39
First off, I've read a few of the other threads on permadeath and have come to the conclusion that my post would of been lost in endless bickering had I posted in one of those. Based on that conclusion, I have decided to post a new thread about, you guessed it, permadeath in MMO's.
Let's take a quick second to define permadeath. For me, I see permadeath as the death of the main player controlled character. Many threads discussin permadeath list offspring as a viable option to losing your main pc character, and I tend to agree.
Now that we are equal ground for what permadeath means, lets take a second to discuss the MMO world in which permadeath can exist. From my experience, today's MMO's are based on three types of grinds: PvE level/skill grinding, PvP level/skill grinding, and Gear grinding. Sure there is lore and story along the way, but we are going to keep things simple for the sake of discussion. The only real difference between PvE and PvP grinding is the players target changes from random mob to random pc. Gear grinding happens at set intervals by the dev's and then is normally your end game content.
Take a moment to reflect on the games you have played and try and see where you would fit that game into the niches I have described. Now that you have a solid thought basis, try to insert permadeath of your pc into that game. My guess is that it just will not work. Does that mean that permadeath is bad? Even for you anger managment lackeys, the answer should be of course not. We should not live in a world of absolutes.
The question becomes then, in what MMO world can permadeath exist? And after a lengthy introduction, I think I have a few ideas on how to create the necessary world. For ease of reading of thread scanners (i.e. the ones who have read none of the post so far) I will bulletize my points.
1)The world should have little to no grind. We need a world were the point of playing is not so focused on the leveling of a characters base stats or skills.
2)Players should not be easy to kill. Can they be killed, yes. Are they as frail as humans are in reality, no.
3)A player defeated in combat is not dead. For a PvP example, soldier X strikes soldier Y. Y is hurt badly laying on the ground and receives a new key layout where he can drag himself off the field of battle. X sees Y trying to crawl away and pursues. Y uses his new layout to dodge attacks on the ground, while praying one of his comrades sees that action and comes over to assist. Once another soldier engages in combat, Y is free to once again crawl back to safety. Which brings us to point 4.
4)A wounded pc takes time to recover. See points 5 and 6. During the recovery time, you play an offspring character that still lives with you (see point 8). Depending on your offsprings age, you could be confined to the house for awhile playing with toys or if a little older, doing chores for mom (or dad). Maybe you are a bit older and you go out of the house and pick fights with the other children or play a game of hide and seek. Even older still? Go out and harvest material for when mom or dad recovers. Maybe you are very capable and upon hearing of your parents situation, decide to seek out revenge, so you head to war.
5)Time is a factor in the game and characters age. The devs would have to work out a time scale, but I think one real life year could equal 100 game years. That means that about 3.5 months would pass in a single day. The dev's don't have to stick to a 12 month calendar, nor do they have to say seasons will change every 4 months. My main thinking is that a player character would have an average lifespan of 80-120 years based on actions in game. This gives us about a year real life time to play our beloved pc, barring no unfortunate "accidents".
6)Player characters are the Non-Player characters. There is no NPC king asking you to go to war for him. It's a real player character that makes the decisions. But what happens when the king logs off you say? I think a very robust attitude, emotion, and personality system needs to be in place for players to decide who they are when they are not there. Use your imagination here, I think you can see the applications. Maybe you log off and set your character to harvest food while you are gone with the attitude to work hard and disregard combat. You may come back to find your character wounded because he was too stubborn to run when the enemy attacked. Then again, maybe the enemy didn't attack and you have many materials to work with when you log on.
7)Towns are mostly safe havens to not die. I'd like to see as much player character protection as possible, but as towns grow, they can recruit NPC's to help protect the town. There will be doctor's nearby should any rival clan come along and try to attack the town. Think of having a bell in the town that a watchman could ring to signal the non-combat oriented players to seek cover in buildings.
8)Offspring! When you create your first character, you get to decide whether you are married already and how many offspring you have. Be careful though! More offspring is more mouths to feed, backs to clothe, which all means you will profit less money. Of course as the offspring grow they help produce more (unless you raised some bad kids) meaning more profit in the long run. You could solo it from the beginning, but should you get hurt, you are stuck looking at yourself laying bed for awhile. With offspring also comes a social minigame of sorts. Not all of your children are content to do your bidding until you die. As they age, they may want to run off and marry other neighborhood offpsring. Do you throw them a big wedding or tell them good riddance? Who knows, maybe they will come back to you someday with money they have earned or inventions they have discovered. Maybe they get divoriced and they want to come back and live with you?
I see that I'm getting too long winded and the post is just enormous so I'll take time to reflect more on what I have and have not said so far, and wait for feedback from the community. One request though, if you did not read at lest some of the post, please try not to reply. I know some won't be able to resist, but hey I asked nicely.
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Comments
Once there were MUDs... and most of them had a *huge* exp penalty for dying, up to a point that dying 3 or 4 times in a row would be such a setback that you'd rather make a new character (a MUD i played had 1/4 of your *total* experience loss upon death, meaning that dying for 4 times in a row would force you to spend a huge amount of time before you could get to next lvl).
at first glance it sounds like one of the most carebear approachs to permadeath I ever read. Makes one question why bother adding it on the first place.
not only that, the game you envisioned as a whole doesnt sound like a place that would hook people into playing it....sounds like a boring game with lil to no risk unless you really TRY to die, and not much to do (no leveling no skilling...no gearing either?)
After having read permadeath discussions in this forum for quite a while, I think your idea would be disliked by "anti-" and "pro-" permadeath players alike...or maybe thats just me
Do you know the permadeath-system in ShadowRun (Pen&Paper) ?
Once you're on the ground (defeated) you've got X amount of time to be given medical treatment. If there's no medical treatment given, then you'll die and your character is gone for good.
Other players can't heal you to full extend tho, but you need to visit a hospital after first-aid was given. ShadowRun has also an insurance-system called DocWagon(TM) which costs more money, the better conditions you want and they come help you, if you're dying, so you get helped eve if there's no other players to help you.
Bare in mind, this is a Pen&Paper RPG-system and I'm astonished, that something like this haven't been used in PC-games yet.
I think the hook would be that it is a mostly player driven world. Players would be given the landscape and they can create the towns, protect the towns while they are growing. Guilds could group and wage war on towns that are gaining too much power. Maybe generate one static NPC town that works as a sort of AI. That town would grow the same as pc towns and would also try and attack pc towns from time to time.
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Just another thought and reply to the game being too "carebear". I don't see it being carebear at all. If it's a 50 player battle with guilds fighting it out. You can't tell me that 5 or 10 people are not going to die permanantly. I mean, how can that many people crawl away on the battlefield?
Or do you mean too carebear because of the offspring?
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because of that, because there are no-pvp zones, because on top of that with no-pvp zones the crawling out mechanic sounds redundant, and because you said chars arent easy to kill so I assume (correct me if im wrong) that people would have time to bail out if encounters start looking not so bright for them.
it all sounds like one couldnt possibly die unless he was a huge moron....
if Im not wrong, permadeath is suposed o bring a new layer of excitement for a player, and also to reward those that play the game intelligently opposed to the "learn after 10000 mistakes" crowd.
In a game where you must really screw HARD to die, and where after screwing you can be back to full strength in the blink of an eye (no levling, no skilling up, offspring)....really....why having permadeath?
Can you explain no PvP zones? I meant for the whole world to be a PvP zone. Of course if you attack a town and want to obliterate it, you are going to have to beat down some of the doors or wait for you ballista's and catapults to arrive. Unless its a low level town, then you could probably burn it down.
As for offspring and leveling and such, I see "raising" offspring as a way of developing your next character. Maybe your current character is a builder and gather's lumber and stones to help build cities. At the same time, he may be paying for his offspring to train at the academy to become a soldier or if the game is designed for fantasy, a sorceror. Of course your main character may die soon and you end up playing an offspring that is somewhat fluent in building, after all his parents taught him a thing or two and somewhat fluent as a soldier. At this point you could decide it's not worth the risk being a soldier with mediocre skills and work on building still while your younger brother is now going to the academy.
Maybe I just don't see it, but I think this is a game that can appeal to those not wanting permadeath at all but still having the angle of being permadeath. But I may be wrong, it might not be possible to satisfy both camps.
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Sounds to me like u r trying to make MMos into strategy games or some sort of Sims (even tho i never played the Sims but thats the impression i get).
Why not make it real easy u r killed u r dead no re-spawning no running bk to your body only another player with the right class can get u back to life...sure u might have to wait for that from time to time but the good thing would be if u don't play nice u don't have friends and no one will come to save u...or even worse get a real bad rep some ppls who randomly encounter u might not even want to save u.....
Not so much. I'm trying to make MMORPG's into Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Emphasis on the role. Not everyone wants to go out and kill rats for 20 minutes so they can kill boars the next 20 minutes after that. Some want to have an effect in the world in which they play. So as before in the example, if your a builder, you go out and mine and chop wood and come back and build. That's not to say that some foxes or bears didn't hear you making the ruckus and decide to come have you for dinner. At that point, you best use that axe or pickaxe for protection. Or hey, maybe you were smart and grouped with a combat oriented peer who is sweeping the area around you killing the dangerous wildlife and skinning them.
Of course some of your peers would be medics or priests and be able to temp heal you on the battlefield or in town, but they can't do everything out there, sometimes you need some time to heal.
And who's to say offspring aren't accesible if you aren't wounded, maybe you swap out your main pc to sell some goods while you play your offspring and go out hunting. I think the point of the game that I would like to play is opportunity, creativity, and being social. It wouldn't be for everybody, but I think it would appeal to many gamers if done correctly.
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Its kind of the whole offspring thing which makes it sound like the Sims tho...
An role game means u create a character and develop it over time u should stick to it. Having tons of alts u play is counterproductive already but your idea goes even further its a step in the wrong way for a role game while i do like the idea of founding a family and having offspring's (even tho i personally wouldn't do it) don't i think they should be anything more than npcs.
In an rpg u play the role of your hero and not the one of a whole bunch
Also your system would limit everyone they do need a family or they would be in a disadvantage.
Oh and btw if u r heavily wounded and u crawl to safety there isn't much evading u could do if someone wants to finish u off.
You obviously put a lot of thought into your ideas i just don't see them working in an mmo and your idea was permadeath in an mmo not how to change the genre of a game to make permadeath possible.
Just a few points:
1) A role game to you means that you play only one character. Look at Atlantica online, you actually get 9 characters you play in that game (although to be fair, only one is considered you, but you do control them all.) I'm just asking you to expand your horizons a bit and consider that a role playing game could be something a little different than that other games you have played so far.
2)The offspring system would not limit anyone, the truly hardcore could go without family and as you say, be at a disadvantage. But, of course that is the role they have chosen to play.
3)How many times have we seen movies where the main character just got beat to hell and then at the last second dodges the attack, it could happen. We aren't going for complete realism here, so we may bend reality just a little bit.
4)Lastly, the post is titled "A way for permadeath to exist in an MMORPG". I think the game I've tried to explained still fits into the MMORPG genre and it includes permadeath (although as some pointed out, it may be a little too carebear).
Thank you for all the comments so far. They have succeeded at stimulating my thought process and allowed me to flesh out more details of a hypothetical game. Its also doing an awesome job of killing time while I sit at work doing some temperature stress testing. :P
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I do see your point but maybe i just dont want an RPG to change into an Sims game since my first Pen and Paper RPG 21 years bk the whole purpose of the game was playing your hero NOT playing your whole family of offspring so while i can see the changes beeing possible in MMOs do i not belive its good for the genre all the alts players create r destroying the real feeling already (which is why i love FF11 and there pay model for additional slots)
All the let the kids gather for u and that is awesome but let them be NPCs and thats fine.
I think people mentioned about a few MMO's that have implemented permadeath server. But it never went really far, and was soon removed.
One thing you can't deny is harsh death penalty provoke people to quit after they die. And there's probably no point on having permadeath if there's too little penalty(the use of offspring, reincarnation..).
But the offspring system is really like just playing an alt. And having your main character recover from permadeath(in a hospital which take time) isn't really permadeath.
If there's really that many people that want permadeath, and it overcome the developer's fear of people quiting from provoked permadeath, I'm sure someone will make one sometime in the future.
Some permadeath hardcore servers do fine, but the point I was trying to make in the beginning is that forcing permadeath into existing MMO worlds doesn't fit well. Basically they are doomed from the beginning due to the intense grind that most MMO's today utilize.
Harsh death penalties do provoke people to quit, I agree there. And perhaps using offspring isn't harsh enough, but I was mainly trying to find some middle ground. And just to clarify, if someone kills you after you've been incapacitated, you just permadied, i.e. you don't spawn at the hospital, so you don't recover. You have to drag yourself away from the battle to earn that right. I was thinking maybe squires on standby near the battle that would try and come help you off the field of battle and cart you back to town. Of course, if the enemy attacks your squires >.>
I don't see developer's taking this kind of leap anytime soon. They are more interested in, well this worked in that game so let's just do the same thing. Oh well, I still keep playing.
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Any thoughts of player characters who are logged off being the NPC's? I think this may be a pretty radical concept. Especially if you setup your character to guard the city while you are logged. You might come back to find your character fighting off invaders. Would probably throw some people off, but also be interesting to see what is going on when you first log in.
Another thought, how much would it suck to be off gathering wood and get a carrier pigeon message from town that says your town just got attacked and your family was murdered?! Time to grieve for 5 minutes and get back to procreating!
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actually there is a mmorpg, which has perma death and sort of offspring feature - haven and hearth
http://www.havenandhearth.com
There is no such thing as perma death.
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THREAD!! <-----------
Yeah, I was trying to get away from that thread, as it people were bickering a little too much and I wanted to discuss permadeath from a different point of view.
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Whops *hides in the bushes*
I thnk the whole discussion is moot.
The real question is what makes a MMO fun? Trying to change the conditions so that perma death is more viable is a lot of work for doing nothing. I don't see how all these things will make a game more fun.
Death is fine in many games. There is no point of changing it.
Perma Death could be introduced in a game where you have offspring, for example. Your main char would be reviveable but you would have children that you would level up, etc. but they die permanently. It would take less than 20 hours of effort to get them back up their max level, though. To implement this it would be complicated and there would have to be alot of thought put into it to make it work. Perhaps the offspring would be akin to a pet, so they fight alongside their parent, leveling up along the way, until they die. Mates could be selected in order to attempt to produce offspring with special attributes.
Ok, not trolling, flaming or being rude here but;
Please explain the purpose of watering down permadeath and removing the features that define an entire genre so that it feels less "extreme" or becomes less of an issue?
The truth is perma-death is not a good feature to have in a time intensive environment, especially one that encourages any form of character development, even more so from a financial perspective.
There may be a small percentage of die-hards out there who don't mind layers of obstruction when "playing" a game, i.e crawling from battle while wounded and slow recovery times, but as modern market statistics prove many more people prefer plain simple fun.
just my 2 cents,
The purpose of "watering down" is to help target a larger audience. The hardcore players can choose not to participate in the offspring system and while they are at a disadvantage, the experience is still there for them.
I agree that permadeath is difficult to promote in games that require leveling of stats and skills, which is why my #1 on the list was little to no grinding. Which means this game would not attract the players who feel better about themselves because they have grinded countless hours for gear just so other players would have no chance to kill them.
Many more people prefer plain simple fun. That implies that you are making a generalization about the community that no part of this hypothetical game would be fun. I would hope otherwise, but I concede that your point is indeed plausible. I think the key to a game like this would be deep immersion and an excellent support system in the "downtime" of the main player character. Giving your offspring or squires or whatever a multitude of things to choose to do would be part of the make or break for the game.
Consider the squire that saves his master from the battlefield. Once you take control of the squire, you have to get your master home or to a doctor, fast! Once there, you can help tend to the wounds, fetch books for your main to level up on skills, run errands around town to help procure new equipment, gather materials, help support other characters still in battle. The list is really endless.
I guess the point I need to get across is that the game will be driven mostly by what the players choose to put in for effort. Battles are not endless spawning and rekilling. Of course if the players require that every now and then, there could be some type of arena created that could fill that purpose. Make it a battle that others could watch from the stands and place bets on with the arena's controlling guild taking a cut from. People would always be battling over the arena territory.
I really like the idea of the game, but so far most (all) of the post seem to be against it having a possibility of working so clearly I'm in the minority here. Yeah its a different approach then every other game out there, but I still think it would have its niche.
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