'Persistent World Roundtable - Perm Death
I am starting this thread series to promote discussion of topics in a single thread so those visitors, both new and old, will have one place to look for information concerning specific topics.
This, I hope, will be the first of many topics in the 'Persistent World Roundtable' series.
Perm Death is a very touchy subject and most game designers shy away from it like a person with the plague. But why, as designers, can no one develop a solution to provide this type of functionality that will enhance game play and the pleasure of game play?
Please discuss and post your ideas, observations and replies, but be respectful of others and their feelings. We are all working together to move the MMO markets into a whole new level (pardon the pun).
Thank you,
Eric C. Tomlinson
I'm positive that some sort of perm death can be developed/designed to fit the game's history or genre. I realize that the thread was there but the title is deceptive, so that's why the 'Persistent World Roundtable'. People know exactly what the topic is about and can get to the info quickly.
As far as perm-death, the lineage method (having families/clans) could be feasible, but as other people stated, this should be a choice for the user/player. I have visited multiple LAN parties across several states and always try to bring up the topic when there's a lull in the action. I noticed that since most of the people at these parties are hard-core gamers of all ages, about 60 to 70% like the idea of a semi-mortality to online game play. They of course do not want to have a character they have spent the last year building to die in an instant, but instead have a way of passing off the skills learned and the possible items/loot that they have accumulated.
My 2 cents.
It's extremely easy to make a game system where death is permanent, but it is difficult to die. I could list half a dozen ways of keeping characters alive long enough for the player to escape dangerous situations, especially at the beginning. Many such methods would produce intriguing gameplay, as well.
In this way, a player could 'choose' to die, or at least to play a very risky game. In many cases, fighting to the death could count as a victory and strengthen the PLAYER, if not the dead character.
I'm all for carefully considered perma-death.
-Craig
This seems like a better location for the balance of my post, so here goes!
As I mentioned in another thread, permadeath (PD) is not intrinsically bad, but it is intolerant of many features taken for granted - not only by developers, but also, crucially, by players, who tend to envisage the effect of new features individually and in the context of a previous gaming experience, rather than collectively as part of a new one. Combine that with the tendency for experienced PSW gamers to be among the most vociferous members of a new game's fledgling community, and it is apparent just how damaging the badly-managed incorporation of PD into a design can be. The value of a core community of happy, excited gamers eagerly awaiting your game's release is hard to overstate.
PD is, therefore - like many features - a dual problem: technical AND perceptual. Technically it must be a vital part of a fun and functional game: aesthetic purity doesn't pay the rent; you cannot justify the grief PD brings down on your head without demonstrable and otherwise unattainable benefits. And from a public relations angle it must be prevented from becoming either A) the heart of a bitter and disruptive forum feud that obscures the value of other features, or B) a prospective-player repellent.
It is important to note that PD has no significant intrinsic value as an attractive feature. To start with PD as a given and try to build around it is to lose sight of the real objective: the creation of a fun and lasting game. Unless PD is itself a solution to an even bigger problem, or you are using it as a mental exercise to help you design outside the box, it's not worth attempting.
The question of whether PD is worth investigating, then, becomes the question of whether there are any even bigger problems with PSWs that PD would solve.
Before we go further it's worth remembering that there are 'shades' of PD. At one extreme dying once means beginning again from scratch. At the other is 'infinite lives' or 'no permadeath'. Nor is the gap between one-dimensional; a 'lives count'. There are many ways in which a character could come to a permanent end, not all of them actually involving death in the in-game sense, and not all of them invoking PD as a punishment.
PSWs typically face two interrelated issues which could relate to the absence of PD:
1. The gradual accumulation of players at an arbitrary level-cap*
2. Permanent stratification of the population according to the amount of spare time they can devote to the game.
With a low level-cap (as measured in hours to attain) the former dominates. With a high or 'soft' level cap, the latter dominates. These issues in turn give rise to harmful problems:
1. Players at the level cap suffer an abrupt downturn in their content consumption. Having just raced through a man-century or more of game content, the relative trickle that a live team can provide may not be enough to sustain interest, and you may well lose your most active and enthusiastic players to new and shinier releases.
2. Players stuck in a stratified population can feel frustrated, lonely and ignored, as the clamour of the top tier of players for new content drowns out their grumbles. Apathy and cancellation can ensue.
It is clear that some form of permadeath might offer a third way, but its associated problems are not inconsiderable either. It is these, and their mitigation, that I shall return to discuss in my next post.
*Level Cap could be replaced here by any effective maximisation: skills, wealth, equipment - whatever it is the player sees as reward for his efforts.
You've made a very long post. In many ways, I agree with what you've said. But I think you're looking at things from the wrong angle.
Your take on PD is largely brusque and dismissive. You talk about it as if it were a component of a game... and a troublesome component.
Player death is the core play component of all games. At the heart of every game (save a very few bizarre ones) is an urge to avoid dying. To dismiss it as 'only worth considering as a thought experiment' is like saying that eating food should only be considered as a thought experiment. It makes no sense.
Player death can be a solution to many of the things you will undoubtably bring up... but those are not problems to be solved, they are paradigms to be avoided entirely. You can't make a game and then 'plug in' a certain level of PD to shore up the treadmill. You have to start your design knowing precisely the level of PD you are going to have and what effect it will have on your gameplay.
Therefore, yes, you start from player death when you design your gameplay. Either that, or you ASSUME a certain level of player death automatically, without even noticing, such as when you say 'Multiplayer FPS' (fragile characters with respawn) or 'RPG' (durable characters and a reload/short setback system).
-Craig
#Player death is the core play component of all games. At the heart of every game (save a very few bizarre ones) is an urge to avoid dying. To dismiss it as 'only worth considering as a thought experiment' is like saying that eating food should only be considered as a thought experiment. It makes no sense.#
I think you are confusing two different issues. You talk about 'player death' which I understand by the mundanity of your 'food' analogy to refer (in PSWs) to variations on the traditional mechanism of death/item loss/experience penalty/respawn. As you correctly describe, the urge to avoid that circumstance is the yin to reward's yang, completing the experience; it is an invaluable component, and it is only right that considerable thought should go into its design.
My post, on the other hand, concerns *perma*death, the eventual and irrevocable loss of a character. This need not correlate with 'player death' by occuring the first time a player's health drops to zero. It may not happen the hundredth time - it may not be related to 'player deaths' at all, but to some other metric. It may even be a voluntary sacrifice to achieve a greater goal. In other words: it is not necessarily the 'yin' of day-to-day play
My contention is that the inclusion of permanent character destruction should not be of primary concern to a designer. In other words, he or she ought not to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say "I am going to make a game featuring permadeath", *unless* it is as a mental exercise to blow away the cobwebs and explore new avenues of PSW design. Permadeath is a useful tool in that regard because it is incompatible with many, many features found in existing PSWs.
It can also be a useful tool when trying to solve emergent problems like the ones I describe. Of course, as you say, one cannot always just plug in a fix; considering the implementation of some form of permadeath might well take you back to square one of the design. But that's inevitable with emergent systems: the problems have to emerge before you can deal with them!
You say "design player death first" - I would lay good money on you being unable to describe a player death system that you could be *certain* you would never have to revise.
I prefer to begin, not with features, but with the benefits I want to convey to my players. Features are means to an end, and finding the right combination of features is ideally a process with no 'darlings'; no pet features you cannot bear to violate. All should be mutable. If, in the end, the benefits are not worth the cost - well, begin again.
I consider perma-death to simply be a type of player death, like cheese is a type of food. Similarly, it may turn out that you originally specify Cheddar for your sandwich, but realize later you should go with Swiss. That's the kind of revision I expect. It is entirely unlikely you'll posit Cheddar and then say, "Hmm, you know, I think instead of Cheddar, we need applesauce".
The threat of dying can be a mere small setback, as it is in many games today. The loss of 500 experience points, or all the weapons you've picked up, or half an hour of game play. But this is a choice you make as the designer. Yes, you might tweak how many experience points you lose, or how many weapons you lose - but you're unlikely to switch from getting punished in one way to getting punished in another. That would require a total redesign.
You could just as easily choose something more interesting/profound and build a game around that concept as easily as you build a game around the normal 'challenges' of a standard genre.
It's not a feature, it's the core of the game, above and beyond the actual play mechanic(s) you use. It's what drives the player's actions. Everything a player does is weighed against the risk of 'dying'. If that risk is very low, players do all kinds of stupid crap such as griefing - there's no risk involved. If it is high, players will tend to take a more cautious approach. You have to decide which way you want to drive your players.
And you have to decide it at the beginning.
Obviously, you don't just 'go with' one of the thousand methods of perma-death and hold it as your holy god. You have to know approximately what you want the play style of the game to be, then choose a death system which gives you that - and it may not be a perma-death system. But it should be the first thing you choose, because it's the only part of the game design (apart from maybe the general UI style) which requires a fundamental redesign if changed.
-Craig
#You have to know approximately what you want the play style of the game to be, then choose a death system which gives you that#
As I said: you design the feature to support the desired benefit - except you have to know better than 'approximately' what you are trying to achieve, and death is only one of many interacting elements - a big one, but it doesn't outweigh all the rest put together. For instance, you can't decide how harshly you're going to punish players for dying until you know how many risks you want it to be fun for them to take - which will be governed by other features. You can't decide in what fashion you want to punish them until you know what there is to take away (to grossly oversimplify in the interests of a short argument). Is the player's character development so important that permadeath is unconscionable, or is there an evolving storyline that the player pushes forwards, so the loss of a character can be a milestone on a longer journey, rather than a knockback to square one?
I think we're just approaching a game from different directions. When I design a game, I think 'I want this kind of play experience, so I'll need the player to feel this kind of tension. I can get that tension using a certain death type and certain reward type(s).' From there I design the actual GAME.
You seem to take the opposite approach, deciding what things the players should get to play with, then designing the core elements around them.
I suppose both may be valid.
To just give an example, I might start with "I want a game that feels like an old fairy tale - not the new kind, but the kinds with danger, death, and Grendels."
From there I say, "In that case, the player needs to actually feel the danger. Simply being set back a short distance wouldn't feel very dangerous at all. By using multiple characters and letting the ones that die stay dead, I could probably get that feeling. Failures would be allowed, so long as characters survived."
Then I would continue, "That means I'll need an overarching plot and some kind of 'mission'-like scenarios where people can live or die, and the player can succeed or fail, without actually nixing the whole game. Scenarios for gathering new characters, gaining special items, and stuff like that."
From there I could continue to flesh out what kinds of features the game might have. Obviously, the above example isn't a MMORPG.
-Craig
As mentioned, perma-death is a very touchy subject. Coming from the gameplay->design standpoint:
1. consider why you want to include perma-death
2. can this same effect be achieved by other means?
For example, would it suffice to impose stricter (or perhaps cumulative) penalties each time a character dies?
- Alan
A while ago I suggested an alternative on another discussion board:
A character begins life with a certain number of 'potential points' (PP). Levelling up (or learning a new skill, or whatever the advancement mechanism is) costs a number of PP according to the utility of the skill (and possibly which other skills the player has; mage skills costing more for a warrior, etc)
However, dying also costs one PP. Run out, and it's game over for that character.
The design would aim to balance likelihood of death, the starting number of PP and the cost of skills in such a way that a straightforward, fun character, with a reasonable number of complementary skills, would also be pretty durable.
However, if you were to go for a super-powered tank-mage or similar, that extra power would come at a price (the star that burns twice as bright - etc).
This system would be partnered with a speedy progression curve and a 'family inheritance' mechanic so that more lasting benefits could be passed down from one generation to the next. I also speculated about an honour system (based on an evolving coat-of-arms) whereby voluntarily choosing permadeath before the game demanded it would reap rewards for future generations.
@ Peeling
I like the idea of PP. No pun intended. Do you see the character gaining more PP as they grow in age and experience or do they have alimited number for the character's life span?
You might be able to gain a small number of additional PP during play, but not many.
I envisage the primary method of gaining PP being based on the 'honour' system: sacrifice one character (permadeath) to a noble cause and your subsequent characters will start life with more PP. This should hopefully get players used to the idea of death being more than just a punishment.
In my experience, perma-death has always been one of those concepts that seems to change definitions depending upon whom you speak to. For example, someone whose defining on-line RP experience was UO or EQ shudders at the very thought of permanent death. To me, this is a logical reaction to the details of those early games: "death" was often both quick and unavoidable when it occurred, due to the specifics of the implementation.
Other players, mainly from more current titles, seem somewhat more open to the general concept, though the thoguht of a permanent loss of a favored character still sends a creeping chill down their spine. However, since some of the more recent titles empower the player to largely avoid "death", at least through cautious play, the near universal black-listing of the subject of 4-5 years ago, for example, has softened over time.
For my own part, I have been interested in the possibilities of a perma-death mechanism for quite some time. Like most people with extensive pen-and-paper RP experience, I fully agree that the implementation needs to measured and forgiving of miscalculation to very high degree: after all, there's nothing like dealing with a grown man (and good friend) fighting back tears over the loss of a long-time favorite character to make you understand the emotional investment that can be involved.
My belief is that perma-death can be a viable element in a game that is designed properly to accommodate it. It needs to be a relatively rare event: something many times less likely than what passes for "death" in games today. It needs to be largely at the player's option, and preferably the cumulative result of many obvious choices by the player himself, not just one. Finally, the player needs to be rewarded in some way for the event: it needs to be more of a swap/trade than a straight-forward penalty, per se.
I find it interesting to note that many of the systems commonly proposed incorporate the above feature set to a large degree. The "lineage" concept and "life points" mechanism both meet most, if not all, of the criteria above. Therefore, what I was going to suggest is that part of the discussion might revolve around what other criteria, if any, should be involved in evaluating a perma-death implementation for appropriateness.
The value of this exercise would be two-fold. First, it provides a metric for contemplation at the design stage. Second, it offers a framework to present to potential customers of such a product, encouraging them to drop their own pre-conceived notions of what the term means, and evaluate it from a more balanced, reasoned viewpoint, instead.
Anyway, just a couple of thoughts from the peanut gallery. Later...
Perma-death needs to hold power as a dissuading factor: it needs to be a threat. So it needs to be a punishment in most situations.
However, it also needs to happen to keep the players from running out of in-game material. Therefore, there needs to be a competing 'profit line' to dying. As you said - death has to actually be worthwhile at times.
In a lineage system, this is almost painfully easy. If you die in certain ways (such as going down with the ship, sacrificing yourself to allow others to escape, etc) then the family line grows 'stronger' - more renowned, richer, whatever.
This, of course, leads to a leveling problem that's related to families rather than characters. However, it is a much more efficient use of resources, and if you have competing lineages, it can bring all sorts of conflict.
You'll have players who run around trying to abuse the system, of course, creating characters who quickly rush off and die for glory. Frankly, I see nothing wrong with that. I think it is a combination of hilarious and good for the tone of the game. These 'lemming-families' will probably get fairly rich or renowned fairly quickly, though, which has to be prevented. To a large extent, this can be prevented by making a sacrifice worth more the 'higher level' or 'more renowned' the character is.
Really, I think that is all that is required: payment for death in certain circumstances. It's also good for RP!
-Craig
Originally posted by craigp
So it needs to be a punishment in most situations.
I agree fully. Most MMOs have relied to long on the process of going out and killing MOBs, getting cocky, dying and starting the process again.
While I would be upset for losing a great character, playing wisely would make for a more realistic game. Some players will scream, but if you institute perm-death properly, you can adjust the amount of XP awarded which will not limit the player's character growth and leveling.
I remember playing pen and paper RPGs and being very cautious unless the character's personality called for rashness. I would always make sure we check for traps, listen at doors and not rushing into rooms or situations.
I agree that we have two viable or even combinable solutions, but there has to be other ideas.
[Waiting for other posters to chime in here!]
-- Eric
Originally posted by Wackatronic
I agree fully. Most MMOs have relied to long on the process of going out and killing MOBs, getting cocky, dying and starting the process again.
While I would be upset for losing a great character, playing wisely would make for a more realistic game. Some players will scream, but if you institute perm-death properly, you can adjust the amount of XP awarded which will not limit the player's character growth and leveling.
I remember playing pen and paper RPGs and being very cautious unless the character's personality called for rashness. I would always make sure we check for traps, listen at doors and not rushing into rooms or situations.
I agree that we have two viable or even combinable solutions, but there has to be other ideas.
[Waiting for other posters to chime in here!]
-- Eric
A MMORPG is not a PnP game with a couple friends. It is an online world with many times hundreds if not thousands of strangers to deal with.
I already mentioned the cost benefit analysis that player make when playing any levelling based game but there is also the otehr ways a player dies in a MMORPG.
Other players through PvP, training, or some other trick. (Even something as a healer character getting annoyed with another player and not healing them)
These games are not all full of people that only group with their most trusted friends.
Regardless if a game is PnP or MMO, your playing style ultimately determines how you fare or survive during a game.
Those players in search of quick XP will attack MOBs several levels above themselves with the hope that they can land a few crits and kill the MOB with significantly higher XP instead of being cautious and attacking MOBs they can handle for less XP. If these same players had perm-death as a integral prt of the world, then they would learn to stop being XP hunters and start playing more cautious.
I think it would better more rewarding to see a high level character that played well and avoided death than seeing 3000 high level characters that played the XP odds. And again this is my take and I don't expect people to agree with it, just consider it.
As far as someone not healing you, shouldn't you be watching your own heath and making decisions wisely instead of putting your life in someone else's hands?
I play several MMOs and even though I have long term friends that I group with and trust, I still keep an eye on the world and make decisions based on the actions of fellow group members and MOBs.
I am really leaning toward a bastardized version of PP and the lineage solution. When I get more of the semantics worked out, I'll post my iseas for criticism (not flaming) and see what happens.
-- Eric
Originally posted by Wackatronic
If these same players had perm-death as a integral prt of the world, then they would learn to stop being XP hunters and start playing more cautious.
Yay, lets play a game where no one wants to take risks so everythign we do is low difficulty. MMORPGs are a crawl as is. With such a mentality the event of a perma death would be even more harsh.
Originally posted by Wackatronic
I think it would better more rewarding to see a high level character that played well and avoided death than seeing 3000 high level characters that played the XP odds. .
The kids will still be playing the odds but for this game playing the odds is extremely boring because no one will be taking risks.
Originally posted by Wackatronic
As far as someone not healing you, shouldn't you be watching your own heath and making decisions wisely instead of putting your life in someone else's hands?
.
ROFL, so no teamwork. No relying on others. I don't know what MMORPGs you play but these games IMO are best when you are relying on others. It helps build a community among other things.
Originally posted by Wackatronic
I play several MMOs and even though I have long term friends that I group with and trust, I still keep an eye on the world and make decisions based on the actions of fellow group members and MOBs.
I am really leaning toward a bastardized version of PP and the lineage solution. When I get more of the semantics worked out, I'll post my iseas for criticism (not flaming) and see what happens.
-- Eric
In the end any perma death idea has to be watered down a lot.
There is also the inevitable "lag death." Even if it is not the companies fault it will be painted as such. And what MMORPG development team or investor wants to be responsible for creating a perma death game with no lag 
Originally posted by Stangler
ROFL, so no teamwork. No relying on others. I don't know what MMORPGs you play but these games IMO are best when you are relying on others. It helps build a community among other things.
I didn't say not to have team work, but said keep an eye on yourself and don't rely on others. You can still group but if you blindly attack without watching your own state, then you deserve to die!
Strangler, you've posted several times just ripping what I have posted. How about you post a solution?
This is a round table which means people come up with ideas people discuss and offer their own solutions. While I really enjoy having someone rip my ideas to shreds, I would prefer to hear how others are doing perm-death or planning how to do perm-death.
Maybe some comparrisons to current MMOs and how you'd change them would be a nice post since there are so many MMOs out there and most have different ways of handling death.
-- Eric
Originally posted by Wackatronic
I didn't say not to have team work, but said keep an eye on yourself and don't rely on others. You can still group but if you blindly attack without watching your own state, then you deserve to die!
Strangler, you've posted several times just ripping what I have posted. How about you post a solution?
This is a round table which means people come up with ideas people discuss and offer their own solutions. While I really enjoy having someone rip my ideas to shreds, I would prefer to hear how others are doing perm-death or planning how to do perm-death.
Maybe some comparrisons to current MMOs and how you'd change them would be a nice post since there are so many MMOs out there and most have different ways of handling death.
-- Eric
The bottom line is that if you are risking your relying on others than they can screw you over and you can die. It has nothing to do with watching your health.
As for solutions, like I said it would have to be watered down a lot to the point where the player isn't really permanently losing much. The whole idea of perma death is about having a large permanent loss. If you remove this loss it can technically still be perma death but it really isn't the same thing.
Anyway a part of perma death is having a failure penalty. You can change the frequency of this failure by making it so you rarely actually die. Instead the common failure of losing a battle has a different result.
Anyway there are many other solutions already given but IMO they change the equation so much it can hardly be considered perma death anymore, but something else.
EDIT: Sorry if I came off as harsh, been spending too much time on some bad boards 
I think there are ideas out there, but a MMORPG is not a PnP game. There are a lot of people out there that will ge some weird pleasure by causing others grief. So when a perma death discussion starts it auromatically raises a red flag.
Originally posted by Stangler
So when a perma death discussion starts it auromatically raises a red flag. [/B]
This is why I started this roundtable. Why can't we as game developers and programmers come up with feasible ways of handling this without causing game play to basically, well suck? There has to be a happy medium that will apeal to gamers (from casual to hardcore) and the game developers!
I'm going to keep working on this scenario and try to come close to a solution. The continual discussion of these possible solutions should eventually (hopefully) yield a solution.
Keep you head up and paddling toward the shore!
-- Eric
I actually believe that most players have a fairly similar risk/reward threshold. Variances in actual behaviour are down to:
1. Misapprehension of the actual level of risk
2. Variations in the percieved value of the reward.
This can be seen very clearly in the PvP/Carebear standoff. PvP players see carebears as risk-averse wimps. But is that accurate? PvE players will risk dropping their best kit while out hunting or on a difficult quest, while PvP players rely on no-drop or low-value equipment to minimise risk. PvP players also percieve the rewards to be more valuable: not just defeating an enemy, but the macho self-image of being 'tough enough' to 'take the heat'. Carebears often don't get much satisfaction out of inflicting damage on other people, and don't get off on machismo either.
Back on topic, I think players will always strive to obtain the best risk/reward ratio, modulated only by their perception of what constitutes a valuable reward. If you make death more painful, players will avoid it more assiduously. If they can do that and still achieve an acceptable (to them) reward, they will enjoy themselves.
@Peeling
Well said.
If there's no risk then people will do what it takes to get loot/xp/rep.
Peeling: although this is in large part true, the more people play a given portion of the game, the more likely they are to be able to judge the risk of that part of the game - the 'better' they become at minmaxing. Therefore, hardcore players will always be twinks, by your logic. 
Also, not every plays for the same goals, so the reward/punishment system doesn't necessarily push them in the same way. I know some people who want to play solo, and some that refuse to play unless on a team. I know some who want to tweak their standings in given factions and some that just want to level. It is these different goals which provide different approaches to the game, rather than simply a radical misunderstanding of reward and punishment.
-Craig
This is an interesting discussion. I felt Peeling’s comments were particularly insightful.
I’m curious as to the motivation people have for wanting to see PD in games. The general trend over the years was to have less and less PD elements in games. Especially in RPG games where the fun is in exploring and building the character. In an arcade game the challenge is quick reflexes and thinking, which is often fairly fun each time, so starting over is more a challenge than a chore. But we are pretty much talking about RPG games, and even the very early ones let you save because dying and starting over from the beginning was boring.
I think anything included in a game should serve some purpose. So, to argue for including PD in a game you need to figure out what the purpose of it is. People’s primary motivation seems to be a feeling of “hard core” or competitive role playing, or perhaps a yearning for the thrill of higher risk. It’s fairly clear form the success and failure of various RPG games over the years that high risk games are not the most popular. Another reason is a yearning for “realism” in RPG games. After all, there are no saves or resurrections in real life. Permanent death can increase emersion because it’s more like real life. I think this may be the biggest argument for PD. Finally it could be said that without death, it’s difficult to construct traditional dramatic story lines.
Let’s take a step back and ask, what is the benefit of PD in real life? Its something people have been trying to eliminate and avoid through out history. Yet many philosophers will tell you that death is essential to the cycle of life. So what purpose does it serve? It does seem essential in preserving life in general. Evolution requires multiple generations, and breeding means increasing demands on resources. If resources are fixed, as they often are, then population is limited. Without death due to attrition the population would outstrip resources and the whole race would die. Such dramatic occurrences lead to a very unstable environment. Death also serves to weed out those who are unfit to survive in the current environment ensuring that the strong live to breed the next generation. In humans, death creates a certain, motivation to achieve a great deal during the short time they live. This motivation seems to be the source of excitement and adrenalin, and therefore pleasure.
So perhaps were looking for death in games because it’s a big part of the thrill in real life. Just as we want to simulate aspects of life we have set aside like wanton sex and violence, we also want to simulate death which we have greatly muted in our society.
While, in general this is a problem I don’t think needs fixing, I do have some ideas for how a game could include permanent character death in MMORPGs while not completely demoralizing the player.
#1. Re-Rolling option
When a character dies, you get the opportunity to make a new character with a similar number of experience points that the old character had, but now you can make different development choices and such. The character could also inherit much of your original wealth, although perhaps in a cash form instead of the items you had before. This way you can essentially re-roll your equipment as well. This way you needn’t re-tread all the old territory and yet retain the idea that when a character dies, his story ends.
#2. Character Wranglers
Think of a game a bit more like pokemon, where your character doesn’t do the fighting, instead your minions or recruits do. Each one is like a character, with stats and items and such, but you essentially own the character and their possessions. Of course you could have more than one minion, and as you progress in the game newer and stronger minions become available. If a minion dies, you loose a unique creation, but you don’t lose all investment in your main “character”. You can start a new minion of a similar level to the old one, although probably of a different class or race by recruiting a new one you have gained access to playing the old minion. Again you maintain story, and death but aren’t forced to re-play every step of the game.
#3. After life
In real life its one of the ways we try to make death seem more acceptable. Many games have had this kind of feature in the past, and its usually seen as a fun diversion. In an MMO game you could take it a few steps further. Dead characters can not permanently return from the after life, but can be played in the world here-after and have adventures only available to dead characters. They could even be summoned by your surviving characters or grant them special ancestor benefits.
More thoughts later…
Sigfried Trent,
Aspiring game designer
@Sigfried
First of all welcome to the thread.
Secondly, it is nice to see more possible options for instituting perm-death in modern MMO RPG games. We hope to hear more from you in the near future.
-- Eric
Sigfried - the problem perma-death addresses directly in a MMORPG environment is this:
In each MMORPG players rush through, gaining levels and eating game media. They quickly eat through all the media provided and get bored of the game unless more media is created. New levels, new areas, new items - all of which cost serious money! Moreover, the designers slow players down to a crawl to preserve their media for as long as possible, leading to the dreaded 'treadmill'.
Perma-death is a method of 'forcing' a player to 'play through' a game multiple times while gaining power, instead of once. This sounds repetitious, and care needs to be taken that it is not. If carefully designed, however, perma-death can make a game's media last much, much longer, thereby reducing costs in the extreme.
All the other things you've mentioned are accurate, but in my opinion, in an MMORPG environment, what I have written is the primary reason to consider perma-death.
Obviously, various forms of perma-death carry various other gameplay tendencies as well, and those should be considered. But the real reason to use PD in a MMORPG is to keep players from blowing through the game.
-Craig
Originally posted by craigp
Perma-death is a method of 'forcing' a player to 'play through' a game multiple times while gaining power, instead of once. This sounds repetitious, and care needs to be taken that it is not. If carefully designed, however, perma-death can make a game's media last much, much longer, thereby reducing costs in the extreme.
-Craig
So the purpose of PD is to make players play the game over again, against their will, because content is expensive, but we want them to keep playing? “Bleh”, I say. Players should want to start over, not be forced to. The kind of PD that makes players start over because content is thin, is the kind of PD that simply makes them not want to start over on your game, and go play a different game instead.
If re-using content is the problem, then there are many superior solutions. Many single player games have found multiple solutions to address this problem. Generally they have less incentive to because once you buy the game they don’t get any more money from you. I can think of few reasons why a MMORPG game could not adopt many of the same strategies. I won’t go into those here, unless someone doubts there are better ways to handle re-play than PD.
Sigfried Trent,
Aspiring Game Designer
There are carrots, and there are sticks. Perma-death is a stick.
- Alan
We already had a rather extensive permdeath conversation not a month ago. Are you suggesting we replicate it here, or critique your game idea?
I think the summary of what we came up with is: Perma-death is not feasible in the standard games of the day, but might be feasible in a game specifically designed with it in mind. Some people disbelieve even that idea, usually stating that the market would immediately reject such a thing, whether it improved the game or not.
-Craig