I need some opinions on the following for my RPG: 1) What happens when the player dies? I think that the player should not be punished too badly, maybe have 5% of their gold taken away, and brought back to town, or something. 2) I need to think of a means of quick transportation, such as waypoints in Diablo 2. I want to try something different, though. Maybe something like an item you can buy that lets you travel to any town you want, but only while in town. Any ideas / tips?

1) How about rather than having them ''die,'' they get given full health and have to fight their way out of a sort of ''underworld,'' and then can return to the living world via a shrine or something.

2) If your transport system only goes between built-up areas, then you could have some kind of pay-transport system. If it were a futuristic RPG you could use teleporters or something... don''t know how it would work for a medieval one though.

Hope I helped.

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates
- sleeps in a ham-mock at www.thebinaryrefinery.cjb.net

2.) For medeival, have each town that you want available transport at have a wizard that can send you to another wizard in another town.

--OctDev

2) You could also have there be big cannons in each town which can shoot you across the world to another town... It''s already been done (Secret of Mana?), but I liked it so much I want to see it again.

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

I disagree with point one completely.

When a character dies, they should be dead, and the only way to get them back is to reload. That way, players will play your game more cautiously, instead of the brain dead gung ho approach that having an insufficient death penalty (ho ho ho) causes.

I''d have to agree with kingy here. If the player isn''t rewarded for being cautious then they''ll storm through the game.

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quote: Original post by siaspete
I''d have to agree with kingy here. If the player isn''t rewarded for being cautious then they''ll storm through the game.

I have to disagree with both of you here. If the player dies and has to reload, he still storms through the game, he just has to remember to hit the quick save button every so often.

Far better to make losing a fight part of the game rather than encouraging constant quicksaving. Instead of just hitting reload, the player has to do a bit of work to get back on track. Maybe he has to reclaim all his equipment from the bandits who just robbed him and left him for dead, or perhaps he has to escape from the Orc slave camp, or whatever. Just to make things more interesting, the potential reward for succeeding with these setbacks should be slightly greater than if he had just won the fight in the first place.

Just hitting reload isn''t much of a punishment for failure, and it isn''t terribly interesting for the player either.

"Just hitting reload isn''t much of a punishment for failure, and it isn''t terribly interesting for the player either."

Good arguement for NOT including a quick save feature. I can remember being so worried about my characters in an old RPG called the Bards Tale because I could only save in the Adventurer Guild and not in dungeons.

quote: Original post by kingy
I disagree with point one completely.

When a character dies, they should be dead, and the only way to get them back is to reload. That way, players will play your game more cautiously, instead of the brain dead gung ho approach that having an insufficient death penalty (ho ho ho) causes.

quote: Original post by siaspete
I''d have to agree with kingy here. If the player isn''t rewarded for being cautious then they''ll storm through the game.

I disagree with both the previous posts. Why? we''ll because, whats to stop the player simply saving and reloading all the way through the game, yes I do it all the time as well.

I think that Diablo 2 had an interesting solution to the problem, that you could only save if you were exiting and when you did all the monsters would come back.

All three of the sugestions are valid, however you have to be careful to make the punishment sevear enough that the player wont do something as stupid again, but not so sevear that they have no hope of getting back to where they were before.

On the transport, Depends on the spec. if its a futuristic RPG then teleporters are ok. If its modern / futuristic / Near future then some form of air or mass transit would be appropriate. If its medievil then it would be horse and cart or boat. If its fantasy then something like town portals, wizards or even flying on some mythical creature such as Pegasi or Griffins. It really depends on the type of RPG, but there are a host of ways for each.





"Making it up! Why should I be making it up. Lifes bad enough as it is without wanting to invent more of it."

quote: Original post by kingy
Good arguement for NOT including a quick save feature. I can remember being so worried about my characters in an old RPG called the Bards Tale because I could only save in the Adventurer Guild and not in dungeons.

That can work, but it can also be incredibly irritating when you have to redo the same bit of the game several times over.