sBibi, yes I'll be making a crafting thread, but thats a long ways off.

If you follow the link at the top of this post you can see the skill and attribute system I outlined. Skills are what you might refer to as volatile character properties, or properties that can be lost. Since I have other stuff such as skill decay in my design, I didn't have too much trouble putting in the 1% skill penalty. Among other things, it balances out the appeal of having a character with a little of every skill.

Nathaniel, the situation you describe in which a player loses an uber broadsword can and will happen in a world using the system I describe. However, we can look at it differently because 1)Most of the time players will be using normal weapons, not uber weapons, 2) Unique items are truly unique, there can only be one of each unique item in a game world, so that item will stay in circulation, and 3) Although that player might have worked hard to attain the uber weapon, the person that killed the player probably also worked really hard. This fits in my general design concept of shared and limited resources, which increases competition and player interaction by providing an ongoing struggle among players to control resources.

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Shared & Limited Resources, Player Competition In most MMORPGs, monsters are the main resources, providing players with experience to advance their characters and ¡¥drops¡¦ to equip them. As WuXia changes the role of monsters as re-spawning entities located in specific areas, it also removes infinite resources. Because all resources in WuXia are limited, the value of items, character skills and social connections are all raised because the ability to ¡¥power-level¡¦ (or kill as many monsters in as short a time as possible) is no longer a big part of progressing a character. Sharing resources among players is the next step, by making more resources that are important but do not permanently attach to characters (i.e. experience, levels), players are encouraged to interact with each other because these resources can be shared or taken away. As players struggle to accumulate power, they will realize that they must step on the shoulders of others to truly gain more. Because of this, players are forced into conflict, and through this conflict alliances are formed.

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anything that promotes teamwork in an MMO is a good thing.

Yes, but anything that requires that you only be with people that you trust is bad. Trust is built, but it shouldn't be required or you end up with something like UO, where if you were new to the game you were easy pickings for anyone who was anitsocial.

Personally I'd like more of an MMO/local hybrid with an easy-come-easy-go attitude to stats and equipment to keep things fluid, but a lot of MMO players are into long-term characters and advancedment, and that's there prerogative.

Anyhow, City of Heroes apparently has a good approach to stat loss from death: its not a loss. Its debt, that you must pay off with your _future_ xp, not your existing attributes. Plus, its not purely cumulative, and its not purely blocking you from getting more XP - it just slows it down a lot.

In the mmorpg im currently designing ive been thinking alot about this kind of thing, in a lot of mmogs ive seen you simply die and either suffer no or very little punishment or you simply lose some items and junk and get respawned back at a town.

My ideas on the subject are similer to this but i like the idea of the heaven/hell thing mentioned at the beggining of this thread, my orignal idea was to make a kind of hades place.

{For those of you who dont know, hades is the greek under world, heaven and hell in one bucket kind of thing, you could leave by getting to an area and proveing you deserve to be reborn}

In my underworld then you would be able to leave by proveing you deserve to be reborn, so you would simply have to compleat a quest or so in some underworldly like maps and then get given the key to leave that world, it fits in nicely with my storyline to so im gonna go with that probs but i like some of the ideas you guys have.

There's one big issue with the "Judgement" or "Hades" world after death, especially with PinFX's proposed 1 hour wait time in Judgement.

Imagine you've got a couple hours to play with your close friends tonight, so you all head out for a little adventure. Early on, you bite off more then you can chew and you unfortunately die.

Suddenly, instead of the normal grind of finding your way back to rejoin your friends, you're now in a whole new world.

If you have have a couple hours to play every night with your friends, death is going to became a real pain, everytime you die, you may end up spending so much time getting out of the afterlife and travelling back to your friends, that it just becomes not worth it.

The afterlife concept has merit don't get me wrong, but to ask a player to go through that everytime they die is a bad move imho.

One suggestion I would make, is to just not send the person to the afterlife after EVERY death. Perhaps base it on number of deaths per time period. Maybe after every death, you lose some of your Life Force (For lack of a better term), you recoup this force over time, but die too many times in a short period of time, and drop your life force to nothing, and next time you die, you're sent to the afterlife to prove yourself worthy of more.

By making this slight change it will keep some of the risk of dying, while giving you something you can fine-tune.

Another way of handling this issue is by determining whether you go to the afterlife on how badly you were injured when dieing. The more you try to bite off and lose, the more risk of entering the afterlife. The more you risk (fighting tougher creatures), the more of the reward, so afterlife would be a good risk for battling higher level creatures.

Ugh that previous poster was me, since I can't edit that post here are a few additional thoughts.


A way of combining those two ideas above would be like this. Allow players to take negative damage, so if you have say 100HP left, and get hit by a dragon for 1500 damage, you're now -1400. Your negative HP stays with you even after you are revived, and slowly diminishes over time. Just like in the first concept, if you die and go past a threshold of negative HP, you head to the afterlife.

Another way, if you had religious concepts in the game, would be to base it on how your god(s) feel about you, fail to keep up with pleasing your gods, and they'll drag you to the afterlife. Keep your god(s) happy and they'll spare you.

Their are a number of other ways to determine when people head to the afterlife, in fact, you could turn it right around and make it a bonus, not a detrement, but thats a whole other beast. The fact is, if it removes the player from normal gameplay, you can't expect to have players put up with it everytime they die, especially when it removes them from their ingame friends.

Hmmm I see your point, and I think your suggestions might be good. The only solution that I can think of would be to leave time points (or points accumulated linearly over real-world time) out of the death penalty and require the use of them to get out of the underworld.

However, the whole point of the 1 hour real-time stay in heaven/hell is making death impactful and realistic in PvP or events. Very often in MMO PvP battles, people will die and just come back right away, the only thing stopping them from returning instantly being travel distance. Since speedy travel will be facilitated by an array of items, mounts, and special skills, distance would no longer be a barrier. In the real world, when peopel die, they don't come back and regardless of your religous beliefs you can't interact with that person again. I want to represent this isolation to a very, VERY limited extent in the design somehow.

I think to battle your problem I'd have to implement more design barriers to make dying something that does not happen often (like the -10 HP system).

PS. The standard go out with your buddies to grind against monsters routine of 1st generation MMOs does not necessary apply anymore.

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Original post by PinFX However, the whole point of the 1 hour real-time stay in heaven/hell is making death impactful and realistic in PvP or events.

If PVP is the point of your game, then removing them from battle for 1 hour is too harsh. If you've ever played planetside, imagine after every death you couldn't play for an hour?

But, if PVP is not the main focus of the game, then why not just make the chances of entering the afterworld higher through PVP battles, and events?

Another idea would be to link it to alignment, fight someone of similar alignment and risk going to the afterlife. Fight someone of a total opposite alignment and you would have a far lower chance.

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Original post by PinFX I think to battle your problem I'd have to implement more design barriers to make dying something that does not happen often (like the -10 HP system).

Their are a number of solutions to the issue I raised, balancing it through how often people die is not in my opinion a good idea.

People will always find the quickest way to die :)

Death is inevitable in these games, you make it harder to die, people will just push themselves further.

I really think it needs to be based on something that is partially withen the players control, but is a concious decision they make. IE: Should I really risk getting my butt handed to me by that dragon and risk going to the afterlife? Yes, the treasure that dragon holds is worth it. Or No, I really don't think I have a chance, why risk it.

The afterlife is a perfect opportunity for implimenting risk/reward in death. In most MMORPG's, the punishment for death is the same regardless of whether you die by a sheep, or by the biggest baddest creature in the game.

Sure you have a higher chance of dying, but that can be overcome with group tactics, since the only risk is a little walk back to the battlefield for those that die in the process.

In fact, I would suggest raising the difficulty of exiting the underworld, make it a big challenge, something that doesn't happen often, but when it does, its a whole new experience.

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Original post by PinFX PS. The standard go out with your buddies to grind against monsters routine of 1st generation MMOs does not necessary apply anymore.

That may be the case with the design you have in mind, but I'm hoping you have something to replace it with that includes a group of friends, and something to do thats fun and can be done in a couple hours a night. And if you do, then just apply what I said to that instead.

interesting idea, not unlike my own.

i originally started with perma-death. i then decided that an "after-life" would be quite cool, and would allow for some interesting game play situations.

essentially your in game alignement would determine the realm you go to upon death. the only set goal in death is to regain life. so you can attempt to complete this goal, with each following death in the afterworld raising the bar to ever make it back to the prime plane. characters that never made it back to the prime plane could be summoned back to the prime plane as NPC's.(just for sentiment sake or novelty.)


Permadeath handles soooo many of the common issues in current MMORPG's that to me it seems like the logical next step. although it will have a new set of issues all its own.

What if there was permadeath, but the player still got some benefit from that character? Such as summoning it into battle as an allied NPC or using its powers for something... (special items?)