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Original post by Madster I assume that family members can only be killed while being played. If this is the case, it is already difficult enough for a whole bloodline to die, for the player would have to take each member out and get them killed without stopping to replenish the bloodline. So its probably okay. About marrying and sharing bloodline and playing a character in someone else's family.... i think you're missing the point. Read the OP again please, for doing such a thing would collapse the whole system and make it like any other game out there. Swapping however... hum. yeah i can see that working and people asking for it. You'd have to get a proper metaphore for it though =D About the web interface: this is great, but then something was added that defeats the whole purpose as well. You should not be able to buff a character by both means. Why? power players will use both simultaneously. How to prevent this? well maybe estabilish a penalty for leveling that way: every time you level up via web, there's a period you can't use that character Effects of this? you can't do both simultaneously (wait time should be roughly what takes to level up by hand) and you can level up just like power players. And if you get the urge to play while in that period, you'd have to use someone else in the family. Which would be perfect if the wait times would match for leveling up active and inactive family members, because you can't abuse it. they all level at roughly the same speed, no matter if active, inactive, web based or whatever. Tough to balance this is :S

My use of the web interface would simply be to manage the bloodline, not to "play" it. You would be able to see your family members and enroll inactive ones into schooling, service, etc. It would functionally be the same as doing it from the game interface, but would simply allow casual players to keep track of their famly progress. That way when you can actually log in to play your characters havent been sitting around idling doing nothing.

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Original post by Madster About marrying and sharing bloodline and playing a character in someone else's family.... i think you're missing the point. Read the OP again please, for doing such a thing would collapse the whole system and make it like any other game out there.

I don't know if that was meant for me but I'll asnwer anyway ;)
You wouldn't play a character in another family, but the couple would be completely played by the player whose family the couple joins. This way one player would lose (or rather give away) a character and may be compensated by dowry.

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Swapping however... hum. yeah i can see that working and people asking for it. You'd have to get a proper metaphore for it though =D

Swapping might be great and most probably wanted by the players, but there should be some kind of in-game explanation for it. I can't imagine a believable reason for two people to suddenly swap families (apart from some stupid tv game show that is) ;)
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Which is exactly your point after all...
Doh, too early in the morning, I should read posts three or four times before commenting...

I figured marriage would be used primarily for eugenic pairing, but with the asexual system, it would be okay to swap them. Of course, with an asexual system, are we talking that the characters are actually asexual, or are we just hiding that part from players?

Although many have posted things that are components of my idea, i hope i am not repeating anyone in my idea. I have had an idea, as a super-realism freak, for a more free-form civilization MMORPG that uses an extensive bloodline system in a way.
You start out in the stone age somewhere. When you die, it is permanent. The ancient world is full of dangerous stuff. So you have a shorter life span. But since there is not much technology, it doesn't matter cause there isn't so much to learn and do, so not much to lose. To continue your lineage, there are several options. First, get married to another player, and hope a kid pops into existance. Each partner can have a child as their continuation. The child gets benefits from their parents and can be schooled to begin training before being taken over. When a parent dies, they then directly control the child. If there is no child, a player can choose another child before they die as an apprentice and pass down their knowledge. Couples with extra children can "donate" children for new players to spawn into or use as apprenctices, therefore promoting community between people, and family-social connections.
Of course, the society then advances through research, controlled by the devs, to evolve the world. As there is more stuff to do, and more organization, life expectancy goes up and danger goes down. So life span is longer and everything more stable.
I think a system of perma-death with family continuity is an extra-dimension of games that should be implemented. And anyone who thinks likewise should implement it, I know I am not experienced enough to yet. Good Luck! And I appreciate all feedback on my idea. Thanks for bringing this up, sanscrit.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage I figured marriage would be used primarily for eugenic pairing, but with the asexual system, it would be okay to swap them. Of course, with an asexual system, are we talking that the characters are actually asexual, or are we just hiding that part from players?

I'd rather offspring just be created when characters within a bloodline reach a certain age level. If you incorporate a marriage/sexual system then you have the obvious problem of more males playing than females.. then you have to have guys playing female characters, etc... When managing your bloodlines i think it would be best if a player could choose to only create female or male offspring in his/her bloodlines.. or they could choose to have them created randomly. By making it possible for characters to "pair up" to create offspring for some sort of bonus, you alienate the casual gamer. I think the best solution is to not have "mating" in the equation at all.

didn't read all the posts but..

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Original post by wackatronic I was so freaked out by this becuase I have been working on a game design document that is very, very close to this. I was almost comtemplating seeing who had hacked my CVS and harddrive. heh But at least now I know that I'm not out on a limb about this type of perma-death. Thanks to all who contributed to this thread.

almost the same here, except I wasn't "freaked out", instead, rather interested to see what you guys had thought of :)

there is a game that already has a system like this, I can't remember the name, but it is bloodline driven, and has permadeath on certain quests only.
the url to the site was posted in a thread about death systems/permadeath some time ago... I'll see if I can find it.

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I'd rather offspring just be created when characters within a bloodline reach a certain age level.

this will make the whole system less interesting.
you won't be able to "mix" two characters caracteristics as you would in a sexual reproduction system.
if you allow reproduction between two characters, you can mix their attributes (more or less randomly), so their child(s) have facilities in areas where their parents were good.
this also prevents players to build an uber character, as through reproduction, the limits of the offsprings will be progressively raised according to their parents, and their potential power will increase from one generation to another (or decrease ;))

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If you incorporate a marriage/sexual system then you have the obvious problem of more males playing than females.. then you have to have guys playing female characters, etc...

not necessarily. not if you balance things so playing female characters is indeed valuable. and it should be. of course if your game is mainly based on fighting, and if males are better at fighting than females, don't expect to have a more or less equal number of females and males.
but if your character's sex influences quests and interactions with NPCs, and/or if females are better than males on some areas (like spiritual/mental skills), and males better than females on others (like physical skills), it might even reverse the tendency (it's all a matter of balancing anyway).
also, it depends on the races. if you consider elves and drows, that have a matriarchal society (power to females, matrons, etc...), and especially drows, where males are considered (for most of them) like ridiculous and insignificant slaves, you can have the other effect, more females than males, and you'll need to balance things so playing a drow male isn't completely uninteresting.

I should go read the rest of the thread now, sorry if I've said things that were already said :)

EDIT: by the way... yesterday I finished reading the second volume of the dark elf trilogy (by R.A.Salvatore), excellent books, really liked them. and it gives a very good example of all the new gameplay such a bloodline system makes available.
your bloodline, in the drow society, could simply be your house, and a form of clan, where other players and yourself would play members of the same house, and would have to aid the house ascencion by drow ways. (this is very specific to dark elves though, but it'd bring a nice diversity amongst different races, each having their distinct society, philosophies, and ways of life)

[Edited by - sBibi on January 21, 2005 6:12:57 AM]

aw, I knew I should've read everything before posting... my bad :D

Vaipa>

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Well, a more in-depth discussion on this topic could be found around this site: www.realmsofkrel.com

that's the site I was talking about in my previous post... :)

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3) I supose its clear you'd have to tone down the frequency of deaths, its common for an inexperienced mmog player to die more than 5 times in an hour. Thats quite a strain on the bloodline, and if they have to re-equip, travel and gain skills again, seriously boring.

you don't need to have permadeath on normal fights, only with specific monsters, or quests, or whatever, witch would be pretty rare...

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Slightly off-topic, but what about the concept of no death at all. Why does an MMOG have to be about creatures in life-or-death battles?

yes, I partially agree with this (not with the no death at all, rather with not necessarily death).
what I mean is, in most (if not all?) mmo(rp)gs where there are potentially lethal fights, a fight ends up with the death of one or more players/npcs(mobs).
it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
you can have an unconciousness level, wich is basically a life level beyond witch you fall unconcious, but do not die (your life level progressively goes down, until you reach another life treshold, and wake up from the pain. if you don't heal yourself quick enough, you'll die anyway).
a fight (assumed between two players/mobs) is considered won as soon as one of the two fall unconcious (note that you can still die directly without going through the unconcious state if the last damage taken was high enough). then the other player can either choose to finish its oponent (but he doesn't gain anything in doing it, except personal satisfaction), or walk away, leaving the defeated opponent alive (he stills gets the experience and all, and can loot the body)

frostburn>
nice idea about the spirit fight to gain a body...

about this:

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odily remains, and items: The only logical thing I can think of is that the body drops where he dies, and all the items are lootable.

what we do is quite similar, everything is lootable on a corpse, but as this can be _very_ annoying (even if you've got friends around to "protect" your body the time it takes you to either be ressurected or for your spirit to come back from the cemetary and reacquire the body (system similar to wow on this cemetary/soul point of view, except a few differences), and as players would really be pissed off, we also have an item protection spell. different skill levels on this spell allows to improve the protection, and there also is a counter spell (much harder to learn/master however), that can deprotect items.
basically, you have a protection quota that depends on your level on that spell, that you can freely spread across multiple objects, and balance protection time over protection intensity.
for the same protection quota used on an item, you can either protect it very strongly, but for a short period of time, or protect it more weakly, but longer.
(or protect one item very strongly for a long time, or lots of items less strongly for a shorter time, etc...)
the protection is automatically activated when you die. if you take too long to come back and reacquire your body, and if time goes past the protection spell time, other players/mobs will be able to loot the protected item(s).
and the protection intensity is used for the counter spell. if you protected very strongly a given item, only players very skilled with the unprotect spell will be able to loot that item. (takes quite a long time to get a good unprotection skill, whereas it's pretty quick to get a good protection skill, so it balances things out)

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Without a body: When your body has been killed you exist in a non-corporial form. You can levitate some distance over the ground, go through some walls and objects (not ground though), and cover ground at a much larger pace than you could with a body. You can't do anything in this form however, so you have to posess a being to interact with the world.

but you can/could interact with other spirits like yourself at that moment, or access certain places unaccessible for material beings. basically be in a parallel spirit world. (have things that could harm/help your spirit, interact with them, etc...)

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Keep in mind that the dropping of attributes with age only applies to physical attributes. Mental stats like intelligence and, more importantly, wisdom will grow linearly through a character's lifetime.

at some point, mental attributes will also begin to fall inevitably...

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The bloodline idea is a complete departure from role playing in the traditional sense. Just because death of a character is permanent doesn't mean that it is catastrophic. Quite the opposite.

I'd say it's even necessary at some point...

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Intermarriage with other households could be encouraged for political or eugenic reasons, and some sort of aging dynamic would require the uber-characters to pass into legend and let others have a shot.

or, as an uber character passes into legend, it can also enchant a magical item (like a statuette that allows you to call the spirit of the deceased hero to do/cast something linked to what that hero was so good at), the more powerful the character, the more powerful the enchantment.

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I believe that in order to create a more compelling game world that you HAVE to integrate player property ownership into the cities.

there is also the technical problem of such a thing, and efficient management/display of dynamic cities in a large world can become really hard... (I assume 3D worlds, it'll be easyer in 2D though...)

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I envisioned time passing quite a bit faster than that. The problem with a system like this is that you have to have a balance. If time passes too slowly then you have to go to great lengths to limit death as you need enough time for new family members to come of age. However, if time is too fast then it would get ridiculous if it took you 5 game years to get from point A to point B. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to determine in a system like this.

about time, you can't just accelerate the time scale. distances are the same, and travel/battle times should be the same too. there isn't any necessity to have a ration between days/months/years similar to what we have in the real world. or even to have days or weeks or months or years.
in your mmo world, a normal lifetime for a human could be 25 cycles, each cycle being 83 days, each day being 6 hours, (beyond the hour, imho it's better to keep a coherent time frame with ours, so the player doesn't get _completely_ confused and lost :)).

that would make a lifetime last roughly 518 days, so a bit less than a year and a half (considering that the character gets unplayable as it gets too old, or when it's too young, if its efficiently playable lifetime is only, in the above example, something like 19 cycles, this will make a playable lifetime of 394 days.

now for seasons, if there is a winter and a summer, and in-between seasons, and if we assume a season cycle == 1 cycle, a player sees a full season cycle every 20 days or so... it not too fast, but not too slow either :)

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As for the game evolving, that is a great idea. Instead of simply releasing "expansions" you could progress the game world.. excellent.

yes, it's a good idea, but it also brings its whole load of technical problems...

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Remember also that not everyone will be on every day, or even every week. Maybe you could have automatic e-mail updates on the status of the bloodline. A quick status report on each member, and a summary of new business, like formal offers of marriage arrangements or other communiques from other players. Running a bloodline might be more than just inhabiting a character and killing goblins with it; you'd be the head of a social unit.

good idea :)

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There could perhaps be a web interface to manage your blood line. In the case of a casual player that plays maybe only on the weekends, they can log into a web page for 5 minutes from work and take care of what needs to be done.

if I recall correctly, there is something like that in everquest2 (although not about bloodlines, but I think you can access your stats and other player's stats through their website)

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Another little nugget. I am totaly against a "con" system. For those of you unfamiliar with a con system, it is a system commonly used in mmorpgs to give the player an exact or ballpark guess as the level of a target. In this way characters can choose only enemies that are close to their level. I think these systems are bad. Instead I would replace them with a system in which enemies can only be judged by physical appearance. Strong characters will be taller and broader than others. They will show more muscle definition. In contrast, a weak character may have poor posture and a beer belly. As characters age they will get taller and more well-built. as they grow old they will shrink and become feeble; perhaps getting an arched back and grey hair. This way players would have to target their opponents based on a gut reaction. Of course it could be possible for a character to be strong but a terrible fighter, or old and a quite good fighter, but these variations would only add to the adventure.

I totally agree with you.
same thing with mental/spirit/mana/magic/whatever that's not directly visible physically, you can/could "sense" the aura of a character, perhaps through some spell that makes it visible to the player. this also adds the possibility to make this aura hideable at wish (a skill to learn), adds some strategy ;)

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Many of you have added ideas that will prevent or at least slow down this phenomenon (such as the length of an in-game year, etc) but eventually, once a player *did* grow his bloodline to epic proportions- who's going to play all the available characters in the family?

other players. if a "family" is seen as a collection of players that can be played by more than one person. if for example instead of making a "clan" with some fellow players whom I'm used to play with, I make a family, and let my fellow players play the members of my family (that'll be their family too).
this would prevent having one family per real player (as it can become quite heavy :D)
the only problem with this is that the incoming players would already need to have an existing character. so it would be good to make some free members of your family available to new players (instead of explicitely "giving" them to someone already registered...) although this can be problematic, as you don't know who will take it, and you might not like him at all. dunno if it's good or bad...

er, sorry, just saw this:

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that if families become to big, you can decide to put certain members of your family into the "new player pool" and a player that starts anew could have the option to take over the name

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While I have thought about the idea of intermarriages and sharing bloodlines, I actually think extending this system that far is a bit too ambitious. There are a number of issues that arise from that sort of system that make it extremely complex and I haven't been able to figure out, nor has anyone presented a way to me in which it could be done simply and effectively (in my mind at least :]). I also think the idea of integrating actual sexual reproduction in a game may not go over well (even though there will be no actual "sex" depicted).

lol. that'll make the game 18+, although you'll probably have an increased <18 players population ^^
joke apart.. I don't see the problem with this kind of reproduction. it's much more logical, adds lots of possibilities, and isn't that hard to implement (maybe harder to balance, although I don't really think so...)

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I think that intermarriage would be missed. With players manifesting families, an economy of genetic material would be expected.

clearly

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One additional thing I was thinking of was... say you don't manage your characters very well, and you DO run out of people to play due to getting them all killed. Then, long-lost relatives come and you play them -- at a cost. They will have lesser stats since they weren't directly involved with the rest of the bloodline.

mmh, you make it sound as if it was easy to get a character perma-killed.
it shouldn't, and if you really managed your family that badly, then you're out. and just have to start again (your family is destroyed and ceased to exist anyway), or find another family that can welcome you (although I'm not sure anyone would want to welcome such a horrible player that got all its bloodline destroyed, except if it was an accident ^^)

sorry for the (relatively) long reply...

[Edited by - sBibi on January 21, 2005 12:21:12 PM]

AP> you've got a very valid point here...
just need to look at the female dark elf ratio (and their lightweight clothes) in lineage to be convinced ;)

Didn't read the entire post.
The original poster's idea reminds me of an article I recently read here.
For anyone making a mmorpg the whole article is worth reading.
Just go to design theory.
mmorpg design