i have this idea for a game where, you can only play it once and if you fail it destroys itself. Those that are careful could make it, whereas careless people would die (i.e dont pick up healing items).

Somebody already mentioned Roguelikes, but I feel I should elaborate on why permanent death works in those games. Basically, these games are different every time they are played. Therefore, permanent death means you *don't* have to do the same things over and over. If you had unlimited saves, you *would* be going back to a saved game and repeating the same things. This turns the whole argument upside down.

Incidentally, the early parts of these games tend to be really fun as well as deadly so you're most likely to (a) die within minutes of playing and (b) not really mind because it's fun to start over and see what you get this time. Actually finishing the game also becomes a truly epic, once in a lifetime event which you may never be able to accomplish even after many years of playing. It's very addictive.

I suggest everybody try out Dungeon Crawl. There's a new version with tile graphics available as well, which may make it more accessible.

Quote:

Original post by Fingers_ Somebody already mentioned Roguelikes, but I feel I should elaborate on why permanent death works in those games. Basically, these games are different every time they are played. Therefore, permanent death means you *don't* have to do the same things over and over. If you had unlimited saves, you *would* be going back to a saved game and repeating the same things. This turns the whole argument upside down.

In a sense yes, but in any game where you can save you need to repeat a certain sequence of actions, unless you save every millisecond or so. And if you loaded and did repeat the same things, you'd probably end up in the same mess as before...

Still, you are correct in that death is not as annoying as the game is different each time. To even further elaborate for those who are interested, it's not just the game world layout, but usually a whole lot of other things in the game world are randomized too; the red potion can be a healing potion in one game session (session refering here to one character life span) and a potion of blindess in another. In order to determine what the potion really does there are different methods (depending on the game), so you don't need to just drink it to find out. It's really great as you will not get bored with the fact that once you know what each potion (/scroll/wand/whatever) does, there's nothing more to learn. Also, the stochastic nature of the game forces you to adapt to the game situation instead of always playing the same cookie-cutter characters; e.g. in ADoM you need to learn spells from books in order to use them and thus the spells you'll have at a certain point of the game depends on what books have you come across to during your travels.

The moral is that roguelikes are a great example of designing the whole game with permadeath and replayability in mind from the beginning and not as an afterthought. The gameplay is made so that even if you died a hundred deaths, it can still be fun to restart the game from scratch, unlike in many other games where you have to do the very same routine thing again and again.

I do admit that in roguelikes this repetition exists as well to a certain degree, since you need to develop your character in a similar manner, but the thing is that the game will have meaningful exploration and surprises since you won't know everything from the previous game session. One problem with the infamous Grind in deterministic games is that you aren't really experiencing anything new and there are no surprises.

Quote:

I suggest everybody try out Dungeon Crawl. There's a new version with tile graphics available as well, which may make it more accessible.

Personally I like Angband and its variants.

I think it's an interesting idea - I'm all for permadeth if done well - but depending on the type of game there could be problems. If it is very hard to die, and if there isn't much risk of things beyond the players control making the player die then fair enough. As an example, I think it would be nasty in a fast paced game because I used to have a wireless mouse, and I'd be most annoyed if I was perma killed on the last level because my batteries ran out!

If you allow players to play in a 'wimpy' mode that allows backups of the player, or doesn't have perma death but does have a HUGE penalty for resurrecting the player (Say they come back with no cash / loose 50% of their resources / whatever makes sense in that game world) then it might allow less 'hardcore' people to play.

Just my thoughts.