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Original post by fastlane69 -With death, you get to introduce the idea of a soul as the eternal core of your individuality. The gameplay possiblities here are endless.

I'd be happy to hear any ideas you have in this area. I've been trying to weave in the idea that all souls are somehow connected, but the idea is a bit unweildy because it means you're both the good and bad guys. (So if your enemy kills you, can you take over as your enemy? Don't see that working.)

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-The soul could hold your stats through reincarnation. Everytime you die and come back, you keep and build up on those stats (similar to the Shattered Galaxy system of reincarnation)

This I'm most curious about. How did this work?

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-During normal gameplay (ala Black and White), your soul accumulates a share of good and evil. Your choices upon reincarnation are based on your accumulated Karma...if you have an abundance of good (or evil), you come back as a higher level good(or evil) character. If you don't accumulate any good or evil, you come back as the same or a lower level character (for example if you go from having lots of Bad Karma to having a balance you go from being a Extremely high level Evil character to a relativiely weak neutral character)

This is good to think about, and a direction I've been debating for awhile now. Where I'm stuck is first is this:

1) Is a soul really necessary, or can players identify with just playing multiple characters who have the chance to affect humanity's destiny?

2) If you do have a soul or you're some energy lifeform or whatever, is that too esoteric for gamers to understand? What will gamers even be able to say something like, "I died in the battle for Mars when the Hegemon attacked, then was reborn 200 years later as a Hegemon soldier..." or will that be too weird?

3) If there's a soul, I want it to represent human potential increasing (for good or evil). So does this mean that humans have "stat caps" and as you level, the stat caps get released? For you only? Or for everyone?

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-Given that alot of companies keep the in game IP, it would be interesting to implement a system where your dying in-game is the only way to release the IP so you can use it off-line. Perhaps you can then sell your character and then give the character a small penelty to reincarnate.

I think you're thinking MMO, which is definitely too big for me right now unfortunately. (Cool idea, though.)

[Edited by - Wavinator on October 3, 2005 1:50:30 AM]

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Original post by Beige Quote: What if you weren't playing with a goal of leveling yourself up, but rather for the grand story goal of "leveling up" the human race? How do you plan to do that?

Unlike fastlane69's suggestion with XP, I'm thinking of an XP-less system where you instead level up the abilities, knowledge and defenses of your species. But it's not just territory I'm thinking of. I want you to be interested in fighting to preserve a certain spirit of humanity. What's in our future? Are we destined to be soulless borgs? Are we to be assimilated by some ancient alien culture, or made slaves? Or are we destined for some future where people are equal and free?

I would like the game world threats and challenges, as well as your own character making potential to reflect this. If, for example, we become alien thralls or corporate drones, this should affect everything from what type of character you can make to how tough it is to rise in the world.

[Edited by - Wavinator on October 3, 2005 1:02:12 AM]

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Original post by NIm The problem with tthis sort of thing is that it needs to be fairly small scale. The ability of a single person(the pc) to affect the course of a population is proportional to the size of the population, so anything the player did would have to be an artificially big deal if the player is working for an entire civilization.

What I had in mind was certain objectives on the map which would change the story and cause history to take a different course. For instance, take FTL: It will be discovered at a certain period of time, but you can find ways to discover it early. If you do so, you change the course of history.

In the future, I'm assuming that an individuals impact will be modified in drastic ways by technology. Being the first to detonate a suitcase nuke, for instance, will definitely change history, as will using robotics and nanotech to terraform Mars.

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Original post by Oluseyi Isn't this, essentially, what we saw in the Spore demo? And doesn't that prove that, at least as an abstract game mechanism, it's possible and perhaps even entertaining?

Unfortunately, while you might be right in principle, Spore isn't an RPG, nor does it even want to be. There certainly is character and clan investment, but I suspect it's going to be like the Sims or SimCity-- none of the emotional intimacy and personal focus that comes from being one frail being trying to come to grips with the larger world. In Spore, as in Wright's other Sim games, you are the world. In these games, as with Meier's Civilization, the enterprise you manage suffers threat, not YOU. I suspect that the enterprise perspective engenders the same level of emotional detachment found in organizational bureaucracy. The people are faceless, and so it's MUCH harder to identify with their plight.

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What Spore, of course, didn't show was setbacks that required a jump to a evolutionary "sibling" - switching to a highly similar avatar because your previous one succumbed to the environment or the meanies it contained. This is where the challenge for this concept lies.

Right, we don't know if that is game over. I think in the Sims, if all your Sims die it is, right?

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Personally, I'm all for it, even though I already think the penalty for dying in most games is too high (yes, including respawn-happy FPSes; it slightly freaks me out when my character dies and I have to backtrack to the last save or checkpoint - this might be why I don't finish very many games).

If you lost perceived progress but the universe kept on truckin' along, what would keep you playing? Would you keep playing to see how things would turn out? Would you keep playing to see if new opportunities opened up?

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Original post by Wavinator This is interesting, but I'm wondering: Is there any risk (in terms of gameplay) to doing this, or is this something that just happens. Normally I'd think there should be some tradeoff for picking on heir over another. But if it's just a no-brainer choice, then it needs to just be the strongest/best of the heirs.

If you did something equivalent to a monarchy, then it would be equivalent to just picking the eldest male direct descendant. The exact rules can be changed of course, so gender or bloodlines aren't important, but traditionally it isn't based on skill. In Medieval: Total War this system was often annoying, as the heir would often be a cowardly weakling with a more suitable warrior-king younger brother.

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Ideally, your strategic choice should create interesting story spinoffs, such as a jealous brother to the heir who has the possibility of locking your future character up, or sending him running for his life. The choice would only be interesting, though, if there was no way to control it (and thus no automatic character switching).

If it is similar to picking an heir, or annointing a successor, it could be made that once a choice is made, it cannot be undone without something equivalent to the death or willing abdication of the heir, so if the heir was involved in a story plot or later found to be entirely unsuitable the player would have to try and rectify the situation.

And some random comments on some of your other replies:

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I'm thinking of an XP-less system where you instead level up the abilities, knowledge and defenses of your species.

Is this analogous to the R&D component of a 4X game? I do think that you will need to have much less focus on personal stats for the PCs if you plan to pass on control from PC to PC, so people do not feel too attached to the numbers behind a particular PC.

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Unfortunately, while you might be right in principle, Spore isn't an RPG, nor does it even want to be. There certainly is character and clan investment, but I suspect it's going to be like the Sims or SimCity-- none of the emotional intimacy and personal focus that comes from being one frail being trying to come to grips with the larger world. In Spore, as in Wright's other Sim games, you are the world. In these games, as with Meier's Civilization, the enterprise you manage suffers threat, not YOU. I suspect that the enterprise perspective engenders the same level of emotional detachment found in organizational bureaucracy. The people are faceless, and so it's MUCH harder to identify with their plight.

I'm hoping that this isn't the case; my game design hinges around garnering player concern for a bunch of characters like the Sims while the player controls the "world". While I agree that the type of attachment is different in the Sims from playing a single avatar in an RPG, it can still be very strong, and the player still identifies with their plight (even more so in the Sims, since it set in an analog of the real world).

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Right, we don't know if that is game over. I think in the Sims, if all your Sims die it is, right?

Not really. You just make more Sims. For some people, killing off Sims was a feature point of the game. I'm not sure about the console versions however; they might have a "game over" for the story mode.

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Original post by Trapper Zoid Quote: I'm thinking of an XP-less system where you instead level up the abilities, knowledge and defenses of your species. Is this analogous to the R&D component of a 4X game?

That's an interesting thought, species R&D. I'd suggest though not making it exactly like tech R&D as implemented in a lot of 4x games where you pick a technology or tech area in a tree and your cities just contribute to a progress bar. While technological development could play a role in 'leveling up' your species, leveling could also be driven by other factors. When a species accomplishes a significant feat, or is the first to accomplish some feat, this would also help. And of course your PC's actions could catalyze these events. This could include things like discovering a new type of star, winning a lot of battles, being the first species to achieve inter-galactic travel, and so on.

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Original post by Wavinator The only game-ending state that would occur would be if humans were annihilated. I'm thinking that rather than this being exclusively a story event, I might want it to evolve naturally from interactions between powers in the game universe. It might make the player think about "being in it for the species" such that if all humans die, the game is over.

Haven't you talked about a system where when the game ends you start over but with different starting conditions that reflect how you played? I can't remember the name you used, Game+ or something, if it was you. Why not apply that here? So the species was wiped out... ok you start over and now the species has similar traits as to when it was wiped out. Perhaps a small leg up over the competition so you're not so doomed this time around.

Sorry havent had time to read every word but I don't think anyone has mentioned that the death of a character could be written in to a story to explain a method of character switching. There's an article somewhere on Gamasutra that mentioned a game idea where you'd play as a Scandinavian warlord for a few missions and then be expected to die in as bloody a bloodbath as possible, the better the death, the better the 'fortune' (or, increased stats) bestowed upon the offspring. It is then a scripted event that upon death of the warlord you take over the destiny of the family by 'becoming' the offspring.

I could easily believe that the death of a Klingon warrior would effect his offspring - a courageous (bloody even) death would encourage a sense of self-worth in the offspring whereas a rubbish, cowardly death would make the child feel like his family are worthless, this feeling that is bestowed upon the child would explain in storyterms the altering of stats or potential stats that he would experience and also allow the game to reward or punish the gamer for good or bad play.