Original post by Coz I don't remember what the name is, but, there is an star wars MMORPG where *very* few players can have the option to create a character that can become a Jedi after doing a lot of advancement with another character; however after you become a Jedi, even thought you gain amazing powers(supposedly a Jedi can beat 7 characters of the same level in a 7 vs. 1 fight) if you do die, you permanetly become a 'blue thingie', some sort of ghost, that can only chat with other players.
Star Wars Galaxies?
Anyway, with reincarnation and the likes it just sounds like a fancy way of saying that you get a penelty when you die. It would be just the same in teory as giving an XP penalty or skill penalty, just that you have to change name and apperance aswell. Of course there are a few minor differences aswell, but I don't think the consequenes will be that much different.
Well yes, that's what it is. It IS a fancy way of saying you get a penalty when you die.
Except rather than leaving it as a gimmick, I go one step further and say you also design the game around the fact that you will die. Fournicolas said it:
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Original post by Fournicolas"the best solution is to let the character know for a fact that the character is going to die ANYWAY."
So rather than just leaving it at that death you get a short summary of that characters life edged on a tombstone in your personal or in the city graveyard. And you may depend on dying to get certain quests or items.
So it's not just a deeper penalty, it also offers a new advantage.
Class idea:
Necromancer: Not the best character to play as a first, but good if you have a good collection of ancestors. Each level you can choose one ancestor and depending on that ancestor's summary you receive a spell that.
So then Belly the Smithy-Soldier and Fizbin the ice-wizard are your ancestors. At level 2 you unlock Fizbin and get a frost spell that deals 2 cold damage in an area At level 3 you unlock Belly and get a spell that can turn metals into random weapons
It would be interesting to tie each class in some way to their ancestors. Priests / necromancers are obvious in communicating with the spiritual world, but if all warriors are shamanistic they too may gain bonuses here and there.
In this way, each time you die, your playtime from last death until that time is recorded and forever resonates during your game.
An idea I have played around with is an (MMO)RPG that is based around the player's family, and NPC followers.
Player starts a new character, and he is the last member of a family. No living relatives, and now landless, but you get to pick family traits. The player can pick from different options like coming from a family of wealthy traders/farmers (giving you bonus skills in dealing with trade and managing land, also bonus starting cash) or a long line of famed warrirors (bonus to player's fighting skills)
Long line of famed Generals (bonus to gathering NPC followers and commanding them in battle) or other similar traits (would take a while to balance the starting) to give different things, like better armour to start with, a better weapon or armour, a little extra gold, maybe a horse, or a few retainers. (I am designing the game to be a little more 'real' basically a sword is a sword. Sure, you can get a cheap one that is harder to use, or a really expensive one that becomes an extension of your arm, but you aren't going to be getting a 'better' weapon twice a day as you play the game, switching weapons would be rather rare)
Your main character will age, and eventually die of something (if he doesn't get a knife in the back before then) so you'll want to arrange for an heir somehow. Either by joining another, older player, joining up with an NPC house, or buying some land and founding your own house. Find some NPC (if you are just starting you, it is likely to be a commoner. Or you can join a different house and do enough favors for them that they'll allow you to marry a daughter. May also be able to adopt someone that isn't actually of your bloodline as your heir) and start a bloodline.
All bloodlines will have a traitpool (defined when you start the game) traits can be active, or stored inactive ones. Active ones (the traits the player actually has, such as command skills, trade, weapons, etc. But not things like money or weapons, you'll have to buy them) are most likely to be passed on, but every generation the active traits are also put into the pool of inactive traits. Inactive traits have a small chance of poping up in a new character.
Now, much of the game is going to be about politics and trade, and less about questing. The players would be able to really affect the economy, being a noble in a late middle age world, you'll have to deal with peasants, running your estate, and most importantly going to war, and dealing with brigands and uprisings. One of the main goals to the game being to peel your family away from the NPC kingdoms, and hopefully after a time, kill off most of the large NPC familes, and human players trying to gain power and rull a kingdom. (which is very hard, as they would have other human players trying to knock them down, always at risk of NPC peasants uprising, and other kingdoms trying to bite off their land)
So the player would start a bloodline, and after some of their kids are old enough, they can pick an heir. They can keep 1 line (maybe 2) and have limited control over members of their line (may have the player only control their current character, the rest are AI controled, but mostly staying safe. Spending time on the estates, or roaming around the cities/country side.) but the player will have to choose after awhile, which offsprings they want to keep with
Think of a tree structure, each level of the tree can have 1 to 10 offspring from any given node above, so as long as you have your starting character, you can jump over to any of that character's kids (as long as they are of age, late teens) and maybe your first character's kids and their kids, but to use characters from the third generation, you would have to pick one of the first character's kids, cutting off access to anyone from the lines of the other's.
The biggest part of character development isn't in beefing up a single character, but working at bettering your traitpool. This will require very careful planning, forming alliacnes with families with powerful offspring.
Also, the 'fun' part is that you have to be very careful, getting started might be hard, and having just one child could be a problem. If you die, you are stuck using your heir, and if you just have one, very young heir, and they die, your line dies, and you get to start over again.
In war, allow people to capture offspring, either hold them hostage, or force them to join your family (most likely as just breeding stock, they would be unlikely to join you as an heir) Sell them back to the family you stole them from for cash.
Old Username: Talroth
If your signature on a web forum takes up more space than your average post, then you are doing things wrong.
By creating bloodlines you are also able to build up a prestige-level-system. You can give titles to the family if any of it's members masters a quest. On the other hand you can mark peoples bad behavior, too (some title like 'slayer of 13' might lead to banning the player from certain arreas like towns or gives him trouble finding a healer or somebody to trade width).
Another way to give the players the possibilty to show is to create items like 'steel-plate-armor-of-unbelivable-expensivness' which aren't better than any other equal item but are recognizable on first sight as highly expensive, which indicates the charakters greatness... or the greatness of the parents from this spoiled little bastard with the shiny sword and the truckload off titles.
and another thought (sorry to mention t here): You could gain money (real money) for charakter creation (just for creation not for continiung with a heir after your charakters death) and five to ten free creations width purchasing the game. This could prevent somebody from creating many low level charakters for spoiling someone else's fun.
(whoa. haven't trained my english lately, hope the meaning is clear anyway)
Some definitions for words (the way I interpret them):
Ressurection: After a person dies, they come back to life more or less the same as they were before death. Namely memory and appearence. Stat loss or weakness may apply.
Reincarnation: The soul of a dead character leaves the body and is used to give life to another, possibly with some innate skills or hidden memories retained from a previous existance. The previous character can no longer be ressurected or called upon.
Afterlife: Some location or plane where only dead characters can go. This may be a place where they go to become ressurected, reincarnated, spend time doing activities, or something else.
Ghost: A soul of a deceased character that has not been ressurected, reincarnated, or sent to the afterlife. May only be visible to certain characters.
Fiend (From Final Fantasy 10): a ghost that remains in the mortal plane for too long and begins to hate the living. Magical energies transform the ghost into a monster, often depending on that ghosts characteristics or the location it becomes a fiend. When a fiend is destroyed, it returns to a ghost but can become a fiend again easier.
(game mechanic. Allow deceased characters to become monsters. They can't do any player activities but it would be kind of cool to BE an Uber Dragon instead of just beating one. Could make some fight interesting instead of relying on AI to control monsters)
Heir: Any character that gains benifits legally from a characters death. Namely, inheriting gold, items, some skills and moves not normally accesably at that early level. Technically, an heir doesn't need to be a child of the origional could be a friend (relitivley close level) a nephew or neice (low level char if the deceased had no children) or any other combination. Though in a game world, it could be set to whoever the char is reincarneted as.
(Heh, imagine a fiend Dragon inheriting gold and items from their previous mortal existance)
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Actually, this Fiend idea (which I stole) seems interesting. What if after death, a person can wander as a ghost and certain charater classes can affect what happens.
Priest/cleric/white mage/holy man- Can find your body and if you agree, restore you to it. Ressurecting you. Higher skilled ones may create a new body if the origional was destroyed.
Necromancer- Collects magical essences and items to create a certain Fiend recipe. He then can choose a willing ghost to inhabite the body and give it life. Could provide an interesting economy aspect as chars pay the necromancer to turn them into certain monsters.
Summoner- Uses energy to give a ghost a sort of 'false life' for a temporary time. They act pretty much as they would normally but when time runs out or are defeated they return instantly to ghosts and leave no body.
Soul Refiner- A willing ghost can become the ingrediants to make certain items or to add effects to an item. Depends on Refiners skills and the ghosts characteristics. That ghost is no more and the player starts a new one from scratch. May also allow a willing ghost to merge with another living character, imparting knowlege and power to them, the ghost is also lost in the process.
Afterlife: A ghost just goes to heaven/hell/Valhalla/limbo/etc. depending on their actions. May be nice touch for some players.
There is a French comic book which develops a strange idea:
Death is dead, and therefore all souls remain on earth. Sometimes, many souls inhabit the same body.
You could have a soul as avatar, and when you log in, as time has passed, you find yourself in a new random place. From there, you can choose a body in which you want to incarnate. The best part of it would be the bodies with more than one soul, because only the most strongly-minded soul could act, and only the last one acting over an opponent would get the XP. Difficult in these circumstances to find a willing team...
Another possibility to use these wandering souls would be quite the opposite of your Soul Refiner concept. It would be more like Pokemon. You have to fight the souls to capture them, and then you can free the world from the presence, while gaining some of their stregth. Think of Morrowind, maybe.
Under the current model of roleplaying games, permadeath would never work. The current model focuses way too much on "statbuilding" - grinding for XP just to gain a level. To get from level X to level X+1 could take days of grinding. Hence the adversion to permadeath.
But...if the game was built to accomodate permadeath, then it is definately viable. I would LOVE to play a game with permadeath because that would mean no grinding! No one in their right mind would put permadeath and grinding together in the same game! Woohoo!
Original post by sarahcovenant Under the current model of roleplaying games, permadeath would never work. The current model focuses way too much on "statbuilding" - grinding for XP just to gain a level. To get from level X to level X+1 could take days of grinding. Hence the adversion to permadeath.
But...if the game was built to accomodate permadeath, then it is definately viable. I would LOVE to play a game with permadeath because that would mean no grinding! No one in their right mind would put permadeath and grinding together in the same game! Woohoo!
I don't follow this kick with anti-grinding. You guys just have it backwards. The goal of the game is not to get X + 1. It's to play. What is the point of Strength + 1 if you don't like fighting enemies? THE GRIND itself IS the game. Yep. You are just playing really boring games. There's no need to create some imaginary element (grinding) that makes it bad. The game itself is bad. If the game (the grind) was fun, you would be leveling up without even meaning to. Or if you were meaning to, the grind would be a good thing, not bad.
Look at games like Halo, HL2, Doom3, Prince of Persia, Shadow Of The Colossus, etc. Almost nothing but 'grinding' in these games. Why does an RPG need stale combat to be an RPG?
Original post by Kest I don't follow this kick with anti-grinding. You guys just have it backwards. The goal of the game is not to get X + 1. It's to play. What is the point of Strength + 1 if you don't like fighting enemies? THE GRIND itself IS the game. Yep. You are just playing really boring games. There's no need to create some imaginary element (grinding) that makes it bad. The game itself is bad. If the game (the grind) was fun, you would be leveling up without even meaning to. Or if you were meaning to, the grind would be a good thing, not bad.
The problem is, commercial mmorpgs are all grind. There is nothing else to do. (or you need levels to do those things and only way to level is grind) Also, i might mean to level but hate doing it through grind?
I think i get what you're saying: grind is not the problem, it is the game itself. WoW, EQ, Maplestory etc wasn't supposed to be anything but a huge grind.
Original post by sarahcovenant The problem is, commercial mmorpgs are all grind. There is nothing else to do.
But you're still looking at it the wrong way. What is grinding in an MMORPG? Constant lame uncomplicated fighting with boring AI enemies? Annoying chores instead of quests? Then commercial MMORPGs have boring AI, unwitty combat, and terribly unfun quests. The grind is not the problem, it's what the grind consists of that sucks.
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(or you need levels to do those things and only way to level is grind) Also, i might mean to level but hate doing it through grind?
Most action games require you to complete goals to advance to the next area. Why is it that holding back a continuous army of thugs in HL2 is so much fun for almost everyone, while killing 20 rats in an MMORPG is yawn city? Isn't it extremely obvious? The intelligent AI, the number of possible choices for attack and defense, the complexity of the environment.
No RPG, MMO or not, should require characters to be at certain levels to perform a certain activity or proceed to a new area. If the player thinks they can do it, let them try. At least test them. Don't just read the number and reject them. Character stats are a measure of the character's abilities. Not a measure of what they can do with them.
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I think i get what you're saying: grind is not the problem, it is the game itself. WoW, EQ, Maplestory etc wasn't supposed to be anything but a huge grind.
Yeah, but somewhere along the line, the designers of these games seem to have made the horrible mistake of relying on character development alone to piggyback the game into the fun realm. If you don't like what you have to do to level up, chances are pretty high that leveling up will not make the game more fun.
That's what made sure auto assault wasn't really fun for me: I loved just driving around killing & destroying things. However that gave you so little XP that you never got to progress on that alone. You only got to go to new area's and be able to take on new enemies if you leveled enough. And to level you had to do quests. And quests were all just errants. So rather than being a behemoth of destruction you were a fed-ex mailcarrier. They should have just called it paperboy assault.
