My favorite game design topic. I've been fleshing out for some time my proposed solution for the downsides to permadeath. In this thread my goal isn't to sell you on the value of permadeath as a game mechanic, but rather to share what I think is a viable solution to some of its downsides. The most common downsides expressed are: 1)Players will quit when their favorite toon is killed. 2)Players will be afraid to leave whatever "safe zones" you allow. 3)Griefers can do serious grief to another toon. I need to explain the setting a bit for some of the concept to make sense. So you have your typical sword and sorcery fantasy world. Players level fast without a level cap, but with reducing values for each level beyond 25 or so. Around level 10 they get the right to buy or conquer land and to build a house/keep/castle depending on their funds and access to resources. At level 10 they also start attracting NPC retainers. Retainers will be much lower level NPCs of various classes that will accept your orders. If you have no land they'll hang out in town unless you bring them along on your travels. If you have land they'll hang out on your property and can perform a variety of services if commanded. You can build upgrades to your house, for example you can start with a house, then build a keep, then build a castle. You can build an altar, then a shrine, then a church, then a cathedral. Forge, Workshop, Metalworks. Each upgrade will provide a benefit based on what it is and your level of upgrade. Players can join together in guilds to combine resources to build huge castles with villages associated with it. Depending on what you build and how well you police the area of "monsters" you'll attract a population of villagers that will earn you taxes. NPC retainers can be delegated to other players to form NPC armies for a variety of campaigns, and retainers can be geared and level depending on what you give them and what you use them for. If a retainer is killed they will be replaced, but slowly. A high attrition rate on retainers makes their replacement even slower. So when you roll your first character you are creating both your toon and your "House". As you adventure and gain levels and treasure your house gains in prestige. This mechanic allows you to "carry over" some of your accomplishments when your inevitable death happens. When you roll a new toon he can be from your existing house, or you can create a different house that he is associated with. Only toons from your previous house will receive advantages gained by prestige. So while you can have a variety of distinct houses for role playing purposes, the best min/max method is to have a single house that each character builds on. A house can be thought of as a family or a coat of arms you fight for or a guild of one player with multiple toons. So when you've lost your uber warrior to the scourge of the underworld he's gone, his gear is gone, you're done playing him. Because of his accomplishments in life the next toon you roll will start at some percentage of his level, will have the gold and resources you left for him, etc.. From an interface standpoint, friends lists, tells etc.. will be pointed at your house, so it'll be consistent no matter which character you're on or what you reroll(so long as you reroll in the same house) Alternatively, upon death your level and accomplishments will be tallied by the server and you'll be given the option to reincarnate as a level appropriate monster. So a level 6 warrior may reincarnate as an orc chieftan while a level 25 may have the option to play a dragon. No matter what you reincarnate as the game is essentially the same. The orc chieftan will gain retainers and seek to build a nice orc tribe. You can rally your retainers to raid settlements or adventure, so the overall theme plays the same. A guild wiped out by another guild may all respawn as a new orc tribe, along with hordes of retainers anxious to get revenge. Players that are out adventuring may run into a player controlled orc horde and be in for a tough fight. So the upshot is that while death is permanent, the only way to explore all aspects of the game is to die, hopefully at an appropriate level, at which point additional options are opened to you. There's quite a bit more to the concept but I'll leave it at that and get some feedback.

can you raid other player's settlement? If not then I feel that the game is a pve game where you compare what you got a bit like Diablo. If you can I like it but some people might get scared of being raided and loose everything and then have nothing more than a first day player.

EVE handles this with insurance. If you get a ship at a cost + insurance, then you will receive some percentage of the ship's cost back if you lose it.
This usually doesn't pay for the ship AND the parts, but it does lets you buy a smaller ship and work your way back up.

Very interesting ideas on lessening perm death by making it part of the gameplay itself here's a few ideas to add to yours...

1) When a character died, the character will give benefits to the next character the player rolled. For example, when a level 30 paladin died he will be "enshrined" in your church. So if NPCs retainers or your future characters (or even other players' characters) prayed at the church they gain a small boost to their stats temporarily as they are inspired to greater feats by their ancestors' courage. You can also have a quest to retrieve the relics left by the dead character, makes for a nice story telling experience. :)

2) To attract high level NPC retainers (e.g a swords smith) requires either a very high level character (e.g. lvl 35 character) or a family with a deep history (e.g. lvl 10, lvl 12 and lvl 13 character). This makes players willing to risk their characters by making it less of an impossible task to achieve higher level rewards. You will need certain rules to prevent players from killing off level 1 characters to take advantage of this.

I believe the concept of perm death should be explained from the start of the game and used throughout the various tutorials and story telling to "numb" the player to the concept, so much so that a player expects to lose characters as he plays the game.

It's strange that I don't feel the same way in RTS games. I'm somehow not so personally vested, even if I spent a lot of time and effort on the unit. Maybe some part of me knows they are expendable, and I'm just trying for mileage.

Maybe a player could start with two toons, so that there is some social distance between the player and his avatars.

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on September 12, 2009 5:14:01 AM]

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Original post by mcmuzzle can you raid other player's settlement? If not then I feel that the game is a pve game where you compare what you got a bit like Diablo. If you can I like it but some people might get scared of being raided and loose everything and then have nothing more than a first day player.

Yes. In fact, my envisioned end game is basically nation building. Note that some really powerful and well played monsters will also be out there with their own goals and armies.

The one thing that seems potential problematic is this: you're on your third life, with a reasonably large town built around your castle, when a dragon with a horde of underlings burns you up, and destroys your town, forcing you to start from scratch.

Furthermore, if you weren't even logged on when this happened, I would feel pretty annoyed at the design of the game.

How do you interact with logged out players or 'nations'. Can you still raid the orc encampment when there isn't anyone controlling it?

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Original post by Si Hao 1) When a character died, the character will give benefits to the next character the player rolled. For example, when a level 30 paladin died he will be "enshrined" in your church. So if NPCs retainers or your future characters (or even other players' characters) prayed at the church they gain a small boost to their stats temporarily as they are inspired to greater feats by their ancestors' courage. You can also have a quest to retrieve the relics left by the dead character, makes for a nice story telling experience. :)

I think this idea right here is golden. It's not only good because it gives you something, it's good because there's a realistic sense of continuity. Practically speaking it might get a little crowded by the 10th or 20th dead character, but I think it personally invests the player in the idea that death isn't a total loss.

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Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom My favorite game design topic.

Haha, points for original thread title.

I'm not an MMO gamer but I think there's a point general to any game with permadeath worth considering-- how fast can you recover? If you've got a castle that can store lots of backup gear and it's not a hassle to constantly be hauling back replacements, I think you have a shot at appealing to more than just the permadeath hardcore crowd. But if you can lose in a single fight what took you months to build, I have doubts.

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Depending on what you build and how well you police the area of "monsters" you'll attract a population of villagers that will earn you taxes.

Your monster approach is intriguing. Later on you say that you can die and become one. What do monsters gain by occupying the areas that the player is meant to clear? That is, is a dragon player somehow motivated to get other monsters to hang out in the places the normal players want cleared?

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So when you've lost your uber warrior to the scourge of the underworld he's gone, his gear is gone, you're done playing him.

If you have unique or exceedingly rare items I think you'd cushion the blow if there were some sort of house quest to get them back (as Si Hao recommends). It could be something open to you and your allies, strengthening the point of having strong friends or an alternate character who can quest for you. In my mind people get invested no so much in their character but in all the abilities given by leveling plus those by gear.

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Alternatively, upon death your level and accomplishments will be tallied by the server and you'll be given the option to reincarnate as a level appropriate monster. So a level 6 warrior may reincarnate as an orc chieftan while a level 25 may have the option to play a dragon.

I see this as being motivating the first time because it's novel, but I wonder if that novelty will wear off. Will players who want to be a dragon really want to suffer through 25 levels again and again? They might... after all, that grinding is even accepted is a completely mystery to me.

btw, what do you become when you die as a dragon? You may have to delevel when you die so that you can become lesser monsters, partly as a disincentive to dying once a monster.

Also, do you foresee a problem with several players leveling to 25, becoming a dragon, then mass raiding a rival's house? Even if you bar communications, I can see players trying to game the system this way, to the point where you'll have potentially evil monsters hanging out in safe havens with supposedly good players, not attacking, because they were all former allies.

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No matter what you reincarnate as the game is essentially the same. The orc chieftan will gain retainers and seek to build a nice orc tribe. You can rally your retainers to raid settlements or adventure, so the overall theme plays the same.

I like this idea a lot, particularly because if you die at high level and become something completely different you're going to have a heck of a shock in terms of playability. For instance, take the dragon-- you've just spent X months playing a paladin or whatever and getting used to how it works. Now you're something that (potentially) flies, has an entirely different rack of spells and abilities, can't use all the facilities and resources you've come to rely on, doesn't even know where to heal, etc. etc. It's a completely different game experience you will not have trained the player for.

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A guild wiped out by another guild may all respawn as a new orc tribe, along with hordes of retainers anxious to get revenge.

If you're willing to go the ghost/liche/undead route I can see this working just as well. What if, as a player choice in keeping with the spirit of salvaging something from death, the player could choose what destroyed keeps become. Perhaps in scorched-earth fashion, you can choose to have your destroyed castle infested with a variety of monsters ranging from ghosts to spiders to the home of a wyvern. Since we're talking magic, maybe with it's destruction you choose to turn it into a banshee infested swamp or yeti controlled crystal palace.

Just as with characters, you'd be normalizing players to the idea that death is just a doorway to new gameplay.

Although I don't know how you'd balance it in an MMO world it would be fascinating if houses and keeps served interdependent, interlocking functions. Since you mentioned nation building how cool would it be to have two nations controlled by human players at war with each other, contending for vital resources amid cursed keeps inhabited by fallen monster-players?

I mention this because it seems that when you can touch so much of the game world at such a high level (thinking of games like Civilization here) there needs to be a greater purpose for being. If houses have strategic purposes, say as suppliers for iron or as purveyors of enchantments, you can have some very interesting diplomatic situations. Say for instance you destroy the best makers of dragon killing weapons and armor-- because it's a three way battle, this can turn out to be either the best thing for your nation or the worst thing for all nations to ever happen. Could be a cool consideration.

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Original post by doomhascome The one thing that seems potential problematic is this: you're on your third life, with a reasonably large town built around your castle, when a dragon with a horde of underlings burns you up, and destroys your town, forcing you to start from scratch. Furthermore, if you weren't even logged on when this happened, I would feel pretty annoyed at the design of the game. How do you interact with logged out players or 'nations'. Can you still raid the orc encampment when there isn't anyone controlling it?

Keep in mind that the term "house" that you build up as you level, is different from your keep or castle. It is your "family name", with allowances that the characters from a given house don't have to be related or even the same race. It's just a standard that represents you as a player.

Yes, your keep can be attacked while you're not online. That's why it's important to have good retainers that are well geared and trained. Further, alliances with other houses or guilds will help protect you while you're away.

But is it possible that while you were on vacation for a month that your keep was razed and all your retainers killed? Yeah, quite possible.

Think of your keep, which would be a castle if you were human, or a dark cavern in the side of a mountain if you were a dragon, as your dungeon. You're going to populate it and upgrade your retainers and make sure that it isn't easy to raid.