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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage... or else you've got your semi-useful major character standing ankle-deep in the corpses of his squad, ineffectually firing a rifle at a spaceship while nuclear weapons impact his face with no effect.

LOL. No, really, I had to try hard not to spray my water all over the desk and keyboard. I'm still sniggering to myself.

Back on topic, I'm in favor of making them really hard to kill, but in a large scale strategy game, casualties of every sort are inevitable, and part of the game. It's easy to imagine a reasonably realistic system where once a character is superior to all their foes by a certain small degree, they are very difficult to kill. It doesn't take a very large skill difference for one person to be able to reliably and quickly defeat another person. Make your combat system reflect this, and most of the problems will go away.

If this doesn't work, it really depends on the kind of emotional investment the player has in the unit. I like the idea of an alert when your hero is running low on health, so that you have time to stage a heroic rescue. Perhaps the opposing army might aim to capture rather than kill the hero?


[Edit: removed random (and most probably accidental) Facebook URL from middle of text! -- Kylotan]
[Edit: What the crud??? I have no idea where that came from. Thanks.]

[Edited by - theOcelot on October 16, 2009 2:38:41 PM]

Maybe something similar to the way Warcraft III deals with hero deaths. The gamer is unable to use the hero for a little time, then he can pay to have them reborn, and the higher the level it is, the more expensive it is to bring it back.

I'd also make this mechanic optional. The gamer could have it's hero enchanted in order to be able to come back, or by buying an item, connecting their souls to a specific building or whatever fits the universe in question.

If you prefer the gamer deal with the death of the hero, you might then consider offering the gamer some temporary benefit to compensate for it. For instance an aura of "Rage" emanates from the hero's body and gives attack bonuses to units surrounding it. Or maybe even, particularly considering the main resource lost with an hero is experience, give an experience gain boost.

I think, in RTS-style gameplay, that you should be able to bring them back with a penalty. Maybe to bring them back your team has to collect a certain amount of resources, maybe something like clay from the ground, and dedicate some units to perform a ritual to bind the lost spirit of the hero with the clay body to bring him back to life (this exact process would be of course for a fantasy-themed game, but could be adjusted for any setting).

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Original post by Wavinator If the player can invest a lot of time in outfitting and leveling heroes, should a game's combat system give them preferential treatment when it comes to death? If you imagine an RTS-like mass combat situation involving a large number of units, most generic but some highly detailed with above average stats, abilities and gear it probably goes without saying that most players don't want to lose their special characters. Over time you'd expect their gear and abilities to protect them somewhat, depending on how good it is. But what about those cases where it doesn't and the character dies? Should the game's combat system have some sort of special exception for these heroes? Should they always somehow resurrect or automatically escape death (by always being knocked out, for instance, until the combat is over). What do you think it would take to get the player to live with the death and move on?

Real heros (at least in many myths) were hard to kill because they were like lions walking around in a battle between rabbits -- they overwhelemed mere mortals and were most significant in battling the opponent's heros.

You could also have them have better support. I recall that more than one hero in the Illiad when wounded has a chariot pull up and take them off the battlefield (or a friendly god throwing in a obscuring cloud), but on the other hand by the end of that epic a majority of the heros were dead.


In real history, more than a few heros/leaders were saved by their troops protecting them (often suicidally) when they went down.

Thanks to everyone for the great ideas. I really like the abstraction idea because I could use a mix of generic units and some sort of indicator, like a portrait somewhere on the interface, to show that the hero is on the board. The hero would probably then act like a talisman or powerup to the rest of the troops.

One thing that makes this a little lame is that if you would have no sense of proximity when you use them. You don't know if the hero is close to the front lines or in the back and it wouldn't be possible for one hero to capture another unless that was an explicit character trait. But that trade-off is probably worth being able to alleviate the micromanagement headaches that come with having specific special units on the board.

An implication of this sort of system that bugs me a bit would be that if you have mixed units in the battle and the weaker ones survive that your hero was hiding out among them. Using a Starcraft sort of example it means that if you lost a bunch of battlecruisers and had marines who made it home for some reason your hero wasn't in the BC, but was for some reason hanging out in a bunker on the ground.

*sigh* Got to remind myself that it's just a game.

The most important thing is to know whether or not "death of the hero" and "defeat of the player" are the same thing (in the game). If they're the same, then "death of the hero" should be taken seriously, and the player should feel it as a hard slap on his/her face. Death is death, the player should enjoy no/minimal mercy.

Unfortunately, games tend to be unclear in stating that matter. It's common to find a game which presents battlefields where death seems like day-to-day thing. Monsters die easily, bosses are slaughtered for exp matter, innocent/civilian NPCs meet their doom just so the story could progress. Why don't the hero experience such situation? What's the reason for that exclusion? A "hole" like this could make the overall game looks stupid.

If death is a serious thing in your game, then by all means, be CONSISTENT in making it serious. Let the player feel the death of his/her hero the hard way.

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Original post by Sneftel First of all, make it difficult for them to die, without making them into tanks. Say, their defense is reasonably good, but moreover they have a good ability to flee when they're taking a beating. Give them longevity without game-breaking invincibility. Second of all, make their death part of the rules. When Sir Scaramouche falls in battle, all his allies in a 200 yard radius go berserk for five minutes, mowing down enemies with the strength of pure pissed-off-edness. The point of this is not to make killing one's own hero a good idea strategy-wise -- and you should be careful not to tip things too far in that direction --, but to indicate to the player that life goes on (for everyone else, anyway) and that the death of that hero should not be the end of the overall narrative.

Those are good, I think.