As a gamer, I've noticed that in most games dying means you either lose a lot of time and hard work (percentages of your total experience), you lose very little, get back up, and continue fighting (percentages of current experience, or no penalties), it makes you bored out of your mind (timers), or you lose everything (permanent death) As you can see from the above description, I have yet to find a game with the right balance that makes death something you fear but can get over. ((Yes, I know some people can do fine with timers, but forcing a person to sit and do nothing in a game is ridiculous)) so my question to GD is this: Has/can anyone come up with a system that makes death something to avoid at all costs, without making it something that ruins the game?

There's always the player's score. Either reset it to 0 upon dying (thus staying alive is the only way to achieve a high score) or award points to the other player/team who killed you.

In a multiplayer game, you could respawn the player as a weaker form that can still contribute somewhat to the ongoing round. Course then how do you discourage a 2nd death?

Any penalty is meaningless if the player can just reload a previous game (which turns it effectively into a time penalty).

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Original post by andur There's always the player's score. Either reset it to 0 upon dying (thus staying alive is the only way to achieve a high score) or award points to the other player/team who killed you.

The game itself is a territory game, so points would be based on how much land you have claimed, and it's not based on rounds either... I've thought a few times about having a 'ghost' system, where you become a ghost and must revive at a certain point, but then the wars would revolve around such points, and no side would gain any ground because the other side would simply revive there.

Hm...

Oh! But if you lose a portion of your kingdom on death, that would be devastating. It would have to be a small percent, so that those with little don't lose everything, and those with lots aren't put off by the amount of work they put into it, what do you all think?

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Original post by LanphrostHas/can anyone come up with a system that makes death something to avoid at all costs, without making it something that ruins the game?

"Ruins the game" is relative. Just look at roguelikes like Angband and NetHack. There, dying actually wipes your savefile; your character is gone. And, yes, it makes players very leery of dying, and adds a lot of tension. Many players state that roguelikes would not be nearly as fun if death weren't permanent. And many other players absolutely hate permadeath and refuse to play roguelikes with them (or at least, not without making regular backups of their character files).

To make death something to be feared, you have to be able to take something away from the player that can't be replaced just by repeating the steps they'd just taken. If they can easily repeat the steps, after all, then all you're taking away from them when they die is time.

One possibility I can think of for roguelike-style dungeon crawl games is to make it so you can only save (in the can-backup-a-file sense, not in the suspend-the-game sense) in town, and the risk/reward ratio for dungeon runs increases as time goes on. So the longer you spend down there without dying, the better the rewards you can get are, but the more you risk losing the rewards you've already attained. This can work in a roguelike setting because all of the content is procedurally generated; the player can't repeat their steps on death because when they go into the dungeon, it'll be different.

Hm, I haven't played Roguelikes, it sounds interesting. However, permanent death puts off a large portion of the gaming community. I'm not sure of the statistics, since I've never seen a poll for it, but I'm fairly certain that from what I read and know from playing on games with a PD server, about 90% of players prefer non-PD.

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Original post by Lanphrost Hm, I haven't played Roguelikes, it sounds interesting. However, permanent death puts off a large portion of the gaming community. I'm not sure of the statistics, since I've never seen a poll for it, but I'm fairly certain that from what I read and know from playing on games with a PD server, about 90% of players prefer non-PD.

PD in my experience require a game designed with PD in mind, for roguelikes its normally not a problem because the player generally doesn't expect to beat the game just like a player doesn't expect to win in tetris.

I was just using roguelikes as an example here of how death penalties can be interpreted in different ways depending on the player. In short, there's no magic bullet here. The one thing you really want to avoid is just telling the player "Nope, that wasn't good enough. Try again, but do it better this time." Especially if the "do it better" bit comes after a lengthy sequence of stuff they already were able to pass.

Loss of resources, but preservation of capabilities, is a model that keeps EvE Online tense and enjoyable for me. In EvE, when you get blown up, your ship and everything you had stored in it or installed on it is more or less lost forever. Some is left behind as loot, and if you or your team can secure the area and reclaim it, you get some back, but often you lose it all. Your character, however, is immortal, and even if your escape pod is caught and destroyed, you revive immediately in your home station, with a fee to pay to the clone company. So sometimes death is no big deal, and I'll often fit up a cheap ship and go out expecting to come home "the fast way", whereas other times your ship might represent days or weeks worth of effort and earning. So you get the full range of death experiences, from, "Meh, saved me the trouble of flying back to base," all the way up to frantically warping a burning ship from moon to moon, hoping that you can stay one step ahead of your enemy and get your ship and its cargo to safety. Better still, you get to decide which situation you may find yourself in before you leavae the safety of the station, since you have control over what you fly and where you fly it.

I like Diablo 2's system. Die, leave a corpse, find yourself in town. You have waypoints to get you back to where you were faster, if you were in a group you likely still have a town portal up even closer, and you lose a sizable chunk of gold if you're above a certain level (10 I think it is).

No wait time, no reduced stats, and if you cant get to your corpse for too many monsters, quit the game and start a new one, and your corpse will be in town.

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Original post by Derakon One possibility I can think of for roguelike-style dungeon crawl games is to make it so you can only save (in the can-backup-a-file sense, not in the suspend-the-game sense) in town, and the risk/reward ratio for dungeon runs increases as time goes on. So the longer you spend down there without dying, the better the rewards you can get are, but the more you risk losing the rewards you've already attained. This can work in a roguelike setting because all of the content is procedurally generated; the player can't repeat their steps on death because when they go into the dungeon, it'll be different.

Good thinking! For the right kind of game this makes perfect sense.