Whoo, there's a lot of text and opinions here. A lot of good thoughts. And also, thanks for the recommendation to DF adventure mode, superking. I'll have to at least read up on that some, although I don't want to just do what they've done -- specifically, their game is a hardcore simulation game, and is thus starting from an utterly alien premise as far as AVWW is concerned.
I think it's fair to say that the perma-death mechanic in AVWW is currently something that has only minor penalties, but as the world gets more complex, the penalties also get more complex by necessity. But before that freaks anyone (Bob) out, I think it's important that I back up for a minute and explain the overall design goals I have.
I'm always talking about my
immutable design goals, right? So here they are for perma-death:
1. When a character is dead, the character is dead for good.1.a. It is possible that in some VERY rare cases we might have some sort of life-saving elixer or something, but that sort of thing would be "the super rare exception to the rule that is used for dramatic effect to underscore the rule itself." 99.9% of the time, when a character dies they are gone.
2. When a character dies, the player should feel the loss in some manner. It shouldn't be like losing a life in Mario where it's just utterly unmemorable.2.a. How exactly this is accomplished will be determined most by things that we have not put in the game yet -- deeds, hopes, and more robust NPC stuff in general. In a sense even your player-character is still an NPC, so they still have hopes and a past that has nothing to do with you-the-player. When you take over an NPC to play with, it's not like their past just gets wiped or something.
2.b. I also figure that even if the
player doesn't care about that NPC, it's important that the world does. Thus even if the player "didn't know the character very well yet" and thus hadn't built up a depth of feeling for them, the world should be affected in subtle ways that matter. When I read the obituary column, as one example, I feel the gravitas of all that loss even if it doesn't really emotionally affect me directly because I didn't know any of the people. This is the minimum of what I'd like to recreate here, if possible.
3. When a character dies, the player must not be punished in a significant gameplay sense. In other words, there should be no incentive to try to "save scum" after death for most players.3.a. Temporary lack of access to inventory that the prior character had been carrying, as well as being jettisoned to a new area, is the only punishment in a gameplay sense that we currently have.
3.b. Going along with this immutable goal, having the players have to choose from a limited selection of NPCs that they might prefer to keep alive in their settlements could be a big punishment, hence my recent thinking on the wanderers.
3.c. Later, as NPCs are more robust and have other functions in settlements and otherwise, this is where the "penalties get more complex." When someone leaves the world, that does leave an awful hole, as they say. The goal here is to make that hole reflected in the world and story in a poignant way, without making the player feel like they are being punished. Mostly that involves making the players not replay stuff they already did; not "lose work" that they'd had in progress; and not significantly reduce the number of options available to the player at that point in the game.
Whew, that's a lot of qualifiers for those design goals, but hopefully that makes sense. Everything else about perma-death springs up from those and only those. Right now, mechanically, it's going what I want for #1 and #3. Item #2 is the more subtle and tricky one, and really involves a lot of world-lore logic and the deeds system, neither of which are likely to be in place for another month at least.
