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Brainstorming Permadeath: Making Death Significant But Not Annoying

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x4000:
Based on this comment, I thought this was worth its own thread:


--- Quote from: FallingStar on November 28, 2011, 10:26:34 pm ----More on the permadeath - A totally interesting idea, but feels anemic atm.  I think this would be a help to rewarding cleverness overall.  A failed raid/ assault in AI war meant losing time to rebuilding and possibly losing something of value, in AVWW player death feels like it should matter more than it does now.  I don't want corpse runs, don't get me wrong, but just something that felt like more of a setback and thus forced me to plan things out a lot more.
--- End quote ---

FallingStar is referencing some of the past times in AVWW when (pre-private-alpha, even) we had other permadeath mechanics that were more severe and which required corpse runs.  That was tedious and annoying and obviously nobody wants that.  But I quite agree that the permadeath mechanic needs... a little something.

One thing I will particularly note is that I think that the health tweaks need to get implemented first before a harsher permadeath mechanic can work in a non-annoying way.  When death can happen so accidentally as it can now, I think that is an issue.  Then again, I always play about 4 region levels above my level on master hero, so maybe I just need to keep it closer to my actual civ level.

Right now the permadeath mechanics are:
1. The character and their stats are gone forever.
2. Unless the character was a robot, you now have a vengeful ghost of them to deal with.
3. There's a grave for them in the citybuilding section, and if there are a lot of deaths you get a lot of graves that will later cause houses near them to have lesser morale, etc (nobody likes living in a graveyard).
4. Morale in general is depressed for NPCs for about 10 turns when someone dies.
5. None of your inventory is lost or affected.

I'm pretty sure that all of those five things we want to keep as they are.  Losing your inventory just feels... punitive.  It really encourages save-scumming, and feels like a punishment rather than a story event.  What I'm looking for are ways that we can make this feel like a more impactful story event, through game mechanics rather than literal narrative mechanics.  In a way that isn't annoying.

I haven't come up with anything in the last few months, and Keith hasn't mentioned anything, so for the time being it's the above five.  If others have ideas, they are welcome as always!

Orelius:
The real problem with the current system of permadeath is that it doesn't really have any of the effect that normal permadeath would.  You keep everything of value, have a slight hit to the macro game, and have a pathetically easy ghost to deal with - ghosts aren't hard to beat at all compared to anything else in the game.

The system really needs a big change.  Thing is, deaths cause more harm to the macro game than the micro game.  In the macro game, if morale is low, you're not going to get much done.  You'll eventually have to deal with grave plots and all that nonsense, too.  In the micro game, a ghost isn't a threat unless you're surrounded by other enemies, which can be easily taken care of (use crates or something to isolate the noclipping-ghost from the rest of the enemies, if you need to).

I feel that a death should have an strong but temporary impact on the micro game, but I'm not sure how something like that could be implemented.  Perhaps, the next character could have temporarily reduced stats until the character does something notable such as killing a boss or getting a specific item. (oh dear this is sounding exactly like demon's souls now isn't it)   It would certainly force people to stop throwing their rather expendable characters (I'm looking at you, skelebots, haha), to a boss battle because they'd be even less likely to win the second time with reduced stats and lessened healing items.

Olreich:
Characters, as they are now, are no more than a vessel for you, the glyph-bearing demigod. Absolutely nothing, but some base, inconsequential stats are attached to them. Their level, equipment, prowess, and achievements all belong to the glyph-bearer.

To give permadeath a bite, characters need to have something attached to them. I'm thinking something along the lines of having stat increases that one can collect with a character, but are completely lost on death. In general, go around, killing bosses and such would give fame to the character for a narrative impact, and going around collecting powerups would give a gameplay impact, but not something inconsolable, and definitely don't drop anything, just have it burn into dust.

x4000:

--- Quote from: Olreich on November 28, 2011, 11:17:47 pm ---To give permadeath a bite, characters need to have something attached to them. I'm thinking something along the lines of having stat increases that one can collect with a character, but are completely lost on death. In general, go around, killing bosses and such would give fame to the character for a narrative impact, and going around collecting powerups would give a gameplay impact, but not something inconsolable, and definitely don't drop anything, just have it burn into dust.

--- End quote ---

I really like this idea a lot, actually.  It's not a penalty, but rather it's the removal of some substantial accumulated bonuses.  That's a subtle but important distinction, I think.

Martyn van Buren:
I like this in principle but I feel like it needs to be limited --- if these bonuses just keep piling up until you get a character who's as powerful as a fresh one four levels up, you're really not going to want to do anything risky with him.

This reminds me --- NPC crafting skills are gone for good, right?  If they're coming in later, losing their established trust and willingness to help you would be a good penalty.

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