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The Eight Stages of Permadeath Debate
MMOG Designer and commentator Damion Schubert has up an article on the constantly renewing Permadeath debate. Permadeath is the concept of permanent death for a character in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. The design hasn't shown up in any major commercial games yet but, to borrow a phrase, the soul still burns. His commentary is a great synopsis of the debate, from the rearing of its head to the final bitter back-biting threads. From the article: "3. Captain Obvious Speaks. 'People don't like to lose their stuff.' 'It isn't fun.' 'It's hardcore, and only hardcore games will ever use it.' 'Any game which depends on the internet for its reliability has no place permanently taking away all your stuff.' 'Why in God's name would anyone consider this idea a good or compelling idea?'"
Move/allow characters of a certain level into a separate world which is inaccessable to lesser characters and may or may not let the greater characters to leave and reenter. Sort of like an Olympus or Valhalla.
You were definitly cautious at times in Steel Battalion. But, due to the emergancy eject, you could still take risks and survive, as long as you had enough cash for another mech. Run out of cash, and you did have to end your career.
The most annoyning permadeath for me in that came came on a midrange mission. I was fignting in a canyon, came so close to finishing the mission, and got hit hard in the front of the mech. It fell onto its back, got hit again and blew up. Hitting the eject failed, because it ejected you out the back, not the top. So since my mechs back was on the ground I died, and had to climb up the missions again.
I played three hardcore charecters in Diablo II. Hardcore basically meant, when you died, you were dead...and there's no coming back. One of them lasted to level 74.
I'll tell you right now that every second of gameplay with those charecters was interesting. When your actions have great consequences, they also have great meaning.
Lag was just part of the game. If you started to lag out, a couple of quick health potions and an Alt-F4 was all you needed to keep yourself safe. Of course that's a double edged sword...die, and stay in the game, and you can have someone recover your stuff. If you were too slow on the keyboard, and quit after you died, you lost all your stuff too.
I say, being on the permadeath! I'd be nice to care about my RPG charecters again.
I think that in a permadeath game, the entire play mechanics would have to be shifted. For one, there would be no level 60 - well, maybe there would be, but it wouldn't be anything anyone sane would care to go after. Also, the characters would have to start out with more skills in the first place - I think we can all agree that nobody wants to play a game where you're tooling around with a level 1 weenie that can't do jack half the time.
You could make the penalty for dying something short of losing everything by giving you more skill points, hit points, etc. when you're creating your next character. So if you just lost a level 12 character, your next one would get to start at, say, level 8, and if you just lost a level 6 character, you'd be able to start at level 4.
You could also make it harder to die. I once played a tabletop RPG called Beasts, Men, and Gods where you were knocked unconscious at 0 hit points, and from there you would slowly lose hit points until you either got some medical attention or reached some negative number of hit points which represented death. I personally like this option because it makes those often-overlooked healers people you suddenly want to have in your party.
Personally, I think the above would be really neat ideas. I tend to look at permadeath as a great excuse for a friendly kick in the pants for MMORPG gameplay mechanics, which in my opinion aren't too different from the mechanics used in computer RPGs since the beginning of time.
Sadly, the thing that you would need most to make a permadeath game truly enjoyable is to include a way of making the game fun besides the usual level-grind. While I'd personally like a game of this nature, since I don't enjoy level grinding one bit, I realize that anyone who tries to create a game of this nature is up against 10 years of precedent and tradition as well as the incredible cost it takes to pay for people to make the game world come alive for new players and stay fresh for veterans.
Yes, this sucks as a business model because there aren't enough hardcore gamers to pay developers, but it should remove a lot of the hassle of playing MMORPGs. I also totally agree with you that respawning should be relatively painless. However, I eventually stopped playing Anarchy Online simply because I lost the patience to deal with a bunch of morons on a team. (Tank sees room full of high level mobs. Tank runs into room before party is ready. Tank gets raped. Party blames doc for tank's stupidity. Repeat as often as possible.)
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
In every dice & paper RPG I run, Permadeath is "on". I don't give second chances, and if you do something stupid, make a bad roll, or generally just get ganged up on, you're dead. End of story, get a clean sheet of paper and roll up a new character. You don't find many D&D or Vampire games where the GM announces "Free rez for your character if they die, just gotta start back at the nearest town." I also don't have a problem with group dissension - ie, PvP. If one player decides to be a dick and "accidentally" pop another player's character in the back of the head when no one is looking during a firefight, and he makes his rolls, then it happens. On the flip side, the game system I run doesn't have "classes" or "levels", and character generation can pop out a 70 yr old War Vet as easily as an 18 yr old street punk. You can improve your character's skills and stats, But the net effect of all this is that a year old (real time) character doesn't have that much of an edge on a 5 minute old (real time) character, and if he slips up when he's offing his own party, he'll be next. I think permadeath in a game will greatly increase interest in role playing and team building, and PvP won't be much of an issue - because you won't respawn, and eventually the victims will team up against you. I'd play in a permadeath game in a heartbeat. More challenge, more fun, less grind. Just my take on it.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
I agree that perma-death could work. There are several problems that come from the lack of perma-death:
1) endless progress. The strong players can become obscenely powerful and lord over the newer players. While this provides a nice incentive to keep playing, it means that the fundamental concept of play balance is really impossible (which is pretty crucial for a multiplayer game).
2) fear. Fear is fun. This is why many people prefer Counterstrike to fast paced FPS games - CS has the fear of death because if you die, it sucks. It gets your heart thumping hard.
3) changing classes. These games often have a massive variety of player classes and species to play, and often no easy way to change. Death lets you roll up a new character, and lets the player explore the game more completely.
4) realism. How realistic is it to never die?
Of course, then there's the converse problem - nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to lose their stuff. Not losing their stuff also means there's no reason to kill anyone - you don't get to take anything. So PVP never becomes anything but a side-game.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill. Something like a throne war - every man for himself, but you can form alliances, and the winner is the one who controls the Throne Tower (spoils of controlling teh Throne are divided among the members of the winning alliance, so pruning your ranks is encouraged). Various smaller towers allow control over areas with good resources that can be used to arm your players for sieging the main Citadel (and these smaller towers are, in turn, being raided by members of smaller clans as well as unaligned thieves).
Let the players have storage lockers for backing up extra equipment and spells and otherwise eliminate any concept of "level-up" besides your gear. Make it easy to escape/survive combat (but at the loss of some gear) so that death matters but is avoidable. Then make the equipment come easily with some hunting. Kind of a compromise between traditional action gameplay and MMORPG gameplay. You could have backstabbing, binding oaths of fealty, heroic wanderers, oppressive kings, tight squads of bandits, etc.
sure, every MMO game seems to have a similar tack: build up your character, get them stuff and levels. obviously if perma-death existed, this could mean a spot of net lag or a down router would mean perma-death for your character, and as many argue that is unacceptable.
however, let us imagine games "outside the tiny box" of current MMO. how about a game where your "character" is really just a soul, which possesses a mortal being. sure, you can upgrade this mortal with some gear, but the real "stuff" is being accumulated by the "soul" - that is where things like special skills, experience points, levels, or whatever "progress" constructs you want to have are attached. so when the mortal is killed, your soul escapes to possess another. so we have something like "perma death" where your "character" dies, period, but you go on in a different fashion from the majority of MMO which I have seen. you could even have it set up so the "soul" would die a permanent death if they wander too long without a mortal body, and if that is too harsh, you could have that soul be "recoverable" in some fashion.
MORTAR COMBAT!
About 4 months ago I thought up a design document for an MMO that had everything I would like to see, and every couple of weeks someone comes out with an article about something I've already addressed in full, with improvements.
An easy solution to permadeath is to not include respawns at all. Try using the D&D system, where another player must come and ressurrect you (simplied explination). The challenge is making this fun for both sides and profitable, so you don't have tons of people spamming the few people capable of rezzing with tells (I know how to address this), and you don't have people quit when they die because it takes too long to get a rez (try including about a quarter of the game as content specifically for dead people).
In terms of inheritance, you need to have a system where people *WANT* to permanently die in order to gain inheritance. How do you do this? I'll leave that for you to think of.
The objective of any permadeath feature in a game is to encourage a player not to die. The problem with most such systems are that they arn't fun when you do die, and that is exactly the opposite of what you want a game to be. You want your game to be a challenge to a player, make them think and learn to play with skill. You do NOT want them to feel like they wasted their time at ANY point. No feature should be a hardship on the player, and every feature designed to make the game more difficult should be there to make the player think about how to use it to their best advantage and have fun at the same time. Almost all previous permadeath systems fail at this.