Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
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.
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.