Column #3: Permanent Death

In a previous article, RayCobra brought up a good point: Why are we so obsessed with penalizing death when we might achieve the same overall goal for rewarding life? In other words, instead of applying stat reductions, experience penalties, or worse for dying, why not use a less painless death penalty and implement a “life reward” for engaging in dangerous activities but staying alive? Currently, World War II Online has a system somewhat like this, where every time you spawn, complete a mission, and manage to make it back to base safely, you’re awarded much more experience (rank) than if you had died and respawned one or more times while on the mission. After all, the entire point of death penalties is to make people use their heads to try and live longer, right? Well, rewarding them for doing that achieves almost the same result. While playing Planetside, I thought of a similar, but slightly more drastic, system for making players want to work together and use smart tactics instead of just swarming in and dying several times to complete a mission. Basically, it involved gaining experience normally, but in a temporary pool while the player is alive. That experience is only made permanent if the player makes it back to a friendly base and “saves” their progress, using one of the medical terminals the game already has. It makes sense, too; how is your next clone going to remember what you did with this one, and thus gain the benefit of your experience, if you never save your progress by downloading your brain scan at the medical terminal? Some people might find that rather annoying, but think of the possibilities. You’d get people starting missions to fly into enemy territory and rescue stranded teams. Pilots that get shot down wouldn’t just despawn and respawn at a friendly base to grab another aircraft; they’d have a nerve-wracking time sulking around enemy positions to make it back on foot. Heroic players would sacrifice themselves by holding off the enemy so their squad could escape. With the proper supplemental game systems and programming, you might even be able to surrender and be held prisoner; you’re hoping to be rescued so you can keep your current pool of experience, and your captors are earning a trickle of experience for the duration of each prisoner they hold onto.

Something that would take the sting out of permadeath is another old idea, one in which a player could designate a future character to inherit some amount of the current character’s wealth, items, reputation, attributes, and/or skills. I believe that a system like this would make permadeath slightly more appealing to even casual gamers. Instead of simply passing the traits on to the next character, they could be reserved in some personal quest. For example, your super warrior character has an awesome, expensive sword you had someone craft for him, but while dueling another player, he was permanently killed. When you create your next character and designate him as the heir to your super warrior, you are informed that at any time you may begin a quest to retrieve the item. This quest would be scaled in difficulty for the former character, so the second character would have to wait until they were about as strong to win back the sword. The same could easily be done to earn a portion of the deceased character’s monetary wealth. As for attributes and skills, perhaps the subsequent character would only gain an aptitude for those that the former character had developed to high ranks, so that Son of Super Warrior gains strength a bit faster than he normally would because of his lineage. Maybe an heir has a talent for a skill in which the former character had reached high ranks, so that he not only advances faster, but tops out 5-10% higher than usual. If this bonus was cumulative, one could imagine people playing entire lineages of characters, each time producing an heir with a bit more potential. Suddenly there’s a bit of persistence to a permadeath system, and it’s not as bad, is it? You might play for six months and then voluntarily retire your character so you can start over with an heir to achieve even higher skills, but the second character dies in a castle siege after only one month. Never fear, for the family line lives on in a third heir with distant bonuses from the grandfather and somewhat fewer bonuses from the father.

Another way to make permadeath more feasible is to give players ample opportunity to avoid it if they play smart instead of recklessly. Getting sniped in the head from half a kilometer away and instantly dying would be a horrible way to suffer permadeath, so I’d suggest robust characters that are never killed in one hit or in less than 10 or 15 seconds of bleeding to death. Nothing causes instant death, not sniper rifles, long falls, or even vehicle impacts. Once a character is sufficiently wounded, they enter a disabled state whereupon they begin bleeding to death. Allies can administer first aid to save the character, so working in groups takes on a critical new advantage. Some people might recognize this system from Dungeons and Dragons, to which I remind the readers of this column that, while some of the ideas I bring up are my own, most of them are oldies that we’re trying to find a home in MMORPGs if we can make them work properly.

Alternately to the bleeding-to-death system, and adopting a different trait from D&D, disabled players may automatically stabilize after some duration. However, other players and certain NPCs might approach their body and administer a coup-de-grace, which I believe is French for “pwned!” In this system, players aren’t killed by the arrows and bullets flying during battle, rather only by deliberate actions taken to produce a final blow. This takes some of the stress out of the permadeath system when considering net lag, client crashes, and dial-up disconnections, because not all players are going to coup-de-grace fallen foes (assuming there is some kind of alignment or police/bounty system in the game), and not all NPCs will either. If you’re fighting a character that worships a saintly deity, he might be prohibited from using coup-de-grace. A pack of wolves might rip you to bits when you’re disabled, but grizzly bears have been known to wander away from people that play dead.

 advertisement 

<a href="http://www.gameads.com/" target=_blank>Game Ads</a> banner requires iframes.

So those are some ideas of how to make permadeath work in future MMORPGs. Remember during this discussion that we’re not trying to make it work in existing games, because level systems, unbalanced PvP, and the lack of any worthy rewards prevent it from being a reasonable risk. What I’d also like to see are ways to make permadeath work for everyone, not just in designated shards or separate servers. If the MMORPG community is going to grow, it has to unite, not divide. I look forward to hearing your ideas.

Remember, check back every Monday for more thoughts from Nathan.

You can comment on this article here.