Can anyone think of what a good respawn reason would be in a post-apocolyptic setting? Like, there's cloning vats in futuristic games, magic in old-world style games, but what about an apocolyptic world? Maybe another survivor finds you, so you respawn at the nearest outpost?
Please discuss.
ID:152441
 Oct 19 2006, 5:43 pm
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Oct 19 2006, 6:36 pm
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Dice1989
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I think being found and taken back seems to be one of the best ideas.
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The easiest "explanation": You just reappear in the nearest friendly location, for no apparent reason.
Providing in-character reasons for out-of-character events isn't really worth the effort in my opinion. Just do it without explanation, and nobody will care why it happens. Games do this all the time and nobody bothers to stop and question it. (Except in jest.) That said, if the game's theme already lends it to "explaining" respawning (like the cloning vats you mentioned, or resurrection magic), then by all means go for it, since it adds a bit of flavour to the gameplay and that's not a bad thing. Just make sure you fit the explanation to the existing gameplay mechanic, and not the other way around. | |
Well said, although it's nice sometimes to have reasons, a lot of people enjoy that little extra depth.
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I agree with the people who said that a survivor has found you and taken you back, but maybe you can extend it a it, such as a few survivors find you and take you to the nearest hospital. Although trashed and deserted, it still provides the necessary tools. You can wake up on the bed or something. This can get a little weird though, seeing as how respawning in the same place can attract zombies, so it would look unrealistic in the games aspect. What you could do, is what Crispy said...or...you can have checkpoints, or a save verb, and when you die you respawn to the checkpoint or the last time you clicked save, whichever floats your boat. Since this is a scary game, make it like Resident Evil where saving your spot is hard, where you have to find ink ribbons and save your progress to a typewriter or something, or come up with something like that but using something else. It will make the game harder, and scarier.
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This is true, but it seems like with save points, if you ran out of ink ribbons or whatever you needed to save, and then died, well, all your progress is gone and none can be made. Also, how would I control the flow of "ink ribbons"? Do you buy them? Do you get a few for every level? Do you find them on corpses?
Another problem I have with my first idea, is this: Why in the Nine would they help you? You've got weapons and ammo and food and technology, why wouldn't they just take your items and leave you? | |
Pakbaum wrote:
This is true, but it seems like with save points, if you ran out of ink ribbons or whatever you needed to save, and then died, well, all your progress is gone and none can be made. Also, how would I control the flow of "ink ribbons"? Do you buy them? Do you get a few for every level? Do you find them on corpses? It's up to you whether you think a limited amount of saves is a good idea. Remember that as long as saving is optional players could dupe items ("You give me your sword, then log back in without saving. Then we'll have two swords!"). It could introduce an interesting perma-death style system if you have a limited amount of respawns. For example every time you respawn out in the wilderness you lose one 'ration' or something; if you don't have any rations you left you don't respawn near where you died, but you respawn in the nearest friendly city. If you were going out on an expedition you should remember to be well stocked on rations! Another problem I have with my first idea, is this: Why in the Nine would they help you? You've got weapons and ammo and food and technology, why wouldn't they just take your items and leave you? Altruism. Or maybe you have to pay them off every time they save you- if you don't have the cash on you then you go into debt and items at the market would cost more. Or, every time they do save you they take one of your items as payment. | |
Here's a thought:
You don't respawn. Survival oriented gameplay is always taken up a notch if you know that when you die, you're dead. Emphasis can be placed on character creation, rather then character development. You can expect players to go through at least a view characters before they learn the tricks of the trade well enough to actually last very long. You could even make a big deal about how 'back before the war', cloning facilities had made death a thing of the past. Players could go on long suicidal quests to try and find cloning facilities that don't actually exist. | |
Well, the game is an RPG, and there are very real penalties for death. It takes a long time to increase skills and gain abilities, and even longer to gather supplies and equipment. So perm-death would mean you just wasted all your time, and someone else takes your rewards. This also means that higher levels would prey on lower-leveled players much more than usual, looking for easy equipment. Which is realistic, but not good for beginners or new characters. I don't want to destroy my fan-base before it starts : /
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I think that cloning is still partially viable. The cloning system's controls have been lost, it's workings forgotten, but it's automatic processes still clone the dead and flash-learn them, in most places.
You could add depth by creating "null zones" in which it takes longer to respawn or, even more problematic, requires a player to bring your corpse back to a zone in which the cloning factories still have effect. The story reason for these could bee no maintenance of the cloning factory system. (The "complete null zones" mentioned above would be at the hearts of the regular "null zones") --Vito | |
Permadeath can be an interesting game mechanic, but you have to be very careful with it. I've left more than one game because I (unknowingly) strayed out of the newbie area while still at level 1 and got killed. Not fun.
A possible compromise is to enable permadeath at high levels only... though on the flip side, that might just make it even more annoying when you do die at a high level. | |
Man, have a species that takes you back to a spawn point!
Like: Nomadic rogues that find you after a little while and drag your dead-butt to a hospital on a cart or vehicle of some type. | |
I like the "found in the wastes" suggestion below, but offer the following addition:
When you die, you stare at your "dead" body until/unless someone actually picks up your body and carries you to the nearest bed. Once you are placed into a bed, you are given 1 HP and can recover from that point on. Various "good" NPCs about the wilderness may deign to pick you up and carry you to civilisation as well. You may want to include some kind of maximum time limit where the player will automatically resurrect after a certain number of real minutes, if no one comes along to assist. For example, if you are down and out for half an hour of real time, it's probably better to just have you regain 1 HP right there in the middle of the wasteland. If you are intending to allow players to be infected with the ZOM-B virus, you could also add a special rule: if you are killed by a zombie there is a possibility you will change into a zombie once you recuperate. Zombies who kill players will try to drag them off to their dens in order to reinforce their numbers, once all of the hostiles are dead. Burden of the cure is on the player, and if an infected person is brought back to civilisation and put into a bed before the change takes place, you could allow an automatic cure and normal recovery. In Diablo II, I was killed by Mephisto. My immediate recourse? Run straight into the warp portal, grab my character's loot, and run straight back out again, all in less than two seconds. (It actually took me a second try, since he plastered me again while I tried to grab my things, but that's life. All it cost me was a few thousand gold coins, which are easily replaceable in D2.) Diablo 2 isn't a roleplaying game nor an MMORPG, but the low cost of dying makes it irrelevant. | |