i think when the person dies,
if the game is fantasy,
you should turn into a ghost, and all you can do is walk around, and speak ghost lang (people would have to learn ghost lang to understand your words)

and you would get healed by a good old buddy, or a NPC
your body could be looted, and all stuff could be lost

and trust me, that is penalty enough,
i get really mad when i die, and someone takes all my stuff that i just worked for and took about 2 hours to get it all

so death doesnt have to mean your character is just gone forever,(if it is fantasy game)
but you can be reincarnated, or healed like mentioned above

these are my theory's and opinions any ways,

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I like the model that I saw being discussed for Sierra Studio's Lord of the Rings online game... death is permanent, and invariably fatal... no resurrection items or spells. If there were such things, why would ANYBODY ever die? The player characters are obviously something special compared to the rest of the world, but not so special that every player character would have access to resurrection but no one else would. The thing is, though, in order to die, you would really have to ASK for it. Human "monsters"
will be happy to subdue you and take your gold, wild animals will attack or flee until you no longer pose a threat, and potentially fatal areas are clearly marked (maybe not with hokey signposts or alerts, but threatening music, ominous scenery, and so on.) Of course, if you want to brave such a region for the greater rewards, or challenge another player to a fight to the death, you can, but if you die, it's your own fault.

Of course, I'm not going to do anything like that for LexyMUD. I'm trying to keep it in the spirit of early Ultima (that's Ultima the computer game series, not Ultima the online computer game), which uses the player/computer interface as a metaphor for a dimensional link. The disk was referred to in the earlier game documentations as a magical device for entering the realm of Sosaria (what they called Britannia before it was unified under L.B.), and the instruction card was a sacred scroll, and so on. This carried over into the game, where the players were presumed to be dimensional travellers from earth, as were important NPCs. Various permutations of this idea have been used to explain (or excuse) the seeming immortality of the player and major characters.

Similarly, in LexyMUD, it will be explained that your character's body in the MUD world is formed by an act of conscious will, and can be recreated if destroyed. Each death, though, lowers your life force (Vitality attribute) by 1, permanently, and when a body's life force is totally dispersed, it can no longer be recreated. Thus, death has consequences, but not a 100% mortality rate... but not because of inexplicably cheap resurrection spells.

Further note: it automatically saves on death, so there's no re-loading to avoid a Vitality loss. And, of course, your stuff stays where your body falls.

On 6/2/01 11:49 am Spuzzum wrote:

Please don't change this into a PK thread, because those are already addressed numerous times. ;-)


What I'm wondering is, if a PC dies, what sort of penalties should they get?


Personally, I think death should be permanent, and your character should be deleted (i.e. no logging out and reloading your character). Like roguelikes. Only difference is, you make the game so it is harder to die. ;-)

Referring to my own design plans and implementation, Haven carefully models damage (without actually crunching numbers on the players' screens... all formulas are internal). When someone is hit with a weapon, some of the damage is translated into "bruise" damage, and some is translated into "bleed" damage. A player's consciousness is measured as max_vitality minus bleed, minus bruise. If that drops below zero, the character passes out. (Of course, if max_vitality minus bleed drops below zero, the character dies.)

This allows for players to have non-lethal combat; fight until first blood (since humans are frail in my game, you rarely get hit if you are in combat), or until unconsciousness. Players also have the option of hitting with the flat of their weapon, which transforms half of the bleed damage into bruise damage.

If a player is knocked out, it is relatively impossible to tell the difference between unconsciousness and death; the icons are the same (blood is scattered on the turf when someone is injured, not on the player's icon). This should make it so that someone actually has to strike an unconscious opponent to kill them, thus demonstrating their intent.

When someone intentionally kills someone by maiming them while they're unconscious, you can easily tell that the killer is bent on permanently killing that player, which makes the crime much more apparent.


But, getting away from permanent death, I can easily see how a non-permanent death has its merits. A la Ultima Online, if you have the option of dying permanently, changing into a ghost, or resurrecting immediately, then that gives players much more flexibility.


But my question is, is UO's system really a worthwhile system? Sure, I can understand if someone spent countless hours double-clicking a training dummy to increase their skill a few points (as far as I understand it ;-), then if their character died permanently they'd be pretty darned upset, but it also gives disruptive people free-reign; if their characters are punished by the other characters, they will simply come right back and continue to harass them.

On 6/2/01 1:54 pm Leftley wrote:

Speaking of underworlds, there's that whole heaven/hell thing. Maybe you could have your world have heaven and hell (or just hell) as physical locations... if you want to go for the mythological thing, physical locations with physical connections to the material plane, or simply other dimensions accessible only via your garden variety extraplanar portal (and, of course, death). Add in patronage; let players dedicate their unlife to serving one side or the other, allowing really pious players to return as guardian angels or really satanic players to return as demons. Or maybe just something a little less permanent; assassin kills you in cold blood, you go to heaven or purgatory or some such, you get an offer from the Devil... he gives you the power to go track down your killer and extract revenge, you give him your soul and go hang out at his pad for the rest of eternity. Heaven might give similar offers for players who have a pressing need to go back for more spiritual needs. And then, if you've got a heaven and hell thrown into the thing, you've gotta have a system for souls--players swiping other players' souls for fun and profit. Maybe the devil doesn't require you to give up YOUR soul in exchange for favors, but merely A soul (although swiping your best friend's soul and selling it to the devil is in fact an evil act which would propel your soul a good ways farther down the path to Hell anyways). Steal the soul of your enemy and you can screw him over and gain unholy power at the same time!

well i had this idea a while back.. the tradeing of souls or portions of souls witch can be used to buy yours back or other things... like if you have 20 souls of players then after you die the devil would have your soul.. but for a trade you can both gain power as i higher deamon AND get a new demonic body to retrive new souls to compleat the cycle.. the only problem with this system are the poor saps who have no soul.. not there own or others and will have there char turned into a lich or something really small and nasty that are usualyy killed again for spells and the like..

but on the other side you canot trade in souls.. it just dont work.. so you would have something like light or faith that you can use to save yourselves or others.. and haveing it follow the light path saveing others would be verry hard but it would decrease the amount needed to save yourself.. it can become a verry good system....

I personally like permadeath, because it increases roleplaying. If when you die you come back with a small exp penalty, why should you worry about walking alone through an unexplored dungeon or something? It lets players do stuff there characters wouldn't normally do, because they know they can just go resurrect them. But it all depends on the game...If it takes a couple of years in a game to become powerful, then permadeath would be REALLY annoying. But if you can go down to a dungeon for a few hours and return a super-warrior, permadeath isn't that bad.
In the mud I'm making, players can be kings, politicians, rebel leaders, etc. So, I kind of needed permadeath(I.E. The rebels assasinate the king, and 5 minutes later he's alive again). So here's how I'm handling death. Your character has a certain amount of time to be ressurected after he dies. If after that time no-one comes then he is dead forever. However if he had married an NPC, and had children with them, the player would become one of those kids. That means he would keep his property/money/fame. It also means that a random murderer would really annoy a player, but that player would come back, so it wouldn't be that bad.

On 6/2/01 2:44 pm Luap wrote:

I personally like permadeath, because it increases roleplaying. If when you die you come back with a small exp penalty, why should you worry about walking alone through an unexplored dungeon or something? It lets players do stuff there characters wouldn't normally do, because they know they can just go resurrect them. But it all depends on the game...If it takes a couple of years in a game to become powerful, then permadeath would be REALLY annoying. But if you can go down to a dungeon for a few hours and return a super-warrior, permadeath isn't that bad.
In the mud I'm making, players can be kings, politicians, rebel leaders, etc. So, I kind of needed permadeath(I.E. The rebels assasinate the king, and 5 minutes later he's alive again). So here's how I'm handling death. Your character has a certain amount of time to be ressurected after he dies. If after that time no-one comes then he is dead forever. However if he had married an NPC, and had children with them, the player would become one of those kids. That means he would keep his property/money/fame. It also means that a random murderer would really annoy a player, but that player would come back, so it wouldn't be that bad.

oh here is an idea! i like this child one.. and it would be better if you got to keep all your stuff but lost your levels.. so you would have to or pay somone to train your child otherwise you start as a level 1.. (and after the child becomes better than the father he can chose if he is going to be the child or the parent... and if the child he has to have his father assasinated.. this could also lead to some god RP if anyone finds out he killed his father in order to inheirt the gold and land and stuff....

I am thinking about a system where death is not pernament. All characters in my "game" would have something called a soul stone, where the character's soul is in. When the character is dead, nothing is left but the soul stone. By getting the soul stone to the temple, one could revive a dead character.
How is the soul stone suppose to get to the temple?
By having friends who are willing to undertake the task.
Thus, pker or unliked-players would naturally die, without revival.
The items on the dead characters would be loot for the killer (PC/NPC). Except for magically binded items (Special items not bought in shop).
OF course, the problem now, is implementation.

Once again, I'll speak from my long experience with GS, where discussion of death mechanics is and always has been a big deal. I'll explain what used to and what does happen in GS, and the issues people have with it, and you can draw from it what you will.

It used to be that when you died in GemStone, you dropped what you were carrying and had four minutes before you "decayed." During this time you could be resurrected to prevent decay. If you did decay, all your items remained on the ground where you were, and you woke up in the temple with stat loss.

Back then (this was years ago) there weren't so many people playing the game, and clerics were few and far between. People tended to log out and head to the chat room or the message boards and try to get clerical help, so they could arrange a time to be resurrected rather than decay.

When the game switched over from the ICE system to the one it has now, stat growth was slowed, and stat loss upon decay was removed. Exp loss upon decay was instituted instead, up to 1/5th what you need to level. (The average character gains a couple levels a month, I believe, to put things in perspective.)

When the game moved to AOL (and especially when AOL went unlimited), there was an influx of players of a different sort than had been paying bills upwards of $400 a month to play via GEnie in the past, and there were problems. Lots of PK just to steal items, people dragging other people off to a lonely spot where no one would stumble on them, and taking their items once they decayed. The staff just couldn't handle all the incidents, so things were changed. Now you no longer drop items on death or lose them on decay.

This was when during peak hours there might have been 2200 people in the game. I highly doubt any of us will ever have close to that many people in a BYOND game -- but we won't have 20 staff members watching things all the time either.

As things stand now, the penalties to death are:

Inconvenience (time spent dead, time spent recovering after being raised)
Loss of all those spells you had on you it took forever to get
Loss of whatever exp was "in your head" that you hadn't yet absorbed
Loss of a deed (which cost maybe 15 minutes' worth of hunting to get)
Possibility of decay and loss of up to 10k exp, or 1/5th what it costs a titled character to level (assuming they haven't already decayed that level)

There is permanent death in GS, but only if you fail to keep yourself stocked with deeds. Considering how easy (if pricey) it is to get deeds, permanent death hardly ever happens without the player intending it.

These penalties encourage people to do these things... I'll approximate percentages:

20% to hunt with others most of the time
75% to hunt with others in especially dangerous areas
5% to log off sometimes when "stunned" (unable to do anything besides watch the critter hack at you)
90% to get spells from other players before hunting
20% to seek so many spells, they're virtually untouchable
50% to log off occasionally while dead and wait for help, rather than decay
50% to occasionally use out of game means like IMs to have friends come get them while dead
5% to bring in a character of their own on another account to save them
5% to join a particular difficult special society solely or partly to get their power to prevent decay

I'll deal here with the pros and cons of the above.

20% to hunt with others most of the time and 75% to hunt with others in especially dangerous areas
Being encouraged to hunt with others is universally considered a "good thing." Hunting with others encourages friendships, which keep people coming back to the game. However, no one wants to be *forced* to hunt with others to survive. So far GS does not approach this.

5% to log off sometimes when "stunned"
We call this slamming and it's obviously bad. Some players despise anyone who does this. I think of it as cheating, but think the effects are minimal and don't really care if player X does it. The number who did this used to be a lot higher, but they implemented a change whereby if you log off in a room with a critter, it disappears -- so no one else can dispatch it -- then when you return it reappears in a high-powered rage. This has dramatically cut down on slamming because now it's more likely to get you killed than remaining in the game stunned is. Rough luck for people with bad connections though.

90% to get spells from other players before hunting
This is interaction, and good, up to a point...

20% to seek so many spells, they're virtually untouchable
...and this is the point. Characters who spell up to the point of walking tanks can hunt with no danger, prompting critter designers to uptweak critters, making hunting without spells near impossible, in a viscious cycle. Especially problematic are multi-accounters who use their high-level wizard on one account to keep their lower-level rogue on another account tanked with spells at all times. Multi-accounting is imbalancing because while that rogue could certainly get those spells from a wizard played by somebody else, they are not available 24/7. To rectify this problem, GS is moving toward a more self-cast environment, and many spells will become unable to be cast on others. Will this cut down on interaction or raise it by prompting people to hunt together? Time will tell.

50% to log off occasionally while dead and wait for help, rather than decay
This is another kind of slamming and generally more accepted, despite the fact that it's circumventing a heavier penalty. Players have been doing this since the dawn of the game some 11 years ago, and it's a time-honored tradition by now. It's a fact of life that sometimes players have to leave their computer while their character is dead, and losing 10k exp because there's an oven fire in the kitchen would suck.

50% to occasionally use out of game means like IMs to have friends come get them while dead
This is frowned upon, but impossible to avoid no matter how slight you make penalties for death. At least it's better than...

5% to bring in a character of their own on another account to save them
...which is blatant cheating as far as I'm concerned. The vocal portion of the GS player base is putting huge pressure on Simutronics to do *something* to combat multi-accounting, but so far no efforts have been forthcoming. I have no doubts the staff debates it a lot, though.

5% to join a difficult special society solely or partly to get their power to prevent decay
This is good. There are two "societies" in GS, one of which is cheap and easy, the other much harder to advance in but slightly more powerful. The ability to prevent decay is one of those things which makes the latter more powerful and is part of the balance. Of course, if that ability were negated, some other could replace it.

I myself have several problems with decay in GS. The first is that it's a system that's just too easy to cheat, and there's no good way around that. If they made it so you decay upon logging out when dead, they tack an extremely harsh repercussion onto poor ISP connections and real-life emergencies.

Furthermore, it's harsher upon those who spend more time roleplaying (RP = good) than powerhunting (powerhunting = bad), such as myself. My main character has leveled only 10 times in the past two years. I spend the majority of my time enhancing the atmosphere of the game for others rather than hunting, and a decay sets me back several weeks' hunting work. Meanwhile, the player who never does anything but hunt loses what's only a days' worth of work to him. I'm not particularly bitter, as what I do is my choice. But it's not spectacular game design when your death penalties have the most sting for the folks who most help the game.

If you make death penalties, people will cheat.
The harsher you make them, the more people will cheat.
The harder you crack down on cheaters, the more innocents (folks with poor connections, spouses who play together from the same residence and IP) will suffer.
A balance can be achieved, but people will always complain.

The most important thing of all is to keep in mind the WHY. WHY do you want death penalties? Not to piss off your players. To make the game *more* fun, when all is said and done. This is accomplished primarily through two means: making accomplishments more enjoyable through the challenge in achieving them, and encouraging people to work together, which forms friendships. It is accomplished secondarily (is that a word?) by having a death system that is in itself "neat," or fun, or simply realistic-feeling in terms of what occurs in your world or the real world.

If death penalties are doing neither of the first two, or doing none of them very well, they need to be changed. One thing to remember is that challenge does not directly equate to difficulty. If something is just plain hard and boring, then it sucks. If something is difficult but can be surmounted through thought, skill, teamwork and a little luck, then the penalties for failing are justified in their existence (if not in their severity).

Always ask yourself: how does my death system make the game more fun to play overall? Your ability to answer can mean the difference between a good game and a great one.

Z