Playable Characters Deaths
 

How do you guys feel about characters dying permanently?? Is it a game stopper? is it cool? does it depend on in what situation they would die ?? I really want feedback on this.

If the character has to die or transpose into another form from death (undead, semi-undead etc') to further the storyline, then he/she may 'need' to die.
For example - a saint may need to die to prove their faith, then continue as a saintly spirit etc' - possibly to resurrect back to life form later.
The storyline/core concept is paramount by design to the death system used, it has to be 'given' to the gamer by the writer and not 'asked' for.
The writer must dictate, the gamer must follow as you may suit the wishes of one gamer but not the other.

(voted 'other')

Perhaps I should clarify what if characters could die permanently, because the player failed to complete a gameplay related task and/or the character dies in combat ?

Permanent death is fine by me. I prefer it that way. I always have the option to reload and try a different tactic.

I do not like the 'unconscious' condition at all. To explain it a little better, if your party is wiped out except for one guy then everyone, no matter what happened, gets up with 1 hp. You rest a little bit and just like magic everyone is healed.

I think the old AD&D rules had it perfectly balanced with bleeding wounds and if your character suffered -10 hp he/she was dead.

Another example that isn't P&P. The Ultima series did death very well. Lost you're last HP and your dead. Then you have to either reload or visit the healer.

There is nothing wrong with making the game more real or difficult. There is too much hand holding in RPG nowadays.

I don't like 'permanent' deaths, characters can die, and it can be painful to bring back (expensive spells or trips to the temple), but let's face it, if there's no way to bring back a character, 99.99999% of the players will just reload the game before the fight if their "Grunk the barbarian" dies.
Now, it's ok for characters to permanently die as part as the storyline, like the paladin deciding to stay guarding the bridge to give time to his/her friends to escape or something.

Yes, but even then you had raise dead spells and you could bring dead characters to a temple.

Nothing wrong with that as long as it costs an arm and a leg. ;)

I was going to go with "under special circumstances" with reference to both Wulf's and wolfing's argument that if it is a part of the story/plot it can be a valid death, so to speak. However, as a part of a lost battle or a poor choice? Absolutely not. Unless you can just reload a savegame from before the battle … but that makes the whole point of permanent deaths pretty moot because all you have to do is reload and voila, no dead people.

I'm playing games to have fun and I don't find it funny to have invested dozens of hours into a game only to have single mistake or a moment of inattention force me to start over because my party (or at least key members of my party) is permanently dead with no option to bring them back. So REALLY permanent death is an absolute showstopper for me.

I have NEVER played Diablo or other Action RPGs on "hardcore" mode (1 life; die and you have to start over) and I NEVER will.

If I can reload, then that's fine for me. ;)

However, My style of playing consists of trying to bring all characters (if party-based) or the main character through the whole story … Even in strategy games I do everything I can to avoid deaths. (Age of Wonders series, especially, I would often relead several times in order to save more troops, or highly valuable ones.)

As everyone has said, death will generally just result in a save/reload cycle. If that's OK with your game design, then rock on. Story-mandated death is a totally different situation, so I won't even touch on that. Personally, I don't have the time nor energy anymore to do too much of the save/reload dance, so I'd favor a game that doesn't force me into it. I get a little too attached to my meticulously molded characters to go recruit and develop a new party member if one happens to get himself dead.

If you simply must have a hardcore death system to satisfy your vision of your design, I'd mention that Wiz8's Ironman approach might be something to think about. Iz optional.

At my age, I don't have time to re-start games. I don't buy any games with perma-death an essential part.

If it's part of the storyline, great. Otherwise, no. It might as well be a "game over" screen then, because noone would consider continuing a game with a permanently dead NPC when they might as well re-load.

Thanks a lot for the feedback so far, I can assure you will NOT need to restart the game, it will not be like hardcore or ironmen.

The game will not have the save/re-load thing, if something happen or you make a certain decision you have to deal with it. Thus the save and reload comments are irrelevant :) If all your chars die you'll NOT need to restart the game infact you'll not need to replay any part which you already played. The system is quite complex, but I think no other game had it so far.. so it will be a kind of unique :D

You're teasing us with these comments ! :lol:

I just wanted to clarify since many people said you could just save/reload :P I think some people will find the idea that you can't save and reload completely awful and drop the game off their radar…… but I think what most people do anyway is just load the latest save game, I think there are few players who would load a savegame several hours earlier in the game….. so it will not make a huge difference acctually.

I like the option to have an 'ironman' mode, but never use it my self because I'm not hardcore enough :)

What I do usually is just use the quick-save/quick-reload but every few hours I save a separate slot for a few reasons:
- In case when I quicksave it's already too late (say, I press quicksave just as the killing blow is on the way, so when I reload I die anyway)
- In case when I quicksave it's past a point of no turning back
- In case the quicksave file gets corrupted and unusable
- Just before big decisions in the game, so I can come back later if I didn't like the decision I made or just to replay the game selecting the other option without having to repeat all the content before the save.

Apropos deaths : Has anone ever incorporated a thing like the "bones" from Nethack in an RPG ?

This will not happen.

I am taking measures to avoid this happening, it would be a disaster if it happend. We would work hard to restore the save if it happend to anyone.

I kind of want to avoid this, my thinking is that the when the player plays a game he has to carefully think of the decision and stick with it, instead of saving and loading until he finds the best outcome ( Sometimes it might also be fun to stick with your decision, you just don't know it yet….. since you saved and loaded too fast ), but the most important is if you do something which has a random outcome like gambling/pickpocketing, etc etc, that you could not save and load again.

I know what you mean, but let's say there are different endings. Once I finish the game I'm usually not in the mood to replay the whole game again from scratch to experience the other paths (specially if that decision is, say, 20 hours into the game). Maybe provide automatic saved 'points' before the big story path splits, so you can go back to those and continue from there?
I'm curious, what do RPGWatchers here usually do, replay from scratch to explore the other paths or from a saved game? Or not explore other paths at all for games that have them?

Depends a lot on the game. The longer the game, the less chance of me replaying it usually. I did play Fallout I quite a few times till the end.

Most of the time I do the same as you, load and save to choose another path. But I think that kind of sucks… just one choice to determine the outcome.

Tactica Maiden of faith will not be like this! There'll be a lot of choices which would affect the outcome so to load to remake one "big decision" would not be something you could do anyway :D

Design by committee? Really? Falling for the mainstream editor-imposed traps already huh? Well… I wouldn't entice you to.

IMO, it is all on how the game is designed. Party-based crawler with a lot of action (BT, etc…)? Raise dead is a must. Something that is heavily story based? Ok, provided things make sense and are consistent.

By that I mean that a character can actually DIE is an early combat, and the story can take that into account if the player continues on. I.E. if character Susan (Sto-Helit/Death) has her heart cut out an eaten by a grue, then whatever storyline parts that would have focused on her shift to a different sequence of events due to her death.

If the character can't die unless at the scripted time, then it just feels cheap, and forced. It also removes any sense of urgency due to combat, as you know that they'll just pop right back up.

Now if it's a completely custom party, then it doesn't matter. Just so long as I can a- easily recruit a fresh face that is at least semi-comparable to the party in terms of skills/power, or b- save/reload. Now if it is a dungeon crawler, with minimal story elements; then the lack of raise dead will only annoy me. Because ultimately, crawlers don't need artificial restrictions on stuff like that.

I could not agree more with your post azraelck…

Yes that's how it works… sue dies and events will unfold differently.. the chars will also complain and be sad that she died etc etc….. except the ones which didn't like her of course!

You probably just made a sale.

If you can make that work, that would be Nobel Prize stuff. Realy.
Otherwise i'd say make it dependable of the difficulty setting, ignoring story handling. I guess that when the main PC dies, the game needs to be reloaded.

I don't know, as long as someone is willing to take up the torch, then even the main protagonist can be expendable. Just so long as the story branches to account for it.