Death in RPGs

I'm craving for a serious RPG discussion and as none of you seems to be willing to start one, I'll do it myself. There's been some talk about the realization of death in RPGs lately - especially in that NWN 2 thread Gaider was vividly defending Bioware's unconscious but not dead attempt. I don't like it and I'm sure most of you do neither. I'm sure the Codex can come up with something far better.

Here is my attempt. You can discuss it or ignore it and present your own one, it's up to you. But please keep the thread clean of the usual Codex redardo land bullshit. I think we had enough of that lately...

Now back to the topic:
The main problem is reloading. As long as the player is able to reload, he's prone to find a way to avoid death. Now that's necessary when you're playing a single character. And often natural when you're playing a whole party. And frankly speaking, I don't see many possibilities to realize death in a way that motivates the player to keep on playing and accept the consequences (that doesn't mean that there aren't such possibilities.) . Therefore I think deadly situations should be even deadlier, but reduced and better marked through narrators or character attributes and skills.

Raising deadliness:
Well, there are many means to accomplish that. More difficult enemies is one possibility but I dislike that one. I'd prefer a totally different combat system. Either a textbased one. The player is presented with a situation and has some choices according to his skills. Success will be determined through his attributes and skills. Or just a combat system without hit points (I'm going to make a thread about different combat systems in the near future - besides, I'm not saying a traditional combat system can't be challenging. It's just very abstract and represses an immersive concept of death).

Why making combat more deadly? Because that is closer to reality. Death goes with combat. That concept is usually lost in RPG - and games in general. Making combat more deadly raises the awareness that when fighting, death can be a very likely consequence. The impact this would have on the player: combat should be avoided.

Reducing deadly situations:
There are different types of combat. Above, I was talking about lethal combat. But there is much more than that. Brawls over small disputes for instance, rarely were fights to the death. Or fighting for entertainment. If the player knows that a fight to the death is likely to result in the player character's demise and if he is presented with a still violent, but less deadly solution, he'll likely choose the latter. As a result he can get beaten up, but he'll survive. And that *can* have some nice consequences - whereas death can't (mostly when controlling a party and almost always when playing a single character).

Presentation of lethal and non-lethal situations:
A player has to be able to distinguish lethal and non-lethal situations to be able to choose. This can be accomplished through different narrators - NPCs, cinematics, game world and/or through character attributes and skills. While the former shouldn't need explanation, the latter does. Character attributes and skills like perception, streetwise, lore, intelligence and whatnot can be inidcators. Is the character able to sense treachery or a trap. Is he able to determine an opponents will to kill. Stuff like that. In general I'm talking of hints that can act as a warnings to the player.


Making death permanent and forcing the player to start anew when having his character being killed adds much tension and can make the difference between a working system and an not working one.

...impossible. When the game crashes. you're fucked.

Your brainstorm is just an example of matching a "death system" to the specific topology of the game you want to make. The usual context of the "death system" ritualized Codex discussion is for standard squad tactics dungeon crawler gameplay. It's obvious that making a specialized game system matched to a specific death system can work as a unique case. No discussion is necessary, and you don't have to justify it on the basis of "realism" or on anything at all.

Crashing is one thing indeed. Another is having to walk through the same shit, convo's, etc to reach the point you died at....Extremely boring unless its a randomised game with entirely different areas and situations ala Roguelike game.

I am sure there are a handful of players that love the Ironman mode that you are espousing, but I am not one of them.

To me, theres nothing inherently bad about reloading, sorry but I still don't get what the fuss is about. In contrast, having the game crash after playing for a few hours...that would piss me off, as would having to trudge through the game again and again, to reach the point of death.

And I remember playing many a text adventure, dieing and having forgotten to save, given up after a few hours playtime.

http://www.ausgamedev.com/

There is a game that you would like. Seems decent, except for the 'death is permanent, start again!' syndrome....pardon the pun. :wink:

Challenge, now thats something lacking....I agree with that.

Volourn isn't here yet, so I'll say it:
"Death" is DEAD!!!!

SNOOFLES!!

Raising deadliness:
Well, there are many means to accomplish that. More difficult enemies is one possibility but I dislike that one. I'd prefer a totally different combat system. Either a textbased one. The player is presented with a situation and has some choices according to his skills. Success will be determined through his attributes and skills. Or just a combat system without hit points (I'm going to make a thread about different combat systems in the near future - besides, I'm not saying a traditional combat system can't be challenging. It's just very abstract and represses an immersive concept of death).

Why making combat more deadly? Because that is closer to reality. Death goes with combat. That concept is usually lost in RPG - and games in general. Making combat more deadly raises the awareness that when fighting, death can be a very likely consequence. The impact this would have on the player: combat should be avoided.

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I agree with this: I've thought about a combat system and it seems to me that at least for an RPG, a menu-based/text-based system would work well for 'deadly' combat. In any case, it would have to be turn based, since real-time would be too difficult to do. I think that combat is too unrealistic in that it's underpowered (ex: Arcanum and low-level guns - it makes no sense that you need 10 bullets to kill something). One hit kills or crippling blows should be more common. Deadlier combat would help reduce the reliance on or maybe even need for potions, which I've always regarded as a bit of a cheat.

Reducing deadly situations:
There are different types of combat. Above, I was talking about lethal combat. But there is much more than that. Brawls over small disputes for instance, rarely were fights to the death. Or fighting for entertainment. If the player knows that a fight to the death is likely to result in the player character's demise and if he is presented with a still violent, but less deadly solution, he'll likely choose the latter. As a result he can get beaten up, but he'll survive. And that *can* have some nice consequences - whereas death can't (mostly when controlling a party and almost always when playing a single character).

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Good point and I agree with this too.

Presentation of lethal and non-lethal situations:
A player has to be able to distinguish lethal and non-lethal situations to be able to choose. This can be accomplished through different narrators - NPCs, cinematics, game world and/or through character attributes and skills. While the former shouldn't need explanation, the latter does. Character attributes and skills like perception, streetwise, lore, intelligence and whatnot can be inidcators. Is the character able to sense treachery or a trap. Is he able to determine an opponents will to kill. Stuff like that. In general I'm talking of hints that can act as a warnings to the player.

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One way of doing this could be using a personality system. Instead of having general personalities, each personality could be put under a category and recognizing each category when in dialog could be a part of the game. An NPC with an 'aggressive' personality would be more likely to kill the player; an NPC with a 'passive' personality might use dialog to avoid combat, even if the player is trying hard to get them to attack. Something that always bothered me in general is that many times, NPCs all have the same reaction to insults. A personality system would help to make things more interesting. And of course, the player could choose a personality type as well, which would affect the dialog choices available to him.

Making death permanent and forcing the player to start anew when having his character being killed adds much tension and can make the difference between a working system and an not working one.

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I still think a limited save system (automatic saves every fifteen minutes and on exit into maybe 3 - 5 alternating slots) would work better than permadeath, which would be plain annoying in most cases.

A serious response: I honestly think NWN2's death system had a lot to do with long load times. While theoritically the reloading capability allows gamers to avoid death, it's not pratical because the reloading gets awfully tiresome (see Gothic 3 or VTM: Bloodlines, even NWN2).

I don't mind the idea of lethal non-lethal situations, but realistically, in a fight people fall to the ground (not necessarily unconscious) before they die, unless given some epic death blow.

I, too, like the idea of losing characters to death (SPOILER: we did lose shandra in NWN2); one alternative is to make more joinable NPCs. But that's a lot more writing and probably would skimp on the character development.

But I'm not sure how increasing the liklihood of resurrection is much different from just being knocked unconscious.

As long as load time remain long, "death" will be problematic.

Aside: This reminds me of a novel. Anybody ever read Robert Coover's "Universal Baseball Association..."; anyway there's a point where the main character is roleplaying a baseball game he invented, and he roles an nearly impossible outcome in which his beloeved rookie gets struck by a pitch in head and dies. The protagnist frets and frets over this but decides to cheat and let the player live, his life soon unravels around him and he falls into destitution....a lesson to be learned?

As with roleplay, the downline is player's own will to do so -- in this case, to accept death. Some roguelikes feature technical enforcement of that rule, like deleting the char progress file upon death, so that people coulnd't tweak it and reincarnate. However, in case of big CRPG this mechanic is uselsess (I fail to see any way to implement that in, say, fallout -- short of deleting all the saves the user's got or maybe formatting his harddrive.

In multiplayer it's completely doable though -- take Diablo 2 for instance: if you play on closed battle.net in hardcore mode you can't do anything to deny death because the character files are stored on the battle.net server, not on your hard drive. But yet again, it's a roguelike-like game, the world is primitive, so it's only the caharacter info that is saved. Same goes with MUDs and MMORPGs -- you don't need to save the world in any file because the world is always functioning.

In an SP CRPG i see no viable technical means to enforce death. So it all comes down to the player's own initiative. For instance, upon my 7-8th walkthru of fallout i actually decided to do it "hardcore" -- no reloading upon dying, or if my companions die. That was a very VERY exciting experience, and I wish I have done that on my 2nd or 3rd walkthru instead, because it really adds to the experience. It's not all about your tactical skills -- it's also about chance and I think it's right and realistic, because in real life chance matters A LOT. So all those critical hits provide a lot of grit and challenge. I still remember how I lost Sulik to some random encounter with thugs -- it was really hard because you kinda get attached to NPCs and to see them die AND NOT BEING ABLE TO DO ANYTHING addds a lot to roleplaying.

Such "hardcore" modes, no matter which CRPG they are being employed in, imply that you don't play for the munchkinistic sake of beating the game or getting the best character or flawlessly winning a battle, but for the sake of the process of gaming and roleplaying, and that's great. You have to admit it that even the most stalwart roleplayers sometimes get those powergaming urges -- it's quit e natural, it's about self-expression, perfection or what have you, and hardcore modes kinda fuse that with roleplaying and make it one -- yes, you do try to be VERY crafty at combat, but only to survive, and if there's a way to avoid combat if you're not feeling confident, you sure as hell take such an opportunity - unless you roleplay a berserker or whatnot.

I would not want to play game like Fallout in Ironman mode, just because you would have to do the same things to go where you were, in game that is generate randomly that is good.

Penalty for death can be implanted easy, resurrection doesn't have to work perfect, and it can cost. If you fuck the game so much that nobody is wiling to resurrect you then that is fine, but you should have enough info to not let that happen later in game.

If there are plenty of Characters that can join up, sweet, make death as easy or permanent as you want (Since the death of NPC joinables has been brought up). If theres raise dead, let it be horribly expensive, or only doable with some hard to find ingredient, or have a percentage chance to work.

If not, make sure there are other people who can join up.

To make a game where joinables could die and then stay dead, you would need a number of replacement characters available in order to fulfill that role. So depending on how many areas a single character can cover, it could mean many NPC's needed to be created and fleshed out.

In this sense, certain developers will never do this, because their characters are part of the forced story necessary for their games. I personally don't care if the joinable NPCS only have a few interjections and issues they care about, and then get on with things....Voice acting has made this even harder however.

By the way, do the people here advocating permadeath player characters really enjoy trudging through a massive slab of the game again (And possibly dieing again BEFORE they even get to the part they originally died at)? Honestly?

In pen and paper, and in totally randomised games, sure...otherwise, no fucking way for me.

I mostly agree with the OP, as there is seldomly a motivation to really find a way to avoid death. Usually I just reload and try to fight the enemy another time, until I finally beat him. Or walk off and gather some equipment/experience. There need to be more consequences to death - and please no forced deletion of your character.
This would be okay if there was an optional "hardcore mode" like in Diablo 2 - die and your character gets deleted. It's okay if it's optional. It can be extremely annoying if it's forced. Especially when exploring and you find a really strong enemy. He kicks your ass before you can flee. Your character is fucked, permanently. Not good.

I think they should try out something new, some kind of system that fits into the game and does not require reloading. Now, the going unconscious instead of dying is quite lame. Maybe if you had a survival skill you could "play dead" and the enemy won't notice you're just unconscious, and when he is away you can stand up again. But he has looted you before, mind you. Then you need to find something to bind your wounds, if you don't want to die from blood loss. This would be a system that puts a high emphasis on survival skills, and it would surly provide lots of fun and role playing options.

But then, there are also instant kills. What if the enemy pierces your heart? Or you get an arrow in your head? Yes, you're dead. Nothing to do about that. Dead. But wait! This is a world of magic [usually, if it's not SF or Post Apocalyptic]. And your soul should usually live on after death. So you could find yourself in some kind of afterlife after death. There should also be a way to return back to life from this point on. The only problem is that it might seem a bit silly to ask your gods after the 10th time of death "please, would you bring me back to life?", and it would make these gods think that you don't like their afterlife. But whatever, it's still an alternative for unconsciousness/reloading.

Then there would be the option of becoming something immortal. Something that can be resurrected after death. Okay, there could be the possibility that a few days after your death you were found by a cleric and he resurrected you, but it seems too made up, especially when you die in a remote place. Then there is the possibility to become - undead. Yes, undead. Not a simple zombie or such, but much rather a lich. There could be some after-death quest [maybe in your afterlife or whatever] which makes it possible to resurrect your dead body as a lich. You'd be alive again, but you'd have to deal with the consequences of being an undead. As your body is still fresh you won't have the problem of looking like a rotten corpse, but still, people will notice you're an undead somehow, and react to it. Maybe you will even be seen as a danger by the townspeople and you are denied access into town. This would surly be an interesting way to solve the reloading problem.

Then to death itself, and the hitpoint/potion quaffing problem. I also often thought about that, and it really seems a bit unrealistic that you can heal ANY wound with a simple magic potion. Now, such potions could have imitations. They can heal open wounds and close them to prevent blood loss. They can help when you lost too much blood [imagine it like a blood transfusion... there HAS to be a reason why health potions are red]. But, let's say, they can't help with broken bones and injuries in the internal organs. Thus a new health system needs to be developed. The old hitpoint system could be retained, with hitpoints representing your blood maybe, and when you lose blood, you lose hitpoints. Then there are your bones and internal organs. If your bones are damaged, the corresponding body part [broken shoulder bone - arm etc.] has severe mali on it. Nobody runs fast with broken legs. If the internal organs are damaged, it can have devastating effects. If your lungs are pierced, you can hardly get breath and in situations where you need to run or fight, you are exhausted extremely quickly and even are in danger of falling unconscious because of too less air. So you need to lay down and rest, and try to heal the lungs. If your heart gets pierced, you need to heal it with magic or something else, FAST , or you die. You got maybe half a minute or 1 turn in a Turn based combat system to fix it, or you die.
This would add a lot of tension, and really make you less daring in combat, as every hit can be fatal.

As for crashing, ADOM - when it still was unstable - did a good job of saving your progress just before a crash. I have no idea how Biskup managed it, but he did.

To make a game where joinables could die and then stay dead, you would need a number of replacement characters available in order to fulfill that role. So depending on how many areas a single character can cover, it could mean many NPC's needed to be created and fleshed out.

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Almost every game that have joinable npcs does provide a way to beat it solo, or at least *attempt to* -- which is also an option, especially in "ironman" mode.

Game can have autosave that is removed when you die, your progress have to be saved in Ironmode also so it can be done in way that is not easy to exploit (like making copy of save, maybe it is part of bigger file, I don't know haw it works).

This would be okay if there was an optional "hardcore mode" like in Diablo 2 - die and your character gets deleted. It's okay if it's optional. It can be extremely annoying if it's forced. Especially when exploring and you find a really strong enemy. He kicks your ass before you can flee. Your character is fucked, permanently. Not good.

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Sure it's a matter of preference, but Diablo 2 woulnd't be fun to me if not for hardcore mode. If you just want to beat the game once - you'll HAVE to do it in softcore because hardcore is not available unless you finish it in softcore. In games with randomized content hardcore cna never get tiresome or tedious for me. Since i started playing on bnet this month (after a long pause) i lost about 5 midlevel (40-60) chars, mostly to pks. but that didn't break me, especially since you can level up fast.

JarlFrank said:

Then there would be the option of becoming something immortal. Something that can be resurrected after death. Okay, there could be the possibility that a few days after your death you were found by a cleric and he resurrected you, but it seems too made up, especially when you die in a remote place.

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You made up rules for resurrection, body doesn't have to be required it can be teleported in process of resurrection, those who want you to live could be notice that you had died

Atrokkus: Hmm, Ok then, Solo Baldurs gate 1 with a Fighter.

Death is permanent. You have to start again with a new character if you die....

I always play CRPGs in "Ironman" mode: for me, character death means I've screwed up and need to start again. I'm aware that I'm in a minority in that I actively enjoy replaying a game (with certain caveats) since I always start a totally different character. It does mean that I'm much less likely to rush my character into a combat situation, and exploration becomes much more fraught with peril.

Much as I enjoy my mode of playing a game, I can't imagine imposing it on anyone else: surely it's down to the individual player as to whether they play "ironman" or not? Isn't that much of the attraction of a RPG, the ability to play it how you like?

Of course, if you're going to impose a dead == dead system, you've got to make a huge and varied game-world so replaying it doesn't get boring. You need various approaches to side-quests, a flexible MQ, decent NPCs with variable dialogue, randomised dungeons, randomised side-quests... In short, all the things that most modern CRPGs seem incapable of offering.

I'd also like to see a break between lethal/non-lethal combat. It always struck me as totally bizarre that a shop-keeper would fight to the death because you stole an apple. Surely, at some point, either you or he will be so battered that one of you will yell 'uncle'? (Something else that strikes me as odd: why would an unarmoured NPC with a dagger start whaling on a barbarian wearing leather amour and carrying the mother of all axes? It's a sure-fire recipe for NPC-death).

I have no problem with what you seen in most adventure games, (e.g. Full Throttle's, "Er, wait, that's not how it happened). Unfortunately it doesn't translate well into RPGs simply because of the way they work.

I haven't played NWN2 but RPG style reviving isn't a problem for me. It's part of the game mechanics. If someone dies in combat you have to deal with the loss of their power until the end of the battle then you have to spend resouces to revive them. If everyone dies, you load.

It eliminates the need to save and load constantly, even though it's not realistic at all. Frankly, character death ought to be part of the plot, not gameplay. In other words, a scripted event. A permanently dead character in a game just means you've failed and need to start over, there's no real way to force a player to accept the horrendous loss of capability that comes with a death of a party member in a somewhat nonlinear game. There's just no other way of dealing with death in a RPG style game.

In Darklands when the entire party was defeated you lost all your possesions and there was a chance one of the party would be permentantly killed. The loss of possesions hurt but could be mitigated by carrying banknotes and storing equipment in inns.

Dead party members could be replaced at the next inn by creating a new one. But the replacements are normal starting characters and won't have near the skills of a veteran adventurer. This means the party is going to have spend time and money babysitting and training the new recruit until they can get their skills up to a decent level.

I always thought it was a good system. You're penalized for being foolish or just having bad luck but at the same time it's not game over.

Whatever you decide to do make it optional. Don't expect everyone to like your vision of what an rpg should be.

Scripted character deaths (npcs in your party that is) suck ass PERIOD. Though if you have control over when and if it hapens i quess it can be acceptable, but scripting such things in as part of a plot is just evidence of a lazy writer.

Sirbolt said:

Scripted character deaths (npcs in your party that is) suck ass PERIOD. Though if you have control over when and if it hapens i quess it can be acceptable, but scripting such things in as part of a plot is just evidence of a lazy writer.

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Depends on the situation. Like, for example, Baldur's Gate 2, when you found out Yoshimo is a spy to Irenicus. You had to kill him later.
This made sense, actually, and was better than just having him killed off scriptedly. [like, your PC or an NPC from your party yelling "OMGZ TRAITOR!!!" and then killing him]

Ladonna said:

Crashing is one thing indeed. Another is having to walk through the same shit, convo's, etc to reach the point you died at....Extremely boring unless its a randomised game with entirely different areas and situations ala Roguelike game.

I am sure there are a handful of players that love the Ironman mode that you are espousing, but I am not one of them.

To me, theres nothing inherently bad about reloading, sorry but I still don't get what the fuss is about. In contrast, having the game crash after playing for a few hours...that would piss me off, as would having to trudge through the game again and again, to reach the point of death.

And I remember playing many a text adventure, dieing and having forgotten to save, given up after a few hours playtime.

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RK47 said:

...impossible. When the game crashes. you're fucked.

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I just take Elwro's post as an answere:

Elwro said:

As for crashing, ADOM - when it still was unstable - did a good job of saving your progress just before a crash. I have no idea how Biskup managed it, but he did.

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If Biskup managed to do it, others can as well. Anyway, the ironman mode is just secondary in my concept. I wouldn't like to play Gothic 3 in ironman mode. But Gothic 3 is an action RPG. In most cases I can't avoid combat. Combat isn't an alternative, it's the only possibility to advance. As Zomg pointed out, I'm matching a combat system to a specific type of games. RPGs where combat is but an option. Feel free to do it differently.

Ladonna said:

http://www.ausgamedev.com/

There is a game that you would like. Seems decent, except for the 'death is permanent, start again!' syndrome....pardon the pun. :wink:

Challenge, now thats something lacking....I agree with that.

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I don't like how it's implemented in Omega Syndrome. I tried out the Demo. I couldn't avoid combat, I had to face the worms and I couldn't even persuade the guard into helping me (the dev is considering to implement that so the next version might be more enjoyable).

LCJr. said:

In Darklands when the entire party was defeated you lost all your possesions and there was a chance one of the party would be permentantly killed. The loss of possesions hurt but could be mitigated by carrying banknotes and storing equipment in inns.

Dead party members could be replaced at the next inn by creating a new one. But the replacements are normal starting characters and won't have near the skills of a veteran adventurer. This means the party is going to have spend time and money babysitting and training the new recruit until they can get their skills up to a decent level.

I always thought it was a good system. You're penalized for being foolish or just having bad luck but at the same time it's not game over.

Whatever you decide to do make it optional. Don't expect everyone to like your vision of what an rpg should be.

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Is the last sentence referring to the ironman mode or the whole concept? Because it would be impossible to make the whole concept optional...

kingcomrade said:

I haven't played NWN2 but RPG style reviving isn't a problem for me. It's part of the game mechanics. If someone dies in combat you have to deal with the loss of their power until the end of the battle then you have to spend resouces to revive them. If everyone dies, you load.

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I hate the way it's done in NWN 2. After the combat the NPCs just got up and that was it. Prelude to Darkness did a better job. Unconscious NPC could be finished off by the enemy. I really rushed to help an unconscious NPC in fear he'd be killed. It added some urgency to the combat, giving it a nice touch.

kingcomrade said:

It eliminates the need to save and load constantly, even though it's not realistic at all. Frankly, character death ought to be part of the plot, not gameplay. In other words, a scripted event. A permanently dead character in a game just means you've failed and need to start over, there's no real way to force a player to accept the horrendous loss of capability that comes with a death of a party member in a somewhat nonlinear game. There's just no other way of dealing with death in a RPG style game.

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I don't think so. I think it's absolutely possible, just hasn't been done before (at least, not to my knowledge). I'm working on a game concept where a character's death is permanent and has lasting effects on the game world. It's sort of the character generator of Darklands enlarged to a full game. The game centers on the life of a single character you form and who can have various impacts on the world he's living in (and vice versa). When he dies, the changes he made remain - or at least the consequences. The character's history is embodied by the game world and when making a new character, you start to play in the changed world. A nice gimmick would be playing the child of your last character. Having a main storyline is impossible though.

Monolith said:

Is the last sentence referring to the ironman mode or the whole concept? Because it would be impossible to make the whole concept optional...

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Iron man, autosave on death, whatever. A lot of people just can't handle losing

Personally I've never seen the need for Ironman mode. Just show a little willpower and don't reload everytime something doesn't work out the way you want it to. I always thought it was more for bragging rights.

BTW isn't there a roguelike that does the family thing? Something like the offspring get bonuses based on the level the parent had reached before getting offed.