Staying alive, staying alive!

Well, if you can say one thing about this blog, its that it's intermittent!

On the subject of handling death in MMOs/RPGs, as I've mentioned before, the problem is no game that I'm aware of handles death anywhere close to correctly.  Generally speaking you either suffer some equipment damage, some monetary penalty is incurred, and you may have to repeat some aspects of your most recent journey/quest/whatever.

The problem is these penalties are either generally too insignificant that death becomes largely irrelevant, and/or there's a danger of monotony in repetition.

I've troubled over this problem for years: how to handle death?

But then it struck me, the reason why I couldn't find a satisfactory answer was that I was asking the wrong question.  Its not so much how to handle death, but how to handle life.

I went back to the core of the problem.  An episodic discussion I've had with several friends and acquaintances concerns an RPG I'd like to make.  Computer game RPGs - even the good ones - still fall short in many ways when comparted to their seminal pen & paper antecedents.  And one aspect is in the relative importance of the life of your character.  In the vast majority of p&p games (Paranoia aside) the life of your character is all important.  Rarely does one rush in (unless you have a headstrong, foolhardy character or a very forgiving GM).  Part of the fun and experience of playing such games is surviving - often against all odds - and indeed in many games the death of one's character may be permanent a cause a player to have to be reintroduced as a new character later on.
Death is so significant in p&p RPGs in fact that some of my most memorable p&p moments concern how various characters died.  The situations create experiences that are as memorable as the best films one has seen or the best books one has read.

In the digital RPG (dRPG?  computer RPG?) I want to make, I'd like to capture some if not all of this potential experience.  But dRPGs differ from pen & paper games.  Death cannot realistically be handled in an identical fashion outside the hardcore mode enjoyed by a smattering of hardcore players.  But it all boils down to tension.

I realised that what I wanted to create was tension.  Tension so that your character creeps along a dungeon corridor, flickering torch in hand, listening hard for the sounds of nearby monsters.  Not rushing about the place wading through rooms of creatures.  These games have their place, but its not the game I'd like to create.

In essence I want to capture the idea of threat.  Make the player feel threatened so they act cautiously and when they do achieve their goals the experiential award is all the greater for it.

So the mechanism here is not just about making a game hard - that road can readily lead to frustration - its about constructing mechanisms that reward a player for staying alive rather than how to correctly handle death.  I want to create the situation where death is avoided.  Virtually at all costs.  Handling death correctly is still an important mechanic, and one I'll return to later, but first, here's a few of the ideas I've had about rewarding characters for not rushing to their deaths.  I want to break that cycle I see online all too often that the way to play MMOs and RPGs is to rush-in, die, respawn, rinse and repeat until one eventually blunders one's way through.

No more Leroy!

Favour of the Gods.  This is a meter that builds up the longer you stay alive whilst you're actually doing stuff.  Questing etc.  You can't just hang about in a tavern, leave yourself logged in to a safe zone and build up the meter, you have to be actively doing something, so perhaps tie it in with movements/actions performed in a hostile zone.  We might want to call this meter Heroism, as that is one of the core experiences I'd like to deliver for players, make them feel like heroes. 

Favour/Heroism does two things.  It acts as a general buff to everything you do.  And it should be a reasonably significant buff.  Something you notice when you have it and when you lose it.  And you lose it by dieing.  You die and you're Heroism is reset to zero.   Maybe Heroism is not the right name?

Also, when you completely fill the bar and keep it filled for some time you are bestowed with a blessing from the Gods.  These blessings are generally situation specific - might well be permanent - and probably the only way to get certain boons.

In this way we should be able to encourage people to stay alive.

Another thing I want to achieve is the experience of a co-operative party.  I believe co-op multiplayer is the best way to achieve the kind of dRPG experience I'd like to deliver.  One of the flaws IMHO of MMOs is the medium's inherent failure to deliver heroics.   Yes I know that's quite a contraversial statement.  But in a game model where one is completing tasks that 1000s of players have completed before you, and 1000s after you, in a world populated by 1000s - many of which are more powerful than you - how heroic are you exactly?  The model, I believe, is inherently flawed.

But what MMOs have shown they do well is in their in-game marketplaces and economies.  So a combination of co-op multiplayer adventuring where you are the heroes, combined with an MMO marketplace for trading would make a nice combination.  But that's for another post.

So our intention here is to develop mechanics which support the notion of encouraging players to stay alive.  To act cautiously.  Death mechanics are still required and will be the subject of my next post.


*This post has been brought to you by Richard's Meandering Brain and its Inability to Stay on Topic.