[BadMrBox]

[Scrim]

[js71]

That's a cool idea. It almost reminds me of Prey (not an rpg of course, but still), where you would be transported to a small area when you die where you would shoot different colored flying creatures to get back health and such before you were sucked back into the living world (if you didn't get enough health while 'dead,' you would obviously die again pretty soon).

[BadMrBox]

Ah, Prey. I'm playing that at this very time. It has a interesting way to handle death.
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[js71]

[JimKurth]

How about this for a death idea?

When 1 party member gets near death, the other members switch to protecting that member. And once everyone is near death, they retreat from battle and you have to face that battle again later on (if it's a boss) and you don't gain anything from the battle. This way you don't have to worry about characters dying and don't need to end the game and you take them out of battle at the last instant (say everyone's HP is 5% of the max each). This has pros and cons:
Pros: no ending or adjusting the game to compensate for deaths. Another is that the player knows they need to level up before fighting the boss (this could be a con if treated poorly) or develop a new strategy. The poor battle could benefit with enemy experience (characters fight better against the enemy than before cuz they "know" how the enemy fights).
Cons: Leveling up and going back into battle after recovering. This makes the game as linear as pointing to an object. Another could be just reloading a previous save point. Nobody really dies in battle, just mortally wounded and the battle ends. If Enemy Experience is used, that is another variable tossed in the bag with all the others.

Either way, there's always pros and cons to any death-handled scenario. I do agree that death is handled poorly in games cuz it's too easy to reload and replay again and again and again. And if you can't beat that enemy, you give up the game for awhile. I recall FF6's MagiMaster boss and kept dying and having to climb that darn tower again and again... and then I gave up.

[Hajo]

[RangerSheck]

I'm having a bit of a struggle with death in my game. Since my game is browser-based, and therefore online, there is no option to "save and reload". So right off the bat, I made a very early decision that death would never be permanent. The game is party-based, and you have active and inactive characters, so if a character dies, they are at 0 health and they need to be moved out of the active to recover health.

Originally, I figured that since I'm not penalizing characters for death in terms of their skills (no levels or experience in my game, just skills) that it wouldn't be so bad to have characters lose their equipment after dying (equipment in my game is quite simple - think old school FFs - just a couple of items on each character). I justified this by backing it up with Role-Playing logic - if someone beats you up, they get to take all of your stuff (and you're not "dead" at 0 health, you're just beaten into submission). Just like when you defeat your enemies, you can take all of their equipment. Also, there was no option to escape a battle.

I quickly found out that people were not happy when they died - in fact, the thought of having to re-acquire equipment caused some people to quit outright. I detailed my experiences here: http://rangersheck.com/2007/6/4/the-death-penalty-handling-defeat-in-crpg-design
To sum up, I changed it so that there is an option to flee battles (you lose skill points in doing so) and dying in a battle causes a PC to only lose equipment they had equipped (not spare equipment in their inventory). Of course, if one or more PCs die but the others win the battle, no equipment gets lost.

I thought this was a good compromise, but I'm still finding players getting frustrated with equipment loss. Since the game is web-based and meant to be semi-casual, I don't want people to feel like at any time they have to "work". I think most people don't care too much about losing typical equipment, because it's not that hard to replace (usually they have spare pieces anyway) but particularly, there are a few "special" items that can be acquired via missions/quests/etc. People get really upset when they lose these items, despite the fact that the items are not really that much better than the other equipment - but because they are "unique" and they were the reward received for completing a mission, people grow very attached.

My players are asking for some changes here: either some items are tagged in a way that means they cannot be lost in battle (nor sold to other players in the market) or there should be a way for them to re-acquire those lost items. I say, if you know you're going to lose a battle, you have to bite the bullet and make any character who has an item dear to you flee before they die. But, of course, I don't want players quitting out of frustration.

I'm thinking of making it so that equipment is never lost in a battle - instead, going the route where equipment slowly degrades over time. Something like: after winning a battle, each piece of equipment has a small chance to degrade a small amount. If a character died during any battle, the chance of their equipment degrading is much higher (still a small degrade though).

In most cases, this equipment is going to get replaced with better equipment before it degrades noticeably for a given player - my thought here is in saving the in-game economy from becoming flooded with cheap equipment (since currently character death is the only way equipment can be lost in the game).

Sorry for re-opening an old post with my rambling. Any thoughts?
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Pioneers of Aethora - Browser-Based Tactical RPG: http://aethora.com
Ranger Sheck Blogs about Gaming and Development: http://rangersheck.com