[Scrim]

[Hope I've got this in the right spot - it's more a high-level design question than a programing question].

I've yet to play an RPG that handled character death in a way that didn't have a few drawbacks, so I'd like to get your thoughts on the best way to approach the issue.

Obviously, if you have only one character, then death = "game over". Likewise, having your whole party wiped out is similarly game-ending. The question is, what happens when only some party members die? I can think of a few scenarios:

1) Death is common but resurrection is easy.
A character dies, so you cast "resurrection" or hoof it off to the nearest temple to have them revived. The upside here is that death has some consequence (deprived of a character for a while) but not so much consequence that the player will just reload a save-game the minute anyone dies. The downside is that it makes the whole game-world seem a bit odd because death is so impermanent: presumably there are lineups at the local temple full of (the remains of) careless folks who accidentally fell from the ladder while cleaning the gutters.

2) Death is rare, but permanent, or nearly so.
I've played games where characters get "stunned" often in combat, but killed only rarely. When they do die, however, they stay dead, or else resurrecting them is so time consuming (travel down into the underworld and petition Charon to turn the boat around, or something similar) that if someone dies, you just reload your save-game. Death might as well not exist in the game, since nobody bothers with it.

3) Dying is impossible.
The thinking goes: if players aren't going to bother with the consequences of death, why have death at all? In these kinds of games, characters only get "stunned" in combat and come back to life afterwards with 1 HP. The upside is that "dying" has some consequence: the character is severely weakened until he can be healed, bringing the player one step closer to game-ending total party death. Also, in a story-driven game, you don't ever encounter the situation where a character that needs to deliver some line of dialog happens dead at the time. The downside is that, well, there's not much consequence for screwing up: if you fight poorly and all but one of your party members dies, no matter, you just heal up afterwards and carry on. Likewise, what kind of adventure is it if your party is basically immortal?

All of these approaches have pros and cons. I'd love to hear which ones people prefer, and what other ideas are out there.

[DeveloperX]

The game could keep a 'last checkpoint reached' kind of thing..so that if a character gets wiped out, they get returned to that checkpoint...all items/money/story that you acquired, and went through are gone..back to that point in the game you were at at the checkpoint.

But that only works for 1 character games.

In party-based, you could have each character be knocked out..instead of dying. they remain unconscious for some amount of time, and during that time, their stats decrease (like real life...how someone bed-ridden for a long time gets weaker, and weaker)
once they regain consciousness you would have to 'train' them to get their strengths back up. perhaps it could tie into storyline too, like if certain characters get knocked out, then those story segments dont get a chance to happen until later, hereby changing the progression of the game...the possibilities are endless.
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[Terry]

I like your third suggestion best: it's actually what I'm doing myself. The first option you mentioned is how most games seem to handle it, and it's a pity - I guess it's one of those disbeliefs that RPG players have gotten used to suspending.

I think this is a really interesting question, and I can think of a couple of games that did something different with this:

Final Fantasy VII: This game really highlighted the problem - it separated death in combat from death in the game. I don't think there's a single FFVII fan who didn't wonder "Why don't they just use a phoenix down on her?"

Baldur's Gate II: This is an interesting one: when the main character died, it was game over. However, secondary characters could die permanently and the game would continue on. It worked really well despite being a plot driven game because the characters tended to have a relationship with the main character and not with each other, so it didn't harm the whole... I dunno, immersion factor.

Deus Ex: Like Baldur's Gate, only with a lot more attention to detail - important characters could die - in fact you could even kill them yourself - and the game would carry on and adjust the rest of the plot to work. There are a couple or reasonable exceptions - at certain points, if you tried to kill important characters they were invincible and would defend themselves until they've killed you, forcing you to play the game the normal way. However, in general it worked really well...

Fire Emblem: This is another game that went with the whole "if they die, carry on" approach - it's a strategy game where you picked up new characters in each level. Any characters that died in that level stayed dead. It worked because of how carefully the cutscenes were constructed, separating characters into groups that interacted with each other.

Hmm, can't think of anything else right now... Anyone else know of other games that did something interesting with this?
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[Rainer Deyke]

Other possibilities:

• If even just one party member dies, it's game over.
• If a character dies, it's permanent - and you can't reload to a time when the character was alive.

Personally, I don't like the idea of cheating death. Death is a rather permanent condition. Trivializing death in a game somehow trivializes the whole game. Resurrections and reloading are different forms of cheating death, but the latter is more forgivable because it is not actually part of the game fiction.

[Scrim]

One theme I'm hearing from your posts is that handling death is intimately tied to how you handle saving.

At one extreme, you've got a game like Rogue where the player can't really save at all, and dying means you have to start over with a new character. At the other extreme, you have *almost any other game*, wherein death of one of your party sends you reaching for the "load" button.

I guess what I am trying to figure out is how to give the player a bit of freedom in how they save and load - I find the "don't screw up even once" aspect of rogue a bit annoying - but also kill their characters once in a while in such a way that death is a significant blow.

Like Echo, lean towards my "third option", but like Rainer, I don't want death to be trivialized.

In my way of thinking, a major sign that a game has "trivialized" death is that the player does not try hard to avoid having someone die, either because the consequences associated with death are too small (one pitfall of option #3, unless healing is difficult) or because they can just reload a save-game from immediately before the fatal battle.

I suppose one solution is, as DevX suggested, is to give death some serious in-game consequence (it's permanent, or one PC dying = game over, etc), AND to only allow saving via a checkpoint system. That way the player will seek to avoid dying, because if they have reload the game they'll lose their progress since the last checkpoint. From the player's perspective, the consequence of death is lost time.

You have to be careful with checkpoints though - I was playing Halo the other night and accidentally drove my tank off a cliff. A checkpoint triggered while I was on the way down. Fall -> die -> reload checkpoint -> fall -> die -> reload, etc. Not fun. If your checkpoints force your players to restart in an impossible situation, they are not happy campers, especially if it means they lose 20h of progress in an RPG. I guess the solution (in an RPG at least, though perhaps not for Halo =) is to allow the player to save as much as they like, but only in certain "safe" areas.

[DeveloperX]

[BadMrBox]

The checkpoints are ridicolous in Halo1/2 and that shows extremely well when you are playing splitscreen.
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[Captain Vimes]

Hmmm... this is a really good question. Death handling in RPGs tends to be done badly (the one notable exception that I can think of is Fire Emblem, but that's already been said). Players either don't care, because the character will just come back later, or just reload the game... checkpoints, I think, don't really solve this problem, as they tend to be so far apart that getting to them takes up almost as much time as actually adventuring. I'd lean toward the third, though it would seriously complicate the storyline and make the game harder to code... eh, I dunno.

But roflmao @ the Halo incident.
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[Terry]

Sorry, I'd meant to get back to this thread earlier.

Saving, in my opinion, is something that's quite easy to mess up. In an RPG or a horror game it's a decent enough way to build tension, but in general I think having limited save points just tends to be a bad idea. It can be quite frustrating if handled badly. Better to let the player save anywhere they like, I think.

I guess one upside is that occasionally, having to make the player work to get to a save point after completing a particularly hard bit of the game can feel very rewarding, but I don't think it's worth the possibility of extreme frustration should the player fail to get back. Checkpoints are a good compromise, I suppose, but you've got to be careful not to make that Halo mistake you mentioned :)

Hmm, anyway, real reason I'm posting: couple of years ago I was working on a game called Project Distraction that was going to do something really radical with this.

Essentially, the game was going to completely do away with the usual RPG response to a character getting wounded in battle. Each section of the game was going to have a little subscript that dealt with the different wounded character possibilities.

Say "Ado" and "Remy" are in a party together, for example, and Remy got injured in battle. Depending on the situation the characters were in, it would trigger a plot event and try to write the situation into the game. There was this one section where they were trying to find some bombs that had been set in a building, and in that case Ado would just tell her to try to make her own way out while he continued on - or in another section they're both trapped and trying to get out of somewhere, and if one character got injured it would trigger a subquest where the injured character would lie against a wall somewhere while the other one looked for some medicine...

And so on. The game would also remember things that happened, and adjust specific scenes of the game respectively - like in the first case above, instead of a celebratory scene at the end, Remy would spend a while moping about how she just got in the way.

In certain scenes, getting injured in battle would mean that a character would die permanently. And then every so often for the rest of the game, the other characters would reminisce about them.

I hoped this approach would make the player feel like they're playing a game where the ending hadn't really been decided. Like anything could happen.

I guess it's probably obvious enough why I never went ahead with this -
(1) It was way too much work. I worked out that it would involve at least tripling the amount of dialogue that I'd have to write.
(2) It became impossibly complicated when considering multiple characters.
(3) It would have meant that good players would see very little of the game's interesting side - in fact, if the game was any good, it would mean that players would replay the game killing off random characters at certain points just to see what would happen, which wouldn't have been a good thing.
(4) There was a real danger that the game *wouldn't* have been any good, and that this mechanic would have turned the game from something entertaining into a complete chore.

Still. I wonder if it's worthwhile making a minigame on this basis? An hour long RPG that did this might be a fun experiment :)
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[XMark]

I liked the way Diablo II handled death. You really didn't want death to happen because you would have to run to your corpse without your weapons and armor.

But the thing that made it good for me was how you don't have an option to just save. You had to save and exit at the same time. So there was no way to undo a death that happened. Good thing the game was reliably stable, though, because if it ever crashed after playing for three hours that would suck.

The "you can't go back in time" feeling is the same with MMORPG's, though death penalties in the ones I've played are relatively minor. I haven't played one that removes experience points upon death yet, I'm not sure how that would make me feel on the subject.
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[js71]

[BadMrBox]

Sounds like a good way to handle character deaths. Youll notice that you have died.
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[js71]

On the topic of save points or lack thereof, I prefer the method used in games like ff4 advance and the Phoenix Wright series: There are save points or specific spots where you can save your game, but you can also do a 'quick save' at any time-- Your game is quick saved, the game quits, and when you come back and load your quick save it's erased, leaving you to continue from that point and quick save again at any time. Added incentive to reach a save point, like 'real' save points restoring your health for example, would also add to it I think.

Not sure if that's been covered before... Forgive my laziness in reading this topic. :p

[Terry]

Hmm - I forgot one major example: Shrapnel, by Adam Cadre.

Shrapnel is a high-concept (in the Science Fiction sense) text adventure about the American Civil War... Well, sort of. In the game, the protagonist dies over and over, each time leaving his corpse behind to find in the next turn. I think it's the only game I've ever played where the main character's death is used as a game mechanic.

It's very short, and well worth playing if you haven't done so already: Direct link to the EXE.
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[js71]

Another interesting example just came to mind: Phantasy Star III. While for the most part I consider it a rather poorly-executed and unenjoyable game, character death was done in an interesting manner. When a character 'died,' he/she simply 'lost the will to fight' and could not do anything except perform healing spells.

I actually really like that idea, even though it could be poorly done and easily make the game far too easy-- I think with some balancing it would work very well.