Jtgibson wrote:

Of course, mine starts out much more lenient than "a couple of hours". My current rule is 3^(x-1)*15 seconds, where x is the number of times you have died. If the community is able to band together to enforce justice on a griefer, eventually that griefer will be ousted out of the game due to number of deaths, while the deaths of legit players will be distributed over the legit players as a whole and won't cost them so much.

I guess the idea is, don't knock what you haven't tried.

After having played Final Fantasy Online here on Byond for a while, my experience says that none of this is true. Nobody wanted to be that guy who ended up dying "for the community" and have themselves set back and the small group of PKers that roamed around for several months pretty much had free reign of the game until the host had to evict them when they finally abused some loophole in the game (and at that point people were scrutinizing them for a way to get them banned).

I don't get the delusion some people have around here that "if there's a griefer, the community will 'band together' to get rid of him". Especially if there's a small group of them, they're generally going to be more organized about it than any half-hearted player militia and in the event one forms, why would someone even show up for that?

Really, all of these death-deterrent ideas people come up with aren't going to solve the problem of griefing, because the griefer just don't care about his character and that's never going to change. It's the people who DO care about the game and their characters that get affected by this.

I don't mean to be picking on your post specifically or anything, but it's like people imagine these "best case" scenarios when trying to implement PVP penalties for griefers, but I don't think it's right to go with that because the fact that you're dealing with a griefer in the first place means it's not a good scenario. I know your formula was just an example, but there's already two really negative points to it.

1) It punishes long-time characters who actually play the game. You didn't mention any sort of method of reducing the time, so gradually your character builds up more and more time with each death...

2) The griefer wins and successfully beats another player. He then proceeds to camp the corpse and repeatedly kill the same person whenever the chance is available. Now the victim is racking up extra death time from a system implemented to discourage it in the first place.

As for the Ultima example, the first thing that comes to mind is "kill someone and hide the body". :P



"How should I implement permadeath?"
"Discourage players from killing in PVP."
"Add guards that kill murderers on sight."
"Weaken the murderer as a penalty."
"Give him bad karma."

Why, exactly, is there going to be permadeath in the first place if all of these clauses have to be introduced? Or even PVP for that matter?

Sarm wrote:

Or even PVP for that matter?

Since that last thought echoes what I've been thinking for the last two posts, I'll just say it. If you're trying to discourage people from killing each other, then DON'T LET THEM DO IT! Its pretty dumb to put in a PVP system and then discourage people from using it.

Frankly I'd prefer games where players team up against the evil antagonistic force instead of a dog-eat-dog online game where the strongest players loot/kill every weaker player that comes along. And if the players can't kill each other, then there's a lot more incentive for them to team up.

Which isn't to say someone couldn't put a PVP Arena into their game if they wanted it.

This is probably a bad idea for BYOND, but it might work for the right game:

How about only allowing GMs the power to kill and be killed by players? They'd throw together some short-lived villian character who's locked at a certain level and skillset, and the GM plays out a story where the players are the heroes and the GM has to challenge them to defeat him. Give the GM a quota for kills, like 2 per story event, which they can't exceed. They don't need to use them, but it might add a nice twist to the story if he has the ability to wipe out some gung-ho cowboy who thinks he can just raid the castle without any plan or help.

If you're going for an RP game, everything has to advance the story or support the existing storyline. If you can't trust the players to always play to the story, then make it a GM's task. That's really what they should be used for anyways. If your GM is a griefer, they shouldn't be a GM.

~X

Jtgibson wrote:

Also, long time characters should always live in the fear of death and should be genuinely afraid to die for fear of losing what they have. If they start racking up long wait times, that's what I call A Good Thing -- they should learn to be more cautious or learn that their present style of combat just isn't working for them.

...But why? :/ I look at something like that and think that I'd rather not risk my character to explore or try new things. That would just lead me toward not wanting to play the game at all. I can't be the only person who would look at it like this, can I? Why should anybody actually -fear- the death of their character in the first place?

If a person attempts to retrieve their body alone, they're pretty damned stupid and probably deserve to die. The idea if you get killed is to return in greater numbers. Griefers can't do that. ;-)

That's exactly what the griefers did in FFO, because at times there was anywhere between 2 and 6 of them roaming around together, taking on (and beating) over twice the number of people opposing them. Because the "community" was generally avoiding death while the griefers didn't care, they flat-out had more PVP experience and could do a lot more. FFO kinda-sorta has corpse retrieval, but not once did I ever notice anybody interesting in helping someone who just got killed because nobody else wanted to take the chance that they would lose their stuff too. At that point, if you just died and lost all your stuff, you really do have nothing left to lose to go back on the (slim) chance that maybe you'd retrieve something. To me, the whole idea just seems broken from the start.

Well, all I really know about Jtgibson's game is what I read in this thread. I took his "retrieve your body" sentence and his player reviving formula to mean that there had to be some materialistic character progression, either in exploring or the usual hack and slash. If there was little of that, I wouldn't understand the need for someone to retrieve his corpse in the first place unless you're required to walk back as a spirit before you revive. Like I said, though, I don't know too much about it so I suppose I'll see if I can look it up on his member page later or something.

If the game is meant to be a full-force storytelling experience, I guess I could see permadeath working but I think the game would not only have to be built around the idea (duh, hence this thread :P) but the player community would also have to utilize it as a sort of "enhancement" to storytelling, instead of a real deterrent to PVP. Of course, nobody wants to lose their progress in a game; I think I'd go crazy if I was forced to delete my save file if I ever messed up once in any console RPG. You're still taking a person's invested time and cramming it down the toilet. If Jtgibson's game has very little (if any) leveling grind or collectibles like gold, special items, etc. then maybe a character-respawning system would be more harmful for roleplaying than permadeath? It's harder to get attached to a storyline character if all you have to do is wait a certain amount of time before you pull him out of the ethereal infirmary.

Come to think of it, I don't know if anybody asked this question yet. What kind of roleplaying game do you have in mind? A start-to-finish sort that you'd find in a console game, D&Dish with a GM to walk you through stories, or a sandbox game where you dump a bunch of players to entertain each other? It looks like the replies so far (including my own, I know) have been focused more on the consequences of dying in the game, and not as much discussion about what the game is actually about, like what you do with your character when he's alive in the first place.

Well, if I could actually finish my RP ((I seem to have a knack for not finishing projects. Sucks, I really need to do something about that)), it'll be mainly sandbox, with perhaps a little bit of GM-interaction as story-tellers to make sure it doesn't get too far off-task.

And of course, without any of the preset classes and your character being basically an empty slate, you can form it completely as you desire ((whether, as in my previous example, you are a mercenary, or a greedy self-serving lord, or perhaps a cleric that goes out and tries to rescue other players before they permadeath kicks in and thus earning yourself favours from other players, whatever you want to do to build up your own little empire.))

Sarm wrote:

Well, all I really know about Jtgibson's game is what I read in this thread. I took his "retrieve your body" sentence and his player reviving formula to mean that there had to be some materialistic character progression, either in exploring or the usual hack and slash. If there was little of that, I wouldn't understand the need for someone to retrieve his corpse in the first place unless you're required to walk back as a spirit before you revive. Like I said, though, I don't know too much about it so I suppose I'll see if I can look it up on his member page later or something.

Actually, the corpse retrieval was going to be done by your buddies. The original plan was to make death permanent until you have been revived, meaning that when you die, you either create an alternate character to gather up your body (strongly discouraged, both for safety reasons (approaching the person who successfully killed you with a badly injured character is a bad idea) and for degrees-of-separation reasons) or you wait until your friends manage to retrieve the body (which can be a rather trying experience in itself, since they not only have to fight off whatever it was that slew you, but also have to drag your body all the way back). If you have neither option available, that's the end of that character, gone, finito.

It was an either-or sort of thing. Either a time-delay system (which allows you to respawn badly injured with no equipment, a long way away from the site of death in a sanctuary area), or a corpse retrieval system (which does not allow you to respawn, and where you can only resume playing as that character once someone has brought the body back to the Lord British equivalent in order to be resurrected).

If the game is meant to be a full-force storytelling experience, I guess I could see permadeath working but I think the game would not only have to be built around the idea (duh, hence this thread :P) but the player community would also have to utilize it as a sort of "enhancement" to storytelling, instead of a real deterrent to PVP. Of course, nobody wants to lose their progress in a game; I think I'd go crazy if I was forced to delete my save file if I ever messed up once in any console RPG. You're still taking a person's invested time and cramming it down the toilet. If Jtgibson's game has very little (if any) leveling grind or collectibles like gold, special items, etc. then maybe a character-respawning system would be more harmful for roleplaying than permadeath? It's harder to get attached to a storyline character if all you have to do is wait a certain amount of time before you pull him out of the ethereal infirmary.

Come to think of it, I don't know if anybody asked this question yet. What kind of roleplaying game do you have in mind? A start-to-finish sort that you'd find in a console game, D&Dish with a GM to walk you through stories, or a sandbox game where you dump a bunch of players to entertain each other? It looks like the replies so far (including my own, I know) have been focused more on the consequences of dying in the game, and not as much discussion about what the game is actually about, like what you do with your character when he's alive in the first place.

Yeah, Newtopia is the sandboxed community-oriented style; when a character dies, it's meant to be an important event, just as important if a particular faction of players decides to declare war on another faction of players. In a classic RPG (which I usually distinguish from "roleplaying" even though both supposedly mean the same thing), permadeath is just plain unnecessary unless you're going for a roguelike dungeon-crawling style of gameplay.