Open Discussion: Dying and Penalties for Death

[Maiyannah]

Hi all,
We had this discussion a bit on Discord but it would be good to have it here for future reference.

I'm interested in hearing what ideas people have on a penalty for death on the server. There were a variety of suggestions and all of them have some merit, but also costs/benefits and so it's worth discussing them.

The design goal of a death penalty is to keep people from just "facerolling" hard content until they win. We want to disincentivise people "brute forcing" content, as this greatly devalues the feeling of risk in the setting.

With that in mind, these were suggestions:

1] Have items dropped on death.
Items of value to the player can be incentive enough to players not to do this. This is simple to implement and Problems include the fact that some classes are more item dependant than others. Casters still maintain effectiveness if they don't have a staff for instance.

2] Have items damaged on death.
Armour, rings, and other gear could be damaged on death and require repair before they have their full effectiveness again. Something akin to form of resurrection sickness, this would require recovery from the player until they are fighting fit. It was suggested the item could be random. I'd suggest we could have a table for each type of class ("martial", "arcane caster", "divine caster" or some sensible other categorization), which would have a higher chance for items more meaningful to the class, but still moderately "random" (not actually random, obviously)

3] Have experience lost upon death.
When a player dies, resurrection or being raised is a traumatic experience. It leaves scars on the soul in the same way injury leaves scars on the body. So one traditional D&D way of having this be impactful is the loss of experience. This is by far the easiest thing to code, however, it has its own problems. Losing large chunks of progress because of a poor die roll out of the blue, especially since some items can have large critical hit multipliers. If we went this route, I would propose we have it lose the progress to next level at lower levels, and a % of it as you increase in level - and then if you had no progress to the next level, then you would drop down a level (appropriate amount of XP as you would have lost with the %).

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These are, of course, not the only possibilities, please feel free to share other ideas if you have them. I welcome your thoughts.

[Talis]

I think exp loss can be fine in theory, and it is certainly the biggest 'threat.' Having said that I also feel like losing a full level is far too harsh. One way to mitigate it could be some rare item that you could acquire and spend to avoid this fate? Or maybe half a level cost?

[Maiyannah]

I think exp loss can be fine in theory, and it is certainly the biggest 'threat.' Having said that I also feel like losing a full level is far too harsh. One way to mitigate it could be some rare item that you could acquire and spend to avoid this fate? Or maybe half a level cost?

One thing I think is: we should only really be penalizing players whom "self-ressurect", ie if they choose not to be rescued, because otherwise, the cost for the resurrection is the other players time and resources, which is already "paid". This would avoid the worst of this from the onset.

I think losing progress to next level - with some reasonable cap of amount for higher levels - is probably more than enough for higher levels, and not very punitive for low-levels since it can be recouperated quickly. I'd only drop people down if they don't have progress to burn, or only have a very small amount, at high levels.

If I did implement this approach, I'd program it in such a way it's easy to change the values if we decide they're too punitive or not punitive enough.

[wilkins1952]

Agreed, Having the basic system in place and the values can be tweaked and adjusted depending on how often people use it, What levels the people that use it are and so on,

[Maiyannah]

Having the basic system in place and the values can be tweaked and adjusted depending on how often people use it

This is definitely the advantage of thinking of all this stuff at the onset: we can design the system in a way where we make it easy to tweak these values as we deem neccesary, so that changing certain things doesn't take a lot of dev work.

It's a little more dev work "up front", but it is an investment that pays dividends down the road.

[Maiyannah]

With the introduction of the Wounds discussion my thought is that rather than an item or XP penalty, an idea I had is that we could basically give them a Wound that they cannot cure for X length of time if they "self res". This would force players to slow down (or accumulate more) without them losing huge tracts of progress.

Thoughts on this?

[wilkins1952]

That seems like a good idea. The first time you self res say a -5 malus to level as level drain (Down to minimum of 1) And have this take say 12 hours to recover from. So basically you have to slow down for a day. But if you push ahead and self res again then the XP penalty is enforced.

[Maiyannah]

I would expand this a little maybe. A self res that is equivalent to a raise dead (ie the corpse wasn't mutilated/disintegrated/etc), could maybe just be a 4 hour temp time out, one that required ressurect (woops, someone cast disintegrate on you) could be longer like a day.

[Maiyannah]

I would like to revisit this in the light of the release of the Dragon's Neck server. They do something like I was suggesting here and I am modifying it to compromise with my own idea to come up with a system I think works.

Essentially, this would be a system of Wounds.

When you get downed, you gain a Minor Wound (from a list of possible minor buffs). This Minor Wound is removed when you rest. This would keep people from just "facerolling" content until they get through - or at least act to try to dissuade them.

When you die, and are raised, either by self or by another player, you gain a Major Wound (from a list of possible major buffs). This needs to be removed from seeing a priest NPC, or by means of specific high level cures (this will vary based on the Major Wound)

Major Wounds persist over time until healed.

If you gain four Major Wounds without healing them your character is considered dead. You cannot self-revive with respawn and priest NPCs will not be able to raise you. You would have to have a player cast True Resurrection. While this sounds harsh, any prudent player will be healing Major Wounds as soon as they can, so it would only get there either by a player choosing to approach it as a semi-permadeath mechanic, or by players whom try to ignore these effects.

I would have to meditate on the effects for Minor Wounds and Major Wounds, but how does this system sound?

[GuardianTai]

I quite like the wound mechanic. Makes it feel a lot more... punishing, to die, or get downed. More realistic, too, if I'm honest. Makes it a lot easier to RP out having some wounds, and it would definitely encourage me at least, to be careful when adventuring.