Death, Phase 1

A place where new features are announced and discussed. (Feature suggestions go in the suggestions topic.)
Post Reply
User avatar
Rias
DEV
Posts: 2024
Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:06 pm
Location: Wandering Temicotli

Death, Phase 1

Post by Rias »

Phase 1 of death mechanics is in. It's fairly simple. When a player character dies, the following will happen:

- The character loses a sizable chunk of experience. This is based on their current level. This can potentially cause level loss. Exact amount to be tweaked as feedback comes in.
- The character takes a large hit to their Sanity stat. Sanity recovers slowly over time. Physickers with the Sanity Therapy ability can help you recover sanity more quickly.
- The character takes a massive hit to their Morale stat. Morale recovers over time. Physickers with the Motivation Therapy ability can help you recover morale more quickly.
- The character's corpse and all their items are left at the place of their death. The items are ON the corpse, and only that player character can GET them again (no PvP for item theft). There may be rare exceptions for specific item types or events. Character corpses can be dragged, if others want to be nice and drag the corpse away from the dangerous area and closer to the respawned character for easier item recovery. Player character corpses are janitor-proof, but can (and should) be BURY-ed once there are no items on them anymore.
- The character respawns somewhere in town with nothing but some basic garments. There will be some very vague IC "explanations" given to the player when this happens. From here, it's up them to figure out a way to find their corpse and recover their items. Asking for help is recommended for corpses in dangerous areas! Don't get yourself killed again trying to get your stuff from your previous corpse.

Note: Yes, it is IC that you end up in a seemingly duplicate/new body while your old corpse is still out there. Feel free to have an existential crisis when you do get back to and gaze upon your own corpse, and speculate on what this all means. Being one of the Undying is a weird and unsettling situation.

More mechanics to come, but I wanted to roll these base aspects of out sooner rather than later.

P.S. Recent deaths and total number of deaths are tracked. Expect increasing penalties to build up if you die multiple times in a short timespan. I'm trying to discourage recklessness - particularly the whole "respawn and sprint straight back into the fray" thing.
<Rias> PUT ON PANTS
<Fellborn> NO
User avatar
Irylia
Posts: 274
Joined: Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:20 pm

Re: Death, Phase 1

Post by Irylia »

Having recently experienced the new death system, I wanted to leave some feedback and see what others might think. It is my understanding that the intent is "to discourage recklessness - particularly the whole 'respawn and sprint straight back into the fray' thing". I am 100% behind this and feel the morale and sanity hits are both appropriate and interesting RP tools that will help prevent players from this behavior. However, I feel there might need to be some consideration taken regarding the XP hit. For those of us who aren't necessarily as combat-savvy in a currently very exacting combat environment, death seems like it is inevitable in normal play and not so easily avoided at all times even when being very careful.

So, what I'm suggesting is leaving in all aspects as they are currently - except the experience loss. This can either be conditionally, or altogether. There are several reasons I am suggesting this:

1) We are still heavily in a testing phase and people are trying to level quickly to work out bugs and make suggestions for game improvement. On the one hand, keeping in the XP hit means we get to test that out if we die and leave feedback, much like I am doing. But on the other hand, if a character dies enough they lose levels which makes it harder to advance through to further testing - especially when there are not always sufficient alternate means of gaining XP for your chosen character concept.
2) Losing XP is both counterproductive and discouraging on an OOC level. It feels like time wasted and going backwards and players might feel the penalty is too severe and not want to keep playing if they see hours of progress lost.
3) I don't think players should be taking such massive hits for "normal play". If you die to common mobs in an area you know to be appropriate to your character's skill level, I don't agree there should be an XP hit. So including this penalty for all deaths seems excessive.
4) Events happen. In my experience, events tend to cause a lot of death as players work things out. I would hate for players to feel unwilling to participate in such things based on the possibility of losing XP should things go wrong.

I would like to suggest a possible alternative (if you want to keep the XP hit) which would be instead of all deaths removing XP, only certain conditions remove the XP. For example... if someone was to die repeatedly in a short time-frame - maybe more than once in 15 minutes or something. Or if you die while under a certain severity of morale or sanity level. Or if someone was to intentionally go up against rare/elite mobs that are purposefully meant to be more challenging or not necessarily killed at all. If you're going up against some uber-monster-of-doom... then maybe, sure, that XP hit is a good way to tell a player, maybe you should take another approach or just leave it be.

I'm sure there are other scenarios you could put in to discourage players from the zerg-rush mentality. I just personally would really appreciate being able to go toe-to-toe with mobs of a similar challenge rating and not worry that their lucky hit or my accidental mis-timing will lose me a day's worth of effort.

Anyway, thanks for any consideration and input - and thanks for fixing the bugs yesterday so quickly!
Post Reply