Death Penalties

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tpapp157 wrote:

Stupid mistakes made by a player that resulted in their death should receive the harshest penalties. Getting killed by a super-powerful boss is more legitimate and should receive the smallest penalties.

In this situation it would seem that there are limits in terms of how "harsh" a penalty should be, simply based on something that is very situational. This is not a very good argument to increase or decrease the difficulty of the player's experience. Especially because the data is situational. (Hard Boss Vs. Small Mistake)

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tpapp157 wrote:

The point of death as a game mechanic is to punish players for playing poorly. It teaches them to become better players through negative reinforcement. Players play more intelligently so they can avoid death because death hurts. That's all death is as a mechanic. When you remove the feedback (death penalty) from the system then death ceases to have a purpose. People stop caring about dying because it doesn't matter. Since there are no negative consequences players don't learn to play better and they just play like crap through the entire game because they can and they don't care. It becomes like a shock test without the electric shocks.

I have personally played plenty of games where the penalty for death was nothing more then starting back from the beginning. Mario comes to mind. Mario has no death penalties, it simply has death. Once you die you go back to the start and try again. I've spent plenty of time perfecting my skills at Mario games and thus now I rarely die, almost never.

The point is Death by it's very virtue is a negative reinforcement. Adding penalties to it only cause different behaviors. For example, if players lose gear at death, instead of trying to be a better player they may simply try to circumvent the penalty by making frequent trips to town. Players will do whatever it takes to reduce a harsh penalty. If there is a timed de-buff, players will simply wait until it is gone before playing again.

Most games that I've seen where the player's really try to improve their death-to-life ratio, are games with positive reinforcements. Some have been mentioned, like the longer you live the more benefits you accrue. Players will do anything to keep these benefits, staying alive is one the things they would need to do.

If players play poorly, it might actually hurt their play experience to then tell them to sit on the sidelines, or that they must lose their hard earned loot. In the end the play experience matters.

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tpapp157 wrote:

If there is no significant penalty to act as a deterrent then the mechanic of death should simply be removed. It can be replaced by another feedback mechanic.

I'm not advocating 0 death penalties, and I certainly hope that death will always be a part of PoE. I'm simply trying to make the point that a harsh penalty on top of death will cause unwanted behaviors in players. I'm also trying to say that when someone dies in a game, that the death alone was enough to affect them. Adding on a penalty will simply alter behaviors beyond that point, and not necessarily for the better.

I do think there should be a penalty, but I think it would be better if it were something that could be worked into with the economy in mind, or some other game-play mechanic that is more of an incentive and less of a complete punishment.

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Silver wrote:

I have personally played plenty of games where the penalty for death was nothing more then starting back from the beginning. Mario comes to mind. Mario has no death penalties, it simply has death. Once you die you go back to the start and try again. I've spent plenty of time perfecting my skills at Mario games and thus now I rarely die, almost never.

You do realize that having to restart a level from the beginning is a death penalty right? No penalty would mean you wouldn't need to restart. It's a pretty harsh penalty too. The penalty for most games isn't nearly that bad relatively speaking. Even games that force you to reload a save point generally allow you to save as often as you'd like on top of including copious autosaves with the result being that generally you restart about ten feet from where you died. Mario forces you to go through the entire level all over again and you lose any sort of power-ups you had. Could you imagine if PoE forced you to restart from the beginning of the act every time you died and reset your gear and level back to what it was when you first started?

You essentially just gave your approval of one of the harshest death penalties in gaming history (relative to the actual gaming content).

I think death is not really a penalty it’s a limitation that makes a game fun. What fun is this game or any arpg if you can't die? Sure it might be fun at first, but soon it will grow stale. Humans like to do two things with games in mind. They like to learn new skills and attain mastery of said skill. With this in mind without a death penalty being a good player in a game would not be a skill; it would simply being able to click a button. Though people are right to harsh a death penalty will turn people off. To leanent on the other hand will also turn people off. Lack of challenge will make an otherwise fun game boring. So i would say finding a happy medium for 90% of the fan base, that’s the most important thing. Sure some people will want permadeath which would soon alienate all, but the most hardcore of your potential players. Some others would want benefits for not dying which would make the game to easy hurting longevity.

Normal ideas would be simply stay with time tested penalties. EXP loss, Item loss, or combinations. No one will be thrilled, but no one will really be too disappointed because we’re used to it.

Bad ideas are debuffs or as all the player will do is turn it off till it’s gone. Simply put it pointless just like a timer saying you can’t play until the timer is done. Unless you want to fight monsters 10 levels below you.

More experimental ideas would be making the character run through a ”death dungeon” to regain items . Used in oblivion shivering isles. I like it’s still fun plus it not really negative. This is a more creative approach probably satisfy more players they still get to play, but instead of new loot its gaining back your old stuff. If you die start over again (balancing issues not sure how hard that would be). Only thing have 4 or 5 different dungeons or it will get repetitive.

Also this is all my own opinion not right or wrong just an opinion.

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tpapp157 wrote:

You do realize that having to restart a level from the beginning is a death penalty right? No penalty would mean you wouldn't need to restart. It's a pretty harsh penalty too. The penalty for most games isn't nearly that bad relatively speaking. Even games that force you to reload a save point generally allow you to save as often as you'd like on top of including copious autosaves with the result being that generally you restart about ten feet from where you died. Mario forces you to go through the entire level all over again and you lose any sort of power-ups you had. Could you imagine if PoE forced you to restart from the beginning of the act every time you died and reset your gear and level back to what it was when you first started?

You essentially just gave your approval of one of the harshest death penalties in gaming history (relative to the actual gaming content).

I think you completely misinterpreted my statements.

First of all, most Mario games had checkpoints, if you died you'd generally be sent back to that checkpoint. This, in and of itself, is not harsh at all. Losing every power-up however has no analog to the ARPG genre. I think that is where you lost my meaning.

I'm simply trying to get across the point that if a player dies in an ARPG and is sent back to town, this is a negative reinforcement. Barring any other type of penalty added to the death.

I'm also trying to get across the point that a meaningful death penalty would be one that helps deflate the economy or gives the player an incentive no to die. One that will not effect the player's behavior in an unintended way.

A single checkpoint per level can hardly be considered an extensive checkpointing system. You need to consider these penalties relative to the game content and not just in an absolute sense.

Regardless, you seem to agree with me on the need for a death penalty.

The death dungeon idea I think could be cool if it's done properly. I sort of envision it as the player being spawned at a random point in a large dungeon and they need to find the way out located at the center. They need to fight mobs along the way but nothing significant. Before they leave they need to fight and defeat the boss demon Charon that guards the only way in or out of hell. Charon would drop the player's inventory that they lost when they died along with some other stuff maybe. How long it takes the player to get would determine what sort of physical state they respawn in the real world with. If they can get out in a reasonably quick time then they would respawn with no ill effects but if they take a long time (or die while they're in hell) their body will have begun to decompose and they may respawn with some penalties that wear off in time.

There could even be some unique items that only Charon can drop which would raise the interesting scenario that players would have to go and get themselves killed to be able to face him.

People mentioned the ability to revive teammates. Obviously an absolute revive wouldn't work in this scenario. A revive spell could help the dead player n other ways though. It could show them the quickest way out of the hell dungeon. It could also give the player buffs so they can defeat the mobs and Charon easier.

The ultimate balancing would be that if a player really needed to get out fast (and they knew what they were doing), they could get out of hell within a 5 to 10 minutes and respawn right where they died. A revive spell cast on their corpse could help to shorten this time. If the player just wandered aimlessly then it may take them 30 minutes or an hour to get out of hell. Finally there need to be small hints to direct the player which direction they should go. Maybe the dungeon gets darker as you get farther away from the center or something similar.

Interesting suggestions Tpapp157.

I think any one of those, or even a combination of those would be a fine death penalty.

Lets see, I'll try to condense a few of the suggestions into shorthand so maybe we can figure out a new idea.

- Death points (As they are added some negative effect on player actions or appearance occurs.)

- The ability to revive players.

- Death causes a minor inconvenience to the player by making some easy mechanic a little bit harder.

- Some economic gold-sink type mechanic.

- Check points within the dungeon.

- A "death-dungeon" that the player must fight out of.

- Positive reinforcement for players that stay alive. (After a certain amount of time they gain strength or a slightly higher chance for better items to drop.)

I will not mention the ideas that I openly opposed. However, this list only covers a small fragment of the total number of suggested death penalties.

Win a jewel to election with str, int or dex each time one ends an area without dying, engarzandoce this in a place of the inventory for the construction of our character, and are lost each time one dies obligandolo to make the area again, but without affecting the current game, in addition to a small decline from the place of death

Forgiveness by bad english

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Silver wrote:

- Death points (As they are added some negative effect on player actions or appearance occurs.)

Unless you're counting total deaths of the character I don't think you could build up enough deaths in a short amount of time for this to be a viable penalty.

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Silver wrote:

- Some economic gold-sink type mechanic.

The devs said there would be very little gold in the game. I don't think this would be very viable.

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Silver wrote:

- Check points within the dungeon.

Outside of waypoints I don't think there should be a checkpoint system. It just doesn't feel very arpg.

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Silver wrote:

- A "death-dungeon" that the player must fight out of.

I think this could be really cool if it could be implemented properly. Unfortunately, I don't really see that happening.

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Silver wrote:

- Positive reinforcement for players that stay alive. (After a certain amount of time they gain strength or a slightly higher chance for better items to drop.)

Maybe. A 'dark cut-throat' world doesn't really lend itself to positive reinforcement. If the bonuses were very minor I could be ok with this but not as a replacement to death penalties.

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tpapp157 wrote:

Outside of waypoints I don't think there should be a checkpoint system. It just doesn't feel very arpg.

Well, the ARPG genre is always changing and evolving. Simply because there are few or no ARPG's currently out that support a feature like this, doesn't mean that having this feature would be bad for the game as a whole.

In fact, I believe that Diablo 3 will have this feature. Will it ruin the gaming experience? I honestly do not believe so.

In either case, I have played plenty of ARPG's without this feature, so even if it doesn't show up in the game we won't be missing out on too much.

Something else to note: mechanically, a bonus for living and a penalty for dying are almost exactly the same; the only difference is which situation is emphasized: a 25% bonus for being alive for a while translates to a 20% penalty for dying recently.

Secondarily, but more relevantly, the question I think with this sort of bonus/penalty is not whether you call it one or the other but whether you balance for recently-dead versus alive-for-a-while.