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DEALING WITH DEATH AS A PLOT POINT?
Posts
LightningLord2
230
LightningLord2
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CloseDragon Quest totally uses death in combat, but only on your party members - you do have the connections in heaven to get them back, though.
Anyways, I also use a non-lethal wording for enemy and player downing not only to make plot deaths matter, but also to reduce the murder hobo factor by letting the player decide himself if he uses lethal force or not.
Anyways, I also use a non-lethal wording for enemy and player downing not only to make plot deaths matter, but also to reduce the murder hobo factor by letting the player decide himself if he uses lethal force or not.
Rine
1378
author=BowelMovementauthor=LockeZOr just dismember them so horribly that a phoenix down ain't gonna do jack.
Alternate suggestion: Kill them in a way that doesn't leave a body. Drop them off a cliff, or off an airship, or have them plummet into lava, or disintegrate them in acid leaving only a skeleton, or launch them into space, or make a vortex suck them up, or have the villain take the character's severed head as a trophy. Or have a necromancer rip their soul out and consume it - instead of not leaving a body, you're not leaving a soul.
Or just make them die alone when no one else is around. That works too.
Hah, you guys made me remember one of the RPGmaker games I absolutely loved and how it handled it. I Miss the Sunrise is a space ship based RPG, and all the ships have 3 HP bars that also serve as ammo. The point relevant to this discussion is that the ships are hard coded to cease functioning when things get below an acceptable level and withdraw from combat. So when you reduce them to 0%, it doesn't kill them, the ship just shuts down, and is removed from your view (the game is from the tactical mind of the main player's view). There are a few situations where the safeties are turned off, which increases your health bars significantly, but any death immediately gives you a game over since that character is dead dead.
Desertopa
775
author=djbeardoauthor=FlyingJesterI think this is great, and if I was doing something like FFTactics with a giant party, I'd give it a shot. But my story right now is very character driven, so I can't afford anyone dying before the story allows them to. That said, the idea of perma-death is something that really ratchets up the tension.
Sometimes death is totally permanent in a game.
Take Fire Emblem. There is no 'faint' status. There's no 'mostly dead, so still a little bit alive'. There's just pushing up daisies.
I think there's also a lot of potential in a system that balances combat around the assumption that any of your main characters falling in battle results in a game over, rather than all of them having to fall at once. If being defeated in battle means "death," and the plot hinges on none of the protagonists dying, then you can just make each individual character's death a failure condition.
I can think of a couple games off the top of my head which did this, but both of them were more strategy game than traditional RPG. But there's no real reason you couldn't do the same thing with a more traditional RPG.
djbeardo
1834
author=FlyingJester
Maybe do a sort of scripted Fire Emblem thing? Make some portion subtly unwinnable without a certain character dying?
If you do it right that could be good. But it would probably work best if any other death of a single character was a game over.
This is a good idea. I guess one solution would be to just get rid of phoenix downs, etc. and deal with death like death.
author=LightningLord2
Dragon Quest totally uses death in combat, but only on your party members - you do have the connections in heaven to get them back, though.
Connections in heaven, eh? I like this concept, but it would require some retconning for my world. Solid option, though.
author=Desertopa
I think there's also a lot of potential in a system that balances combat around the assumption that any of your main characters falling in battle results in a game over, rather than all of them having to fall at once. If being defeated in battle means "death," and the plot hinges on none of the protagonists dying, then you can just make each individual character's death a failure condition.
I can think of a couple games off the top of my head which did this, but both of them were more strategy game than traditional RPG. But there's no real reason you couldn't do the same thing with a more traditional RPG.
This echoes some other comments, and I think it might be the best approach for my particular game - although there were lots of solid suggestions (way more than I could dream up just sitting my myself).
But that brings up a sub-question:
If you were playing a game and the death of any one party member resulted in a game over screen, what would your reaction be? As a player, is it cool or annoying? Does depending on where you can save change your thoughts?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=djbeardo
If you were playing a game and the death of any one party member resulted in a game over screen, what would your reaction be? As a player, is it cool or annoying? Does depending on where you can save change your thoughts?
It doesn't inherently change anything about how I see the game, but it definitely changes a ton of things about how you have to design the battles. Talking about side-effects of doing this and ways to do it without causing problems and design your other systems around it would be worth having an entire topic for... so I think I'll start one.
LockeZ's soul trade thing made me think, what if the object to restore your dead buddies to life was an inanimate object
LIKE OH SHIT WALLY DIED BETTER MAKE HIM AN ANIMATED CHAIR
Like, you can just pick up random crap from around the map and change your party members appearance based on that object, NPC's will obviously be given more pity than ignorance, then. You could even have flavor text on corpses that says "No, we aren't turning the Janitor into a Broom, we aren't Fantasia!... or, I don't think we are! Order number one from your supreme Hatrack overlord, ask our writing staff if we're fantasia or at least inspired by it." or something.
God this idea is dynamite, I'm actually gonna implement this in Release (a game's name that is definitely a placeholder, not a game release) for the Young fella Wizard recruits and wants to keep alive. Wizard dies its game over, and in battle I plan for him to be pretty lazy and like 'whatever dad' and just do whatever until Wally or w/e the player calls him ends up at like 25% health then he's like "alright this one might be a bit tough for you on your own and joins in."
Thanks LockeZ you've given me a Jimmy Neutron Worthy Brain Blast here.
Obviously, that might incentivize players to cheez it, but maybe I'll be able to overlook that in favor of character dynamics and gameplay in one.
LIKE OH SHIT WALLY DIED BETTER MAKE HIM AN ANIMATED CHAIR
Like, you can just pick up random crap from around the map and change your party members appearance based on that object, NPC's will obviously be given more pity than ignorance, then. You could even have flavor text on corpses that says "No, we aren't turning the Janitor into a Broom, we aren't Fantasia!... or, I don't think we are! Order number one from your supreme Hatrack overlord, ask our writing staff if we're fantasia or at least inspired by it." or something.
God this idea is dynamite, I'm actually gonna implement this in Release (a game's name that is definitely a placeholder, not a game release) for the Young fella Wizard recruits and wants to keep alive. Wizard dies its game over, and in battle I plan for him to be pretty lazy and like 'whatever dad' and just do whatever until Wally or w/e the player calls him ends up at like 25% health then he's like "alright this one might be a bit tough for you on your own and joins in."
Thanks LockeZ you've given me a Jimmy Neutron Worthy Brain Blast here.
Obviously, that might incentivize players to cheez it, but maybe I'll be able to overlook that in favor of character dynamics and gameplay in one.
skjo
0
author=BowelMovement
LockeZ's soul trade thing made me think, what if the object to restore your dead buddies to life was an inanimate object
LIKE OH SHIT WALLY DIED BETTER MAKE HIM AN ANIMATED CHAIR
This reminds me of a PS2 game called Phantom Brave where the main character summoned other characters into objects found on the map. IIRC being summoned to a rock increased your HP, ATK and DEF but decreased MP, INT, AGI and movement, and other similar stuff like that.
