ANY CHARACTER'S DEATH = GAME OVER

I had this idea for my game. Whenever a battle is finished, the event checks if anyone has less than 1 HP and if so, you return to the starting point.

I'm very compelled to use such a system and it seems simple enough to implement.

It's realistic too. Seems strange to have one party member drag around everybody's corpses while intentionally or unintentionally getting into more battles.

Would be really fun for a few boss fights maybe, but not for the entire game.

The trick to use less damaging attack moves would probably work logically, but emotionally- you wouldn't be able to have any hectic fast attack type monsters that require lots of quick, powerful healing - unless you were a huge sadist.

Oh another way this could work is in a game with a huuuuge array of characters. Have like....120 of them. And each with their own interesting stories, if you can pull it off. Have some super special reward if you can beat the game's optional bosses while keeping everybody alive. (and depending on the dungeon a wide variety of combos would be required in order to unlock all the stuff necessary for final boss.) I'd also tone down the random nature of a lot of abilities as well.

This would be better integrated in the story, I think. A more brutal world where healing spells weren't as powerful, and resurrection spells didn't exist at all... and you could feel the weight of every person's death, not just the cliched Mary Sue healing female archetype. The game I'm making has a lighter tone overall than this but I think it could be wicked in a brutal/hyperrealism type RPG. (maybe the opposite of what I said before- you could have most/almost all fights have one death = game over then a few that aren't for variety.)

My worry about this isn't so much what triggers the Game Over as the Game Over itself. I like the idea of an effect happening upon character death that isn't lopsided to story characters, but I take some issue with the tangential idea of Game Over.

I think this idea would benefit from piggybacking on discussions about exciting Game Over alternatives, or how forcing a battle restart (hard force or soft, through logical incentives) is quintessentially worth the same frustration as a complete loss. If this latter problem were addressed I think the canopy effect over the whole team would be great in that it would give you real appreciation towards the NPCs. :)

bahleted

In Valkyria Chronicles they had a similar idea.

Squad members would be incapacitated on the field for three turns before perma-death set deep into their frail bones. If you got any other member to their side before that "doom counter" terminated then they'd call a medic who would single-handedly hoist them out of harm's way and start working some sort of military medicine that I imagine came at the cost of morals and ethics. After a few more turns the fallen member will be brand new and ready to redeploy, super soldier serum coursing through their veins.

I added some embellishments but that's kind of what happened.

Still, it fell prey to LockeZ's first concern, which is that a Game Over state would only happen if a) the main character was incapacitated AT ALL or b) if key members didn't get picked up by the medic before the doom counter doom counted. Any other character dies and it's a perma-death, and with so many troops at your disposal you can sometimes just suicide bomb with your favorite character.

LockeZ's made a good point about how often you might have to heal/defend. I think in order to really stress that each character has the same weight while keeping a Game Over/Mission Failure option you would have to rethink how the confrontation works. In a system that is as generic as the one outlined then it would be hard to employ, but if this particular narrative turned some ideas on its ear (no heals, "Death" having other requirements, "Death" having other abilities, some benefit for the AI to NOT kill a character that quickly, etc.) it might be able to side-step it.