PLAYER'S IMAGINATION IN RPGS

I think it's pretty silly to assume that in RPGs the protagonists beat everyone to death.

That is actually the assumption I make, unless told otherwise!

I think it's pretty "soft" to assume otherwise.

author=LockeZ
Really, when you stab someone with a sword or shoot them with a gun or burn them with fireballs until they stop fighting back, I would think they'd typically end up dead.

So what differentiates the heroes from said NPCs? The same shit happens to your heroes. Unconsciousness is a defeat for both parties.

Add to that the fact that 75% of the enemies in most games are monsters that definitely die at the ends of battles.

Agreed. Monsters don't (usually) get mercy.

There's no in-game indication that the human enemies are handled any differently. So I figure, if they were being handled differently, the game would indicate it.

There's no need, a victory is a victory. Why should the game have to tell you whether that soldier you beat up to get into the gate is unconscious, in a coma, or dead?

After all, if these people are trying to kill you, you'd almost certainly want to make sure they don't get back up and try again.

Yes, which is why you incapacitate them.

Also, part of my mindset probably comes from playing games like Dragon Age and WoW and Ultima and MUDs and Roguelikes, where bodies are left behind after every kill and you don't get the gold and items until you loot the corpse. And so in games like Final Fantasy, I see the way gold and items drops are handled as the game designers just making one step of the process invisible for the sake of making the game faster.

You don't have to be dead for me to beat you up and take your money.

author=Max McGee

I think it's pretty silly to assume that in RPGs the protagonists beat everyone to death.

That is actually the assumption I make, unless told otherwise!

I think it's pretty "soft" to assume otherwise.

I think it's pretty weird since even in actual armed combat in real life wars, you know, with highly lethal guns and rifles, defeat doesn't necessarily equal death. Hell, even in the military we're taught to disable your target, not 'BLAM BLAM BLAM DEATH IS A MUST'.

author=LockeZ
When everyone in my party reaches the brink of death, the party dies. When everyone in the enemy party reaches the brink of death, the enemy party dies.

That's not how I thought of it; my thinking is, when everyone in the party reaches 0 HP, sure, yeah, they're not dead, they're on the brink of death, unconscious, incapacitated, whatever, but it doesn't really matter since they're ALL incapacitated and they've failed at their goal. Same for the enemy party. If your goal is to infiltrate a castle, escape a cave, rescue a princess, or whatever, if everyone in your party is unable to fight, much less walk to the end of the hallway, it's game over.

That doesn't have to mean dead. Am I suggesting that nobody dies? Of course not. But being unable to continue means game over, death or no.

author=LockeZ
Hmm. There are times, I suppose, where getting defeated would mean that you fail your goal, and the enemy finds you and captures you.

I bet a lot of the people who posted in the non-linearity thread would be interested to see this result in a branching game path instead of a game over.

Well I usually explain things by using my own games as an example, or I would think of things the way I can understand them, here's an example WITH a way I can understand them:
The "beta", the word beta used loosely from this barely being ANYTHING like JailBreakOut, of JailBreakOut, had a storyline where you were arrested from killing a bunch of kids, and you are released and find yourself in a random garden with a random guy at the end of it, and he wants you to join him(he was a villain), and the boss idea was that you go to different treasure chests and check out which one has something that can destroy the dude for some reason, then you leave as a door opens behind the man, and you walk into a town. If you chose the wrong treasure chest, you got hurt, and if you "died" from it, instead of dying, you would just give up and join the man. In this game, you go through the time travel building at the end of the game, and you have a time limit, or you will cause a paradox(I didn't truly have an understanding of time back then), and when you left the building, the timer stopped and you had travelled backwards in time. Well, you go to that other building to find that it was the school that you killed everyone at, and you fight your past self and fight him. If you lose, you lose, and that means for you, you end where you "started", in relative terms to the storyline, but if you win, you still lose! Why, you may ask? Because you caused a paradox! So both ways, you fail, because at the beggining of the game, your main goal was to keep yourself from killing everyone, but when you made your goal, your past self wouldn't be having to go back and stop his self from anything, let alone be living! Yet, the game goes on normal, the way this is explained:Time was meant to be that way, and his past self wasn't killed, but was simply knocked out. And that was the end of me creating the game, because I had got to the ending scene, and well, I guess I just said:"I GIVE UP!", for some reason. And this means, that if I would of finished the game today, the ending scene(and hopefully LOADS of editing!), would pretty much explain that the man was merely knocked out, and was sent to jail, and his life went in loop as everyone else's went on.
That was a block of words, but I bet it was worth hearing my explanation of it, though, it was all about my game as well XD, lol! So the way I think of it is, if the character doesn't come back later, they are dead, if they do come back later, they were knocked out, and if they don't remember you, they were in a coma, put them in another one XD, it should of been said, as simple as that, but it wasn't because I wanted to tell you about a past game and how it relates to this.

author=chana
Sounds like a great story, you should maybe pick it up again?

Well, that could be a good idea, but that would mean I would have to "port", again another word used loosely, the game onto the only 2 makers that work on my computer, and re-create every vomit enducing part to it, even the parts that didn't make sense! You know fire-woman, it was a surrealistic game, THIS GAME WASN'T MEANT TO BE SURREALISTIC AND IT IS! And besides, if I decided to edit the worst parts out of it, and make it a bit better, it would turn into JailBreakOut, without the evil king and religion part of it. It wouldn't even be it's own game anymore. And I forgot the name of that game, let alone the name of the characters, so I find it to be REALLY unlikely to bring back the game idea, Besides, that was just the beggining and ending to the game...if you heard all that was meant to be in the game, you would die of shittyness. That's how bad of planning and ideas in the game are, you would die...of shittyness.

author=Deckiller
Please try to use paragraph breaks, pyro; it makes things easier to read.

Sorry ^_^"