ISRIERI'S PROFILE

Limited number of lives/continues

This got me to thinking about Final Fantasy and its Tent/Cottage items. I think they've phased them out after IV, since all they do is give you a partial or full HP/MP re-fill. But in the first game, they also let you save your game anywhere on the overworld. That made them useful in a sense, but you still couldn't use them inside dungeons. Therefore they kind of sucked. I never spent much money on them that wasn't better spent on a heal potion.

So what if you took that idea and ran with it? Instead of allowing players to save anywhere, or at registered points, they carry their saves around with them (lets say you still get hardsaves at towns or similar safe zones for convenience). Say you start the game with five saves or so, and you have to find all the rest along the way. That would make those save items ridiculously valuable.

Although I think if you went that route the temptation to drop save items in all the dungeons would be too great. BUT it could offer a risk-reward system. They're functionally the same as savepoints if you can just find them hidden in chests, but if they're worth a lot of money then selling them becomes an option, to make the game easier in a different way. The challenge thus becomes a bit more dynamic.

I can't imagine a game where losing all your 'continues' sends you packing back to the beginning in an RPG. The genre didn't become really big until after saving data to the console became possible. Saves at regular checkpoints with hard-to-revive death states is, I think, the way to go.

What I really want to delve into is a) why are punishments for failure necessary, b) why are they problematic, and c) how can you maximize the player's feeling of accomplishment while minimizing frustration?

Personally if I'm going to play an rpg video game, I want that game to try and kill me. Turn-based affairs are my favorite and in those its all about prep and planning - If you don't plan well enough, you get stomped and have to use a different plan. All challenge comes from the dying, and the oft-overlooked aesthetic aspects of death (ie; the in-game consequences of characters actually losing) are also pretty vital.

But dying sucks in games that take hours and hours to play to completion. Moreover rpgs are by design meant to be completed and have their stories experienced. Combat gameplay is kind of superfluous if story is your only goal. If you want challenge, you need a penalty for sucking. Dying and being punted to a save is a lot better than a character getting downgraded, being lost, or the enemies getting more difficult or some other wacky alternative I can't think of, because if those were the penalties I'd probably reload my save. Just make dying not delete all those hours of progress. Taking you back before the boss or a segement of the dungeon that killed you is the best move in my experience. If the random overworld encounters ever kill you its usually because you wandered somewhere you weren't supposed to, or again, you didn't plan well enough (or the game could be badly designed i dunno).

Had me fooled too, GG all!

Also sorry for wanting to kill you, Gourd. I didn't realize the truth until the very last minute.

I'm not contributing because I'm at work right now. But that's no excuse in mafia.

Also for reference:

Those Voting Ebeth

• Psy_wombats
  
• demonlord
  
• Jeroen_Sol
  
• InfectionFiles
  

author=Isrieri
and honestly if Cap was mafia, he'd still know there's no cop in play. Its not something I would easily rule out.

Actually lets review this for a second.

If he's town. Why make this claim? He couldn't know unless he had a role, and even then he wouldn't be certain unless he was the cop himself. If he's mafia, why lie about knowing it? So that he could fake having a claim. He can't know for certain, but if there was no cop, it would be a successful gambit. It makes more sense for mafia to do that - I can't figure out how claiming knowledge of something he couldn't possibly know with certainty could catch me in a lie.

He wasn't directly asking me to reveal a role he just wanted to know how I knew Ebeth was town. I thought that was really weird so we went on that little tangent. I still don't know why he was so interested in pursuing that unless he wanted to make me or her look shady, that was my whole point with those questions.