[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Perma-death

[Hans Häggström]

On 5/15/07, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>
> What other ways could we create such a feeling (assuming that's
> something we even want to do...)?
>
> LotR has titles for each level range you survive without dying. This
> seems to be in a similar social area, but is it quite as impressive?
>

Looking at other genres, there are some ideas that may be worth thinking
about.

In the old Half Life mod Action Half Life, you normally get one point
for each other player you kill.  However, if you have a killing streak
of say 3 kills with no deaths, you get two points for each kill.  And so
on, the longer the undefeated killing streak, the higher the reward.

This tended to create two different playing styles - either you run
around and try to kill as many people as possible, often dying yourself
too. Or alternatively you pick a good camping spot and snipe or ambush
players that are running around, without getting killed yourself.  This
tends to result in a slower rate of kills, but because you do not die it
eventually can give you a higher score.

In the Warcraft 3 mod DotA, the more kills you have without dying
yourself, the more your own head is worth when you are killed by a
player on the opposing team (and you also get a 'title' of sorts,
"Monster killing streak", or "Godlike killing streak", etc).
Resurrection also takes the longer the longer you have been alive.

This could be used to create a stronger motivation for going after
undefeated characters, as they would give a higher amount of experience
or gold.  The undefeated player could also get a more severe death
penalty (loss of money / experience / longer resurrect time) the longer
the undefeated killing streak is.  So the more characters you manage to
kill in PvP, the higher the risk of dying is.  This system would not
penalize newbies / often dying players very much, but might give more of
a thrill for skilled players.

So to summarize: A character gets increased reward (xp / gold) for each
opponent he kills in PvP.  The longer the undefeated killing streak of a
character is, the more xp/gold you will get for defeating them, and the
more severe their death penalty will be (xp/gold/resurrect time).

This approach combines a positive reward for staying alive and killing
enemies in PvP, with a death penalty whose severity depends on the
success of the player, and in a way balances the reward the successful
player receives.  It creates an incentive for good players to stay
alive, and for other players to kill the undefeated players.  It might
be better than just penalizing for death, without any reward for staying
alive or defeating undefeated characters.

This is focused on PvP gaming, but might be adapted to PvE with some
modifications.

-- 
Hans H?ggstr?m (zzorn)