Opinions on the Current Death System

[Ithildur]

Would anyone not prefer a -25 (or some high number) bleed limit to the floor?

I don't get it; even if you remove the 'floor', wouldn't a -25=death mean it's easier than ever to dodge death? The floor isn't triggered all THAT often in my experience; not everyone runs into mobs that crit for 80+ and throw around slay living you know.

You'd also have cases where people are sitting around at -4 hps or whatever at low lvls after the precious few clw's have been applied to bring people up from, say -20, with the entire party out of heals and waiting around unable to do anything if a DM isn't around. It's also a huge leap from the -10 of RAW; maybe -12 to -15 isn't a bad idea but -25 ... what exactly are the benefits of taking 15 more rounds (on top of our current -10) to finally keel over? I thought the desired result (for some) was things being more gritty/deadly?

[Brokenbone]

It is true, we had four orc fishermen in the Underdark which we chose to jump, three were subdued, one got full dead somehow. On topic, the fourth at least did not get a tech rez.

[Twin Axes]

I think it was because I critted while subduing him.

[kid]

I don't get it; even if you remove the 'floor', wouldn't a -25=death mean it's easier than ever to dodge death? The floor isn't triggered all THAT often in my experience; not everyone runs into mobs that crit for 80+ and throw around slay living you know.

Good point, however it does resolve the main issues:
massive crits and death spells will work.
Also I''d bet that with -25 being dead Aglaril would be dead by now. (How many times has he hit the floor? dozens most likely, most of us have. One of those might have been lethal even with -25).

But you're right. Perhaps -20 would be good enough.
I suppose some testing would be needed to find the desired number.

As for not having enough healing to heal a downed buddy, well, here you can have your more gritty/deadly i'd say.
"What about Joe?"
"We've done all we can. All we can do now is wait..."
That would seem cool to me.

[Ronan]

I don't get it; even if you remove the 'floor', wouldn't a -25=death mean it's easier than ever to dodge death? The floor isn't triggered all THAT often in my experience; not everyone runs into mobs that crit for 80+ and throw around slay living you know.

You'd also have cases where people are sitting around at -4 hps or whatever at low lvls after the precious few clw's have been applied to bring people up from, say -20, with the entire party out of heals and waiting around unable to do anything if a DM isn't around. It's also a huge leap from the -10 of RAW; maybe -12 to -15 isn't a bad idea but -25 ... what exactly are the benefits of taking 15 more rounds (on top of our current -10) to finally keel over? I thought the desired result (for some) was things being more gritty/deadly?

Ok, so -15. Whatever.

I don't care so much about making things more deadly; if I wished them to be more deadly they would be. I can DM and toolset all sorts of things that will murder people, floor or no. What I hate about the floor is how OOC it is, how impotent it makes conventional danger, and how it promotes OOC behavior in PCs (e.g., it makes it more efficient on healing to tank Near Death). As a result DMs need to resort to some pretty absurd and/or unconventional challenges if they want there to be a chance of death. I just find it to be a pain to DM around.

For the vilquari group I'm probably just going to house-rule it away and trust players to report floor activations if I'm too far away to see them.

[Zelknolf]

Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is just a common human instinct, and nothing I condemn (I caught myself thinking along those lines here and there); I just wish we would let some insights about human nature influence our decision making process.

Would tend to agree; I'm just not sure that such can be translated into action in a reasonable way. We would effectively have to place a policy of "mommy knows best, and you cute widdle peoples can't overcome your cognitive biases! *blows on tummy*" (emote mandatory, I presume). And also comes with the assumption that folk making that call had successfully overcome their own cognitive biases (and, of course, folk who know about cognitive biases tend to believe that they've overcome them, whether or not they've been successful).

Would anyone not prefer a -25 (or some high number) bleed limit to the floor?

Couple little things--
-- chances of stabilizing when dropped basically in the negatives increase from 61% to 92%. (though, admittedly, this is easy to solve. 4% chance of stabilizing per round makes it 62% over 24 rounds)
-- it looks like Foam quit ALFA before giving us his solution here, so all we've got is mine (and mine is crashy). Of course, ragequits tend to not be permanent. We could wait until summer and see if it resolves itself. Or we can try again through CLRScript, which tends to eventually become more stable, at the cost of more work and being harder for new people to figure out.

And then real things--
-- A level 1 greataxe-wielding orcish warrior who gets a crit (14 base strength, assuming this is one of those nameless mook NPCs with a 25 point build, +4 racial is 18. So +6 damage from strength, +6 from OE power attack because that's the one that works with the OE AI, 6.5 average roll from a d12 = 18.5. *3 for crits is 55.5 damage) blasts that away. We'd have to make that number pretty implausibly high to make this still serve in the "insulate careful players who roleplay well and travel in groups from one instance of bad luck" sense that we've heard the "change nothing" folk support. And even then, we heard the "having a death system which catches death magic is a feature, not a bug" line-- which you'd said yourself, and I'd tend to agree. It's weird having it be inconsistent with petrification like it is, sure, but tbh I'd rather change petrification in that context.
-- The proposal includes that servers would have to reduce the amount of death magic in their build, which I don't think is a safe assumption to make. Servers have a terrible track record for updating their build in response to ACR changes. Folk complain about losing messages in spam, but who uses acr_notifiactions? Just me. Folk complain about bad AI, but who's using the new one? Only shadows, and only some of them (just the ones that absolutely refuse to work without taking the new AI). Folk wanted the ability to instance areas, and we provide it, and then two wagons in all of ALFA use it. Folk wanted more-diverse hazards in their dungeons, and we got a handful of swimming holes and one water-based trap (which I made) for it. Fix pChests and no one restores backups. That's not to say that servers don't do build-- the FTP (or, in the case of our one version-controlled module, the repository) is proof enough of that; it's just that builders seem to expect to be able to ignore the ACR, and I have no reason to believe that will change. So I'd rather not rely on it.

[jmecha]

The pause feature will let you know.

[Ronan]

Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is just a common human instinct, and nothing I condemn (I caught myself thinking along those lines here and there); I just wish we would let some insights about human nature influence our decision making process.

Would tend to agree; I'm just not sure that such can be translated into action in a reasonable way. We would effectively have to place a policy of "mommy knows best, and you cute widdle peoples can't overcome your cognitive biases! *blows on tummy*" (emote mandatory, I presume). And also comes with the assumption that folk making that call had successfully overcome their own cognitive biases (and, of course, folk who know about cognitive biases tend to believe that they've overcome them, whether or not they've been successful).

I am hardly pro-democracy, but in this case I think it works well enough. Providing good (teh hardcorez) policy with public gains and private costs is a public goods problem. Hypocrisy is often rational. I guess not cognitively so, but it leads to rational action (which is all evolution ever selected for anyway).

I agree that expecting modules to be updated is unlikely. On BG we have very few things with death magic and they do not tend to spawn statically. But I still find wacked-out shit, like those "weird" elemental types I recently deleted for being completely absurd. I do not expect the floor to be ditched in favor of a -20 limit or whatever (especially if Foam quit?); I was mostly just curious what people thought about the idea.

The pause feature will let you know.

It tells you if someone is dying, but not if they hit the floor. If they did hit the death floor you'll see 7 negative energy damage if you're close enough to them to be receiving combat messages. If they hit the dying floor (that is, taken to -7, -8 or -9 like Njall did when he ate a face-full of bomb) you won't see anything.

[Stormseeker]

I voted to keep it like it is....when it works. I have had the a.i. continue to attack my pc that stopped bleeding while ignoring the living pc's i was with. I would like to start at 3 and ignore all rp xp from statics...or just let me have a 5th-7th level pc with gear equal to gp value from the rule books. That pc would never level nor gain magical gear of any kind. With a pc in the 5-7th lvl range(dm could decide for their setting) the pc is high enough to help/train/guide etc the low levels...and still be a flunky for pc's from the 7th-10th lvl campaigns. In all my time here my favorite pc's/campaigns/ times in general have been at these levels. There are only so many ways you can rp having experience in this game...without having any experience. And i do think i have seen them all.

[Xanthea]

Would anyone not prefer a -25 (or some high number) bleed limit to the floor?

I'd like it, 2x your con score for preference. But I think any change like that that would open people up to death spells and massive crits and so on has to come with increased leniency in another area.

Specifically, a change of culture regarding IC raises. I think IC raises should be more available and common than they are now, if more people are going to start dying, and they should be seen as perfectly normal instead of the partially stigmatized view half the playerbase seems to have of them.

[Ithildur]

Kid, Aglaril has been saved by the floor 2, 3 times (not that often surprisingly, I remember each and every one of them vividly). I offered to Ronan that I'd have been ok if he ruled he was dead dead since one of the times was a failed save vs Slay Living, but he didn't choose to houserule the system that was in place (which I'd generally agree with; houseruling death stuff needs to be discussed beforehand with players).

Regardless, this isn't about my PC or yours or whatever; I want to see what works for ALFA. You or I might want the floor gone, but so far it doesn't seem like the majority of people want things to be more hardcore...

Maybe remove floor, -15 = dead, fail save vs death = dead *shrug*. Advocating something like 2xCON is failing to take into account overall game balance and flow; there are PCs currently that wouldn't die until they hit -36 HPs or so, which is SIXTEEN rounds/hps more than an average CON PC, and TWENTY SIX more rounds/hps than 3.5e. That's neither gritty/scary nor balanced. It does, however, favor solo grinder PCs with high CON tremendously.

[kid]

I remember twice in one combat when I daftly blocked his way out with a well placed dire wolf.
But okay.

[Xanthea]

I'm fine with there not being a big chance of people bleeding out, in trade for an increased chance of people instantly dying to massive crits or big explosions or death effects.

Like Ronan says, it's not a matter of increased death, it's a matter of people behaving OOCly because being near dead isn't very scary with the bleed cap in place. Maybe 1.5x your con score would be a little less extreme though.

[kid]

Word.

(Unless you can always come back from the dead for a penny and in which case they will continue their OOCness nonetheless)

[oldgrayrogue]

Word.

(Unless you can always come back from the dead for a penny and in which case they will continue their OOCness nonetheless)

Word.

And its not always OOC to keep fighting when you are "near death." You might actually be a hero who does that sort of thing -- you know, selfless, willing to sacrifice for the sake of others instead of saving your own skin sort of thing. The same type of character who would choose to spend eternity with his deity in paradise after such an act of sacrifice. You know.

Or maybe you're just a really tough badass who doesn't back down from a fight because he is losing? Or maybe that opponent you are fighting is "near death" too and you are so in the heat of the moment, or just plain desperate, that you believe or pray that you can kill him before he kills you? Or you are an evil bastard that hates the other guy so much you would rather die yourself than concede defeat.

Or maybe you keep fighting because OOC you know that the -6 floor will save you and your party mate will heal you and if not, you know, you will get an "IC" rezz.

I dunno, call me crazy but I often find that the heroic endings of stories are the best part. Do we go to the movies to watch flicks where the characters always take the safest route to long term survival or where they take HUGE risks that could get them killed at any moment for all sorts of cool reasons like honor, or glory, or hate or a desire for treasure? Which is more exciting? Fun? Memorable? I play in ALFA for the story. And also for the thrill. Always have. The possibility that the character you have immersed yourself in, and invested in might die -- permanently -- is what gets the juices flowing, and the short hairs tingling, at least for me, and why I play in ALFA as opposed to on respawn servers. We should design our PW so that it is conducive to interesting and exciting adventure stories, not perpetual character survival. This is D&D, not the Sims. Permadeath is what makes it all so very meaningful.