Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
Zelknolf
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Zelknolf »

oldgrayrogue wrote: Even if your scared or dazed, you might jump back into a fight if it looks like your friends are about to die, or for some other valid RP reason. There is no need to "code" people's RP.
I have to wonder about this description? I mean... we could also remove all of the effects of bless or fear, and say that we ought not try to "code" peoples' RP of morale. The suggestion is, after all, combat penalties. That fellow who struggles into the fight through bleeding and blurred vision to help his friends can still fight: he just isn't as good at it as he would've been if he never got death magiced.


In any case, the request at the start of this was to make death a little more dangerous without removing the system entirely-- and I'm much more inclined to go with a suggestion like that: make the system less watered down and closer to the average desires of the community; that of course means that almost nobody gets their ideal circumstance, but maybe we get to a better middle ground.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by HEEGZ »

Okay so what I am left wondering now is if this is a good use of the allocated tech hours for our community. The death system isn't perfect and works pretty well. Sure we can change things but is that what we want to do? I've never set up a poll before, but perhaps someone can make one in the general chat to assess if people want us to prioritize a change to the death mechanic?

Also, I think OGR's suggestion to remove the -6 floor after 3 is an excellent solution for me. We already coddle people up to 3 already and it makes sense to me. As for the OP with extra death effects, I find myself wanting to leave that left to the RP of individual members and not hard code anything new. But it sounds like that would mean leaving in the -6 floor which I would rather be without.

So I come back full circle to the possibility of removing the -6 floor and adding in some new death effect. TA has stated that this has sort of side tracked his point, but I feel it is directly related based on what tech has said. If we are going to change the death mechanic it should be a solution that is elegant and that tech feels improves on the whole situation, regarding tech rez, and so forth that they are trying to address here.

Summary then, I think we are on the right track but am concerned that we not waste tech resources needlessly. We seem to have an opportunity to address future tech rez issues which is a DM and tech team time sink... so likely worth it. Just not sure how we should proceed from here. Thanks for initiating this discussion TA. 8)
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Twin Axes »

No problem. Always willing to stick my neck out on some contentious issue! :)
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ithildur »

Holy cow Twin Axes, *looks at thread title, reads OP, then reads most recent post, blinks* love ya and have nothing bad to say about you but... yikes. :eew: So your whole deal was 'the floor makes death trivial, so let's tweak regular BLEEDING, not floor issues'...??? :shock: Now I see why things were so muddled. I guess that's one approach... *shrugs* :)
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Twin Axes »

Thanks for the endorsement, I feel the same about you :) We'll just agree to disagree then, hmm?
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ronan »

I have three thoughts on death:

1) Everyone seems to want more perma-death. So do I. So why don't we look at making the various Resurrection spells harder, more expensive, etc.?

2) The -6 floor + lots of healing consumables = teh suck.

3) Keep it simple. Complexity creep kills projects, and ALFA has a long history of of shooting for the "ideal" solution regardless of the costs to staff (i.e. the pricing standards). Consider how much hassle something as simple as the -6 floor has been already. I proposed stat damage because we already had code to handle stat damage, so I thought it was a relatively simple solution. Even better would be to get rid of the floor completely.

What happened with Foam's experiments to change the amount of negative hp damage a PC could sustain? Could we just set it to -25, tweak the stabilization probabilities and ditch the floor?
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Xanthea »

2x your con score would be nice if changing the bleedout point is in consideration.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Zelknolf »

NWNx4 is never the simple solution. It is the path taken last, when all other options are exhausted, on account of the unpredictable behavior and instability it tends to cause.

If the goal is actually simplicity, our best bet at accomplishing that is going to be in ceasing to invent events that the Aurora engine doesn't already give us. Once we're not using timers and local variables to pretend that such things exist when they don't, it all becomes a whole mess more manageable.



In terms of costs of raises, I'm not sure that's going to accomplish what people are looking for; we've got a handful of vivid examples of people getting killed and coming back more than once, yeah, but the majority of people who die stay dead-- and even the majority of people who get killed and raised eventually die and stay dead (we do, after all, know that they are prone to taking actions that result in death: it's a high-risk group). We've already got a DMA policy that requires special approval for raise #3, which has come up zero times, and we even see people with double-digit levels getting killed both in party and when soloing (and staying dead). Yeah it's only a couple of those people a year, but we also don't have that many of them either.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ronan »

I was under the impression another PW had altered the -10 hp value without consequence? If not, then never mind. I understand the danger; that -10 value was originally a C macro, and upon pre-compilation may have appeared in multiple places as an integer literal. If you do not change them all (and maybe even if you do), problems will likely result.

7 of my 29 kills have resulted in some sort of resurrection. I agree that in general raising is not an issue, but it is usually not an issue because either no one wants to rez the PC or the PC does not want to be rezed. Our problem seems to be with players who treat death as no big thang. Why should they, when the cost to come back from death is often only 5,000gp and a level? Instead of additional rules and flamewars over rezzing, I suggest simply increasing the cost of the spells (XP, GP, or both).
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by FoamBats4All »

For all the DMing you do, I just feel you're out of touch, Ronan. Everyone wants more permadeath? Only 5,000gp and a level? For the vast majority of PCs, that's quite a hefty price. As it should be. Sword's Edge may be full of very high-wealth, high-level characters, but that doesn't necessarily reflect the rest of ALFA.

The -10 change did seem to work. We could do it in C# instead of NWNX. But it'd require a lot of testing and still require a rewrite of the death system.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by kid »

No floor and higher negatives seems like a better solution in all regards.

(Death spells would actually kill you for a change. So would an amazingly massive axe. lots of darts, less so. win)
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ronan »

Among active DMs We have some mild red tape and a lot of social pressure (occasionally flaming) which discourage rezes in some manner or another. I'm not aware of any initiative which has served to make rezes easier. I would prefer greater IC costs than OOC costs, as most of us are here because we enjoy the IC game (costs and all), not the OOC B-game. I do understand that some enjoy the B-game, but those people generally don't deal with rezes.

My last PC was my first to ever get meaningfully above the "low end" on wealth, and I currently DM a party of level 4-7s. I know 5,000 gp is a lot to some PCs but to some it is a trivial sum, especially with the time granted from Gentle Repose.

If the death system is ever re-written, I would suggest favoring simpler solutions so that new staff can get up to speed quickly. The complexity-creep boat may have already sailed though.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Zelknolf »

In terms of raise costs, I'm pretty sure that raises would be classified as necessity goods by economist sorts and that we wouldn't get the desired result from price fiddling. I'd expect that putting more barriers between players and rezzes would have the effect of having ALFA drift closer to a Dragon Ball Z parody (with the variable being how long people spend on King Kai's planet). Penalties side seems more promising, but I'm not sure how effective that will be. It's already pretty bad, after all. Just losing 4000 xp tends to represent all of the progress made from a couple months of play for even regular players who get DMed.

In terms of system simplicity, I think everything on the table makes death more approachable to a hypothetical new developer. If things start to run directly from the events with the only stored information being stored in the relative long term, we've got a state of affairs that can be maintained and debugged with relatively little skill.
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ithildur »

So, this is the part of the conversation where it gets technical enough that only a few people can follow it. :)

For the rest of us, I feel the need to ask, do most folks really feel our current system is inherently broken (setting aside say, less than elegant coding/scripting/implementation etc for now), even though it closely follows DnD rules (which is a pillar) except for the added element of the floor?
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Re: Thoughts of death (Where is thy sting?)

Post by Ronan »

Rezes aren't necessity goods because of the promise of afterlife and that the people paying for them aren't the people being rezed. A hell-bound, faithless or false PC able to pay for his own rez (maybe a Clone spell?) would probably treat it as a necessity good. For the dead guy its "I pay one level to get more time on Faerun and forgo my current afterlife", and for everyone else its "I pay X gp to get this dude back". If your PC really wants to avoid his afterlife, no XP cost is going to be enough to dissuade him (necessity). But the gp cost might dissuade his friend from going through with it. Edit: As I've said I don't personally see a big problem with how things currently tend to work out (24% rez-rate seems acceptable), but others do.

I wasn't just referring to system simplicity, but simplicity for DMs, standards, etc. Most people already grok the -10 bleedout, so making that -25 or whatever is generally pretty easy for them.

Ith, I would say the current system is broken in some scenarios. Larger parties with lots of healing facing smaller numbers of direct-damage monsters produces the greatest breakage.
Last edited by Ronan on Mon Feb 17, 2014 12:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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