Zelknolf wrote:Just, y'know, for perspective:
In the last 30 days, we have had 6 deaths and 3 people spared from death by the death floor.
Of the six deaths, 4 were solo.
Of the three spared from death by the death floor, 1 was solo.
So...
9 people near death. 5 solo, 4 in party.
Of the people in parties, 50% died
Of the people flying solo, 80% died.
Ander's (party) death last week was tech. Bugged bugs got him before he could bleed, though I'm giving the PC a rest anyways. Assuming you're counting him, that'd be 5 deaths, 1 partied. I'm not sure what help these stats will be unless we establish some percentage of all PC deaths which are ruled tech. This seems to vary a lot depending on DM.
I recall Ander getting KOed four times in past sessions (one shark, two orcs, and the bugged bugs), so I'd imagine one of those was a floor hit. Maybe not as it was a lowbie adventure and Rumple is a big softie.
Maerdhel hit the floor 5 times (two Slay Livings, one frost giant crit, one rofl-orc, one ogre barbarian crit) that I can recall, so the real number was probably quite a bit higher. He died once to a now-fixed floor bug, so I suppose that number should be 6+. Unsurprisingly, the ogre and death spells were Rorax's. Maer wasn't too abnormal here; Elenaril definitely hit it more often while we played together.
So its difficult for me to imagine games where the floor doesn't save people a ton more often than they die, to the point where I'd suspect a technical error if the logs say otherwise. It may be that 6 is a poor sample size (which it is of course, though I don't have db access any more), or it may be a difference in party organization. Skilled and familiar players are quick to heal downed mates, and always have healing consumables available. Unskilled or disorganized parties tend to be a lot worse, though I certainly had my share of crappy parties.
On BG, Duncan's crew was very skilled at using the floor, KO-healing and kiting. Probably the 'best' I've seen. SE is very good tactically, thanks largely to BB/Rhaggot and all the practice they got with me throwing 'overpowering' encounters at them. EV is probably as good as a bunch of lunatics can be. Everyone else was pretty much crap, but hey the pause button helps. I try not to kill people because they are slow typists and don't have keyboard macros set up.
kid wrote:How about changing it to -8?
some sort of middle ground?
kid, I don't think anyone is interested in straining people's reaction times (-8 would actually make saving the PC nigh-impossible due to how NWN schedules things). I'm more interested in preventing repeated use and incentivizing more rational risk-taking behavior.
SwordSaintMusashi wrote:A change to a core system of ALFA is made when the system is adversely affecting the game itself.
As of the moment, no one has presented an argument that it is broken, just "that they don't like it", which is not enough reason to reverse something like this.
By all accounts, it is working exactly as it was meant to: To encourage people to group together and adventure rather than solo out in the wild.
There are a multitude of pro-broken arguments strewn throughout the history of this discussion. I'll summarize: Incentivizes unnatural and OOC risk-taking; forces DMs to target downed PCs if they want most fights to be dangerous; makes AoE attackers more lethal; makes direct-damagers much less lethal; makes single, powerful enemy 'bosses' much less lethal; makes parties with lots of healing much more effective; leads to questionable tech-rezes; enables kiting of single, powerful mobs; and makes judging combat difficulty much more difficult for DMs. The first two and the last are the biggest annoyances to me.
That the system accomplishes what it aimed to do is good, but that in itself says nothing about its other effects or their costs. I assert we gain little but perverse incentives by allowing the system to function repeatedly and without limit.
