Permadeath

[Tarsus]

I'm considering a kind of semi permadeath system to my game. Where apart from a small number of characters if someone dies in or out of combat death will be permanent and they are removed from your party.

What is everyone's thoughts on the idea of losing characters permanently? The story and setting of my game lends itself well to the system as the idea of reviving people from the dead would be impossible and around half of my characters are expendable to the game.

 

[Stapleton]

I think it is a really good system, and will have people on edge playing your game.

It could be a pain in the butt if you do penalize them too much like end up not having enough characters left to support a 4 man party or whatever you have.

I always loved games like that because it made me think of how to be the best I could be instead of just going through pressing buttons.

 

[hiromu656]

I think it could work, it's definitely not uncommon in many strategy games. You say "in or out of combat death," is there a way to prevent out of combat deaths? I'm assuming you mean along the lines of Mass Effect like decisions. About half of the characters being expendable, if you've designed the characters in a way that makes them expendable, it really lessens the impact of their death. I don't think the player would care emotionally, or even gameplay wise, if they're expendable.

 

[Kes]

I don't think the player would care emotionally, or even gameplay wise, if they're expendable.

Which, imo, could weaken the point of having this mechanic.  If they are no more important than a high value potion then their death will have no more impact than using that potion.  If the player can see that they are expendable then whether they die or not isn't really going to matter.  But surely it should matter to the remaining characters?  Unless the plan is to have characters who are hard-hearted and/or ruthless and/or automatons. And if they are going to matter to the characters, then there needs to be a way of ensuring that they matter to the player as well.

 

[Wavelength]

I just kind of scoff when I hear people mention this as a feature, because it never ever works out for them.  Not to say that you couldn't do it, but it takes an insane amount of work it takes to craft a decent narrative that can adapt itself to any character permanently being removed from the game at any time.  Every time I've seen someone bill this as a feature for an RPG Maker game they're working on, the game either (1) is never released, (2) is released without this feature, or (3) is horribly broken.

Edit: I'm making the assumption your game is indeed an RPG or at least has a substantial party with real (as opposed to instanced) characters.  If you're making a straight-up Roguelike or a Fire Emblem-type game, obviously this becomes much easier.

 

[Tarsus]

Being expendable doesn't make a character less important. Look at wrex from mass effect, in terms of the game, you can complete the game with any ending wether he dies or not but is still an important character in terms of story.

It's hard to explain what I'm planning without going through the entire plot in detail but I'm aiming for something between xcom and elder scrolls. Any character important to the story will be "immortal" and just get KOd if they die in combat.

I will also probably have an option at the very start to enable or disable it for the play through.

 

[Stapleton]

If he is important to the story then they are not expandable to the player.

I think we refer to a character that comes and has no influence on anything therefore he basically doesn't exist. And if he dies in that case the player wouldn't care.

 

[Wavelength]

It's hard to explain what I'm planning without going through the entire plot in detail but I'm aiming for something between xcom and elder scrolls. Any character important to the story will be "immortal" and just get KOd if they die in combat.

I will also probably have an option at the very start to enable or disable it for the play through.

Be really careful about treating your characters inconsistently like this.  If you thoroughly integrate this gameplay device with the plot, (I'm thinking something like the anime Log Horizon, where Adventurers and People of the Land are treated by the "game world" in two entirely different fashions and with very good justification), or the expendability of some characters is explored as a theme (think Quantic's short video Kara, the likes of which is a great model for what it means to be expendable) then it can be very powerful.

The fact that you're thinking of giving the player an option to disable it makes me think that (and I stress this is only my opinion, but I think I understand player psychology pretty well) you're going about it the wrong way.  If you do want to go this route and implement this as some sort of "hardcore mode" to a game where the narrative doesn't address death and expendability, then I'd suggest also implementing a mechanic where if one of the "main" (read as mandatory) characters dies, it's an automatic Game Over - as if the main characters had actually died, but without you needing to spend years creating a thousand different plot branches.  People don't usually love this mechanic, but it would reconcile everything you want to do, since having such a minor "KO" penalty for main characters versus having permadeath for all others would not only break the player's immersion, but would also create very awkward gameplay where players need to use their main characters as a shield for the expendables.

 

[Tarsus]

Well like I said without explaining the entire plot it's hard to justify the system.

My game is very story driven, with a series of short connected missions where you play as different characters with a few that cross over between them.

There is also a situation in several parts of the game where if a single character dies it would make absolutely no sense for them to be revivable so the only choice is for either that character to be dead or force a game over in the instance of any deaths.

 

[whitesphere]

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years has a "permadeath" mission where you have 4 Ninja you can recruit (there are 20 playable characters).  Each goes on an independent mission and any of them can die.  If they do, they are permanently dead.

The pro is it definitely adds challenge to those missions.    The con is it doesn't really --- when the ninja died in those missions, I'd just restart.  And the missions themselves were a small part of the game, each mission took maybe 30 minutes.

Personally, I don't like permadeath as a developer, because it is incredibly difficult to make a narrative which accounts for all of the permutations of characters dying off.  Also, frankly, as a player, if I go into a game knowing characters can permanently die, I probably won't play it. 

While I enjoyed Roguelikes when I was in college, but I also didn't "mind" losing hours of effort grinding up a character since I had boatloads of free time. 

Now, when my free time is more limited, I just won't play a game which has that type of penalty.   It's one thing for the plot to remove characters for various reasons.  It's another to say "Well, you made a bad decision so now you permanently lose your character." 

Now, granted, in tabletop RPGs there is permadeath BUT it's also at the GM's discretion --- and I'd imagine decent GMs make pretty clear if you're about do something highly likely to kill off your character.  

 

[Wavelength]

There is also a situation in several parts of the game where if a single character dies it would make absolutely no sense for them to be revivable so the only choice is for either that character to be dead or force a game over in the instance of any deaths.

This is exactly my point   If you can account for all the permutations of the characters being dead or alive, and make it believable, then go for it.  Otherwise, force the game over and just be careful to make sure your game mechanics feel fair to the player.

 

[Tarsus]

I think in the end I'll probably stick with my original plan a force a game over on a single death. Although I do like games that use permadeath, particularly xcom and Fire emblem, the characters in then are not very well fleshed out and losing one isn't a big a deal as it really should be, plus most people will probably just reload a save anyway.

The whole idea came up while I was writing my moves database and I got stumped trying to find a reasonable skill or item that could "revive" a destroyed space ship.

 

[Nivlacart]

I hate permadeath features when the chance of one of my party members dying is out of my control.

I can't control which member the enemies will target.

Permadeath is only good in games where if they die, it's your fault.

Strategy games like Fire Emblem is a good example because they have a well-established Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic, and being able to see the enemies' move range.

Apart from the RNG trolling you with an enemy's critical hits, character deaths are your fault for placing them in a perilous location.

Edit: Grammar

 

[TheRiotInside]

I would definitely be more on board with a gameover-on-death mechanic instead of a permadeath one, since (like it was mentioned before) it usually ends with the same result, as most players will reload a save if a character dies.

@Nivlacart That's a great point you made at the end that I was planning on mentioning while reading the topic. With mechanics like this, it is imperative that you don't cheat the player. Great care must be taken when balancing the battles, as well as an effort to minimize the random aspects of battle as much as you reasonably can. If you punish the player and it feels like it was out of their control, that is more than enough to get most people to put your game down. Unless they are a masochist! ...though they will probably be a very small percentage of your playerbase.

 

[Wavelength]

Nivlacart/RiotInside: Well said!  The player needs to feel that sense of agency for things to work well.

I feel that Critical Hits are an issue unto themselves though.  The default critical hit system in Ace and its predecessors is awful.  In theory you could build a system around forcing the players to make some kind of interesting alteration to their battle plan once one of their characters gets critted for triple(!!) damage, but I've never seen that done.  I've tended to use Crits as a way to introduce incomparables - I repurpose the nearly-useless LUK stat to solely influence Crit chance (which tends to run about 15% on average and can get really high if you build your character with lots of LUK), lower the damage to 150-200% instead of 300%, and add other bonuses (such as "Crit Points" that build to Limit Break-style moves, or using whether a skill is a Critical to determine whether it applies a state to the enemy).  In the end the RNG is still a big factor, but the player now has a lot more influence over their odds and over how important scoring the Crit is.  It doesn't feel like a random, "trolly" occurrence.

Allowing characters/enemies to "MISS" in battle falls under the exact same kind of design theory.  Unless you are working some kind of additional player control into the equation, it feels like the RNG is trolling you when your characters miss and it doesn't add anything good to the player's experience.

Tarsus: I think that plan is fine, but if all you need is a way to "justify" reviving a spaceship battler... just have a skill that turns back time (and/or cause-and-effect) on a subject!  That would be a way that Spaceships (and everything/everyone inside) could be brought back after being destroyed.

 

[whitesphere]

If the spaceship is a living being (see: Vorlon spaceship in Babylon 5), or perhaps made with advanced nanotechnology, it's quite justifiable that the spaceship can heal itself.

I would have the spaceship slowly self-repair.  And you can justify a "Revive" as "When the spaceship is too badly damaged, it needs seed power and resources to re-start the regeneration cycle."

As you see though, if you have permadeath in a game, you can't really flesh out the characters well, because then you would have to make a very complex narrative.  Say you have 8 characters, and you need just 1 to survive.  Then you would need 7! (factorial) combinations of narrative!  That's 7*6*5*4*3*2 = 5040 possible permutations of narrative!  With a mere 4 characters, it's "only" 6 permutations of narrative.  That's 6 complete storylines which the player can branch to at any time, if a character dies. 

In Roguelikes, the character doesn't really have a narrative per se.  It's all up to the player to do it.

But in every game, it's important for the player to feel his/her actions matter, without making random numbers too heavy an influence on the outcome.  Imagine a Final Boss where the only way to win is if a specific skill, which often fails, has to connect? 

 

[Wavelength]

As you see though, if you have permadeath in a game, you can't really flesh out the characters well, because then you would have to make a very complex narrative.  Say you have 8 characters, and you need just 1 to survive.  Then you would need 7! (factorial) combinations of narrative!  That's 7*6*5*4*3*2 = 5040 possible permutations of narrative!  With a mere 4 characters, it's "only" 6 permutations of narrative.  That's 6 complete storylines which the player can branch to at any time, if a character dies.

Just to note your math is a little off.  The actual number of permutations you'd have to account for with n characters is (2 ^ n) - 1.  So 15 possibilities with 4 characters and 255 possibilities with 8 characters.

Example - 4 characters:

1 only, 2 only, 3 only, 4 only, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, 3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-4, 1-3-4, 2-3-4, 1-2-3-4

Additionally, most situations wouldn't necessarily require every permutation to be accounted for.  If there are two or three characters that might be important to a scene in a game with eight characters, you could get away with ten or fewer different branches.

Still, do you really want to limit yourself like this as a designer, making most scenes rely on just a few different characters?  This is why I advocate for either the standard JRPG "Knocked Out" mechanic, or a straight-up game over if any characters die.  Or, like I advocated before, making the "immortal vs. expendable" dichotomy an essential part of the story and the gameplay, which I feel could be very effective.

 

[theheroforgaming]

What if you only introduced Permadeath at the end of the game? I don't know the story, but what if something happened where an antagonist does something to make the heroes vulnerable, or the situation doesn't allow for medics, or all reviving items are stripped from your inventory? Then, you'd be heading in to the final area equipped with every important playable character, meaning that their death has weight to it, and it creates real tension as to who survives to the end of the adventure.


As for the whole "it creates too many branches" argument, what if there was a cutscene that played if a character was in a certain status at the end of the battle? Replace the standard KO'd status with a new Death status, and have a cutscene check for anyone having it on. It's just an idea, but I thought it might be an interesting alternative to how Permadeath is handled.


Only other thing I have to say is that the protagonist of the story will most likely have a set fate: either survive regardless or die at a specific point, meaning the number of possible branches isn't as massive as it might've been. 

 

[Wavelength]

What if you only introduced Permadeath at the end of the game? I don't know the story, but what if something happened where an antagonist does something to make the heroes vulnerable, or the situation doesn't allow for medics, or all reviving items are stripped from your inventory? Then, you'd be heading in to the final area equipped with every important playable character, meaning that their death has weight to it, and it creates real tension as to who survives to the end of the adventure.

I guess it could possibly work with really good framing - the problem with this approach in general is that you are completely changing a mechanic (easy "revival" from KO status) that the player has worked under for the entire game.  They view falling in battle as a mild inconvenience - if I don't have a Revive item now, I can just heal them back up later.  A good night's rest will cure it!  I know you mentioned there could be some kind of paradigm shift like the antagonist removes their immortality by accomplishing some big goal, but in the player's mind I think they will treat it like a story-and-gameplay segregation rather than internalize that their characters are actually no longer immune to truly dying - because that's the expectation that you've reinforced for the last 10/30/80 hours.

 

[Dr. Delibird]

I guess it could possibly work with really good framing - the problem with this approach in general is that you are completely changing a mechanic (easy "revival" from KO status) that the player has worked under for the entire game.  They view falling in battle as a mild inconvenience - if I don't have a Revive item now, I can just heal them back up later.  A good night's rest will cure it!  I know you mentioned there could be some kind of paradigm shift like the antagonist removes their immortality by accomplishing some big goal, but in the player's mind I think they will treat it like a story-and-gameplay segregation rather than internalize that their characters are actually no longer immune to truly dying - because that's the expectation that you've reinforced for the last 10/30/80 hours.

I guess if you explain the characters immortality through story this could work if you make doubly sure the player catches the link between the story device and the gameplay mechanic which would be hard to do without saying "hey did you know that bla bla bla?" Every 5 minutes.