Revive/Raise

[CWells]

I don't know if I want to use a spell that restores an ally after dying. If I'm going to give the characters healing spells, then players should have to make smart choices and recognize when they are in danger. I dunno how I feel about spells or items that revive. I think I'm going to avoid raise for my project :/.

 

[Kes]

Is that a permanent death, or will an inn or an item revive them outside of battle?  If it's permanent, what to do when eventually all your party dies off?

 

[CWells]

Is that a permanent death, or will an inn or an item revive them outside of battle?  If it's permanent, what to do when eventually all your party dies off?

Resting will resolve the issue. And there will be a specific location to restore party members, especially summoned characters. Given that most of the members that a player will have are summoned, I have to create a place to restore them when knocked out in battle.

 

[Andar]

Is that a permanent death, or will an inn or an item revive them outside of battle?  If it's permanent, what to do when eventually all your party dies off?

That would be game over, naturally.

I don't understand why a lot of players can't accept failure as a consequence - especially if you have several actors to hire for a smaller party, then there should be no problem to replace a dead character with another character, and train that one to compensate.

I once wrote a gameset (not RM) where the research for better armors could only be triggered after the first soldier died - with a story sequence telling that their soldiers need better armors to prevent more deaths. It was a good cure for those players who always reloaded when they lost even a single soldier ;-)

 

[orochii]

Try watching a game called Beyond the Beyond. In Beyond the Beyond, characters have a first HP bar, which works pretty much as energy shields in spaceship games. When this first HP bar depletes, the character gets stunned and doesn't acts until some turns later. Then is the second HP bar, which is the actual character's life. If this goes down to zero, the character dies.

There was someone's RM game where it used something pretty similar. Characters didn't died permanently, they got up with some HP after a while. But if all characters were dead at the same time... well, you know the consequences.

So, using this kind of stuff (or others, who knows) can make it completely unnecessary to revive characters,

Orochii Zouveleki

EDIT: Another idea. Characters aren't dead at zero HP. They're dead at, let's say, -700HP (let's say the character has 1400 maxHP). When its life depletes to zero or less, the character gets incapacitated. But you can "revive" it just using a regular recovery spell/item until its HP gets again above zero.

A little of this can be seen at Mabinogi, where exists a chance of not dying if your HP is like -400HP and your character had a maxHP of 200. It's called DEADLY status. Still, while on deadly, ANYTHING (even a small breeze) can kill you (except for healing of course, you can heal back to normal, that's the idea of it existing, because there are some insane monsters that deal like 10000dmg and the max HP I think one can have is like ~800).

 

[Traveling Bard]

Or you could revive upon battle victory. Newer games tend to do that to make their games easier. Personally, I don't like it and tend to lean more towards using your resources such as damage mitigation, equipment upgrades, threat/tank concepts using a "cover-like" ability, and a wise use of items(a sparse resource) to stay alive and add that element of challenge i feel most games just don't have anymore. Finding the sweet spot to balance it all so it's fun and not rage inducing is the key. 

In my game, I give the players "a tent" in their inventory that they can use at any time to rest up completely after a battle; however, each time you use the tent a day passes. After so many days, tentatively 3, the end result will be the bad ending. So you can play the game, you just won't get what you want at the end unless you play it right

Good luck with your game. I'd be interested to see how you balance out the difficulty.

 

[CWells]

Good luck with your game. I'd be interested to see how you balance out the difficulty.

Lots and lots of troop testing at levels 1, 10, 30... XD

 

[Erynn]

The reason for it's inclusion in games is pretty simple - is it more fun for THE PLAYER to have to try and play on without their character until they reach a designated point? Seriously. It can be, if you create a sense of achievement using this 'danger'. However, if you use it to artificially increase the game's difficulty, it might not be fun. Games are about fun. Instant revival can make games more fun - particularly story based ones where people are really trying to get to the next bit of story and the fighting is incidental (as with many JRPGs of the 90s). If combat is your main facet that people play for, a more punishing death can certainly be a bonus for you. If it is part of your game play and your game is built around the idea that the player's party could be 1 or 2 men down for a while. Like all mechanics it is a 'depends on what you are trying to achieve with it' thing. Instant revival isn't just about making games easier - it's can just as easily be about removing artificially increased game play time.

 

[Gilsev]

CWells, I have a quick question for you. What benefit does this offer the player? I can see something like this in a more realistic setting where revival takes time and concentration, but that is not what most games are about (your mention of recovery/revival spells says this is not your game). I am also very interested in how you will balance an encounter for 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 party members (or however many you will have) and have the difficulty shift after a single party member dies.

The primary reason for revival spells/items being able to be used in combat is generally *not* to make encounters easier, but instead not to pound a player into the ground with a difficult encounter for a full party that only gets harder and harder as more and more party members die. The idea of having a revival spell take several rounds of combat to perform would be one idea to counter the party that just keeps bouncing back up after each crushing blow.

Andar - People can accept failure as an option, unless the game itself treats any level of failure as the first step on a short path to party wipe. Imagine you are playing a game in a Table Top setting and you enter into a fight that is very hard and your party needs to use ideal strategy to win, when the first hit lands on a party member and hits harder than expected the morale of the group drops dramatically. In general, the players of any game made with RPG Maker is going to be played by someone in school or with a full time job... the last thing they need is their entertainment draining away their already dwindling supply of morale.

muramasa - That is an interesting idea, pulled straight from D&D (Second Edition) where players were knocked unconscious at 0 HP but didn't die until -10.

To me this sounds like unnecessary time and strain being applied to the player, adding in a special place to restore your lost party members, which doesn't add any entertainment for them. While it may not be important enough to be a featured point, most games attempt to create some level of emotional bond between the player and their party (unless this is a mass war game where you command entire squads of troops at a time). This is lost completely if you have disposable party members that can be killed and replaced with another Red Shirt in the next scene.