AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic - Death Penalties (no permadeath talk here!)

Here, we will discuss specific, technical suggestions about new death penalties. The optional permadeath discussion is another matter: please keep it out of this topic.

I will present some quotes on suggested actions. Roughly, the main options that have come up during the discussion have been: stat/level penalties, time penalty before resurrection, a set number of lives (regenerating over time) or cumulative penalties on top of eachother, increased XP/gold penalty, making scrolls unavailable.

When you make suggestions, try to read all the other posts and be constructive. Keep in mind both PvP and PvM, and double-check that your suggestion is valid for both.

chefwudan wrote:

what could also be intersting is when one dies it leaves a corpse and puts the player in a state of GS, as if their spirit is hovering watching things in an OOC state, instead of sitting their watching that YOU ARE DEAD screen. The corpse could be picked up into ones inventory (at a high weight value and not allow to be put into bags/boxes) to be transported to the proper temple or whatnot. then upon being raised their could be a % roll and or alignment check to grant raises or ressurections.

mairacle_ninja wrote:

Just my thought on a system, although it could be a bit harsh. When a character dies, they have to wait a certain amount of time to respawn, say 1 day for levels 1-10, 2 days for 11-20, 3 days for 21-30. If, before they respawn, nothing is done to help them, they receive XP/GP penalties. If they are Raised, they receive milder penalties. If they are Resurrected, no penalties. Although, the XP/GP penalty plus the days to wait is probably too much. It's meant to give Raise and Resurrection something to do. Maybe they could reduce the time you have to wait?

Delarwyn wrote:

I have a suggestion, if a character gets killed why you don't add some type of thing that will make that character slow and blind for several hours? The character could be raised and such, but he wouldn't be able to go back into a fight or to do any thing forceful. Make it so that only a PC cleric would be able to "heal" him from the effect.

Selmak wrote:

There's no Dread or similar in NWN. That would have been my preferred alternative.

Basically it's like a level drain, but a little less severe. You can gain varying degrees of Dread from 1 to 4 points, depending on your level. The effects of 4 points are more severe than the effects of 1 point. In all cases, Dread caused by defeat lasts ten minutes real time.

The effects include loss of maximum hitpoints, poorer healing, and reduced combat damage.

The first of these could be done in NWN as a loss of CON effect. The second would need a little tinkering in the healing spell scripts and still, wouldn't affect healing kits. The third could be done as a reduced damage effect, but obviously this doesn't affect damage from spells.

Xaviera wrote:

Here, with numbers, is my suggestion for death penalties. Exactly what happens when you die (eg. turn into a corpse that has to be carried to a cleric, or remain dead for 5 minutes, or go to the fugue plane) is not addressed - this proposal applies only to the longer-term consequences of dying and kick in only after you have been raised.

:arrow:

Every time you are 'raised', the system checks each of your 6 principal stats and your level and rolls 1d10. On a 1-4, nothing happens. On 5-7, you lose 1 point in the stat or 1 level. On 8-9 you lose 2 points/levels, and on 10 you lose 3. These penalties are checked each time you are raised and are cumulative.

:arrow:

Every hour (though it could be every reset for more 'oomph') the stat is checked, 1d10 is rolled and if the result is less than or equal to the penalty, the penalty is reduced by 1 (eg. if the penalty is -2, a roll of 1 or 2 will reduce it to -1; a roll of 3-10 leaves it unchanged).

Now, the numbers.

First, note that you'll only go to zero in a stat if you are a minmaxed PC with a 6 in something (likely Wis or Cha) AND you get killed twice in one hour AND you roll really badly for the penalties (a 10 on 1d10 twice in a row for that particular stat). So it would be possible to use this as a 'permadeath' option for PvM and/or PvP, where really serious damage to your ass would require a True Res (griefing of course would still have to be screenied, and DMs could reset the penalties at will if desired). Or the system could simply block all reductions below a 3 stat and 3rd level. It might also allow for people to gang up on someone and beat them into the ground, though there would have to be rules for how this could be accomplished as well since it would probably involve keeping the victim around and beating on him while he's helpless.

The penalties, by the way, are carried on an undroppable item in your inventory and are essentially just the equivalent of an undead level/stat drain. They are unaffected by Restoration and similar spells, however, though there could be other methods to boost your rate of recovery (regen adds 10% to the recovery roll, or a Restoration lets you make an extra roll, or something). AFAIK, applying penalties this way wouldnt cause you to lose wings or shadowjumps or whatever, though someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Assuming average rolls, stat decreases recover at the following (RL) rate:

-1 = 7 hrs
-2 = 11 hrs
-3 = 13 hrs
-4 = 15 hrs
-5 = 16 hrs

and each additional -1 is an additional RL hour. So even if you lost 9 points (3 deaths within 1 hour and horribly bad penalty rolls) it would still only take 20 hrs (less than 1 RL day) to recover, on average. Much more likely is -3 points, which will recover in only 1/2 RL day. Even if you roll terribly on the recovery checks, you're 95% likely to be back to full health in 3-4 times the periods given above. So at worst a -1 might take a full RL day to recover from and even -9 would take 3 RL days. That's not so bad, is it?

And finally, my own suggestion:

IronAngel wrote:

You have a set of ”lives” that regenerate weekly/monthly.

Every death will have consequences increasing in severity: first a temporary ability/level penalty, then a movement speed decrease and so on. These penalties are not technically cumulative, but get increasingly severe and include the previous penalties within them. At first, it will take some hours to recover. Later, it will be entire resets and longer (if technically possible).

After a few deaths, you start to go to the Fugue on resurrection. You cannot leave there until a certain time has passed. This step is crucial: it allows political assassinations to actually work! At first, it may be fifteen minutes, later even hours.

Once you lose your last life, you go into the Fugue and can't leave at all until your lives regenerate.

There would be a cap on lives, and the penalties would be determined by the number of lives left: this is why they are not cumulative. Even if you're already free of penalties, but you still have only three lives left, you get the severe penalty for that. If you just spent your last life and regenerate two, you will have to suffer the second-worst penalty for death, should you die before you regenerate more.

Respawn button would increase the base duration of the penalty x3, Raise and Resurrect scrolls x2, Raise and Resurrection spells would be the base duration. The benefit of getting a priestly Raise over a scroll is therefore half the duration on penalties.

Two good ones I'd enjoy taking part in:

chefwudan wrote:

what could also be intersting is when one dies it leaves a corpse and puts the player in a state of GS, as if their spirit is hovering watching things in an OOC state, instead of sitting their watching that YOU ARE DEAD screen. The corpse could be picked up into ones inventory (at a high weight value and not allow to be put into bags/boxes) to be transported to the proper temple or whatnot. then upon being raised their could be a % roll and or alignment check to grant raises or ressurections.

It could lead to fun RP, however, it doesn't really say what happens if your entire group wipes and then there's a reset and such.

And yours Iron, it seems to work effectively also.

Last edited by IronAngel on Sun, Dec 20 2009, 22:58 PM, edited 1 time in total.

I prefer my own suggestion, of course:

It is not crippling in PvM. You can easily die once or twice in PvM and still keep going reasonably well. This is important, because we don't really want to make it too severe if you die by lag or accident. But several accidents start to weigh in.

It's not subject to other players ruining your peaceful fun: if you want to avoid conflict and penalties, you will keep a full reservoir of lives and the penalties will therefore be negligible.

It will enable real consequence in PvP. However, the consequence will be temporary: you can cripple someone just before a gladiator match or a faction war, or send them into the Fugue before a political meeting if they have few enough lives. But all this will be fixed in time.

For active players, legit PvP will often have more than the lowest penalty, since it's quite likely that you have less than full lives left.

Xaviera's system is not bad, but I feel it doesn't quite give those increasing RP penalties I want: once you've healed from your penalties, you're back to square one. I want penalties that are reasonably short-term, but that previous deaths will have a notable effect on your current death penalties. If you died a lot some days ago, even if you've already healed from the penalties, the impact of the next death should be greater.

I am also in favor of removing gold cap on Respawn, but that can be done irrespective of what elaborate system we choose.

Problem I see with chef's would be if players picked up corpses and held onto them so that the character remained in a state of death.

Im all for irons, but i still dont see how any increase in death penalties is going to work for political assassinations. I actually see this as a way for players to merely switch toons when one of them has been killed too many times.

Craig deathwalker wrote:

Im all for irons, but i still dont see how any increase in death penalties is going to work for political assassinations. I actually see this as a way for players to merely switch toons when one of them has been killed too many times.

I may be somewhat biased to the Drow perspective: if you're summoned to an important meeting, and you're assassinated beforehand so you can't attend, it may have severe political consequences. Similarly, if you must conduct a spellcasting ritual in the temple, or if you're challenged to a duel in Melee-Magthere for prestige and rank, and you've just been crippled or inflicted a concussion in PvP, it's going to be harmful to you. You don't need to kill someone to ruin them politically, you just have to make them miss their opportunities and look bad.

As for players switching PCs and keeping a few of them active, I don't see anything wrong with that. Personally, I think it's actually desireable, but that's my taste.

I agree that chefwudan's suggestion would have the base flaw of PC's lugging your corpse around to prevent you from being raised. Forcing equvilent of permadeath; or forcing people to take ressurection penalty instead of the opportunity to be raised. Worse yet, what happens when a person carrying your corpse- logs out? Epic screws you?

mairacle_ninja's idea seems more reasonable, although I challenge it brings in level favoritism because they days spent dead are based on your character level or ECL. The upside it that it can prevent 21-30's killing off 1-10's for longer and longer times. But I am personally more favorable to a death system that comes out equal across the board. Then again, giving it some consideration, we may very well need caps base on levels to reduce certain abusive posibilities. I like the notion that the reason you want raised, or better, ressurected, is because it will reduce the penalty you face depending upon the quality of revival you can get instead of a raise dead being treated equal to a ressurection.

Delarwyn's notion for slow and blind for several hours would just be infuriatingly hard if they can only be cured by a PC cleric. People would probably rather lie dead and send of tells "get be a cleric" so they don't have to try and walk at a reduced speed with a blind effect back to whoever can heal them. Or be a burden on their party if a Cleric isn't in the group; and then everyone has to move slow just to try and get the 1 person back. Sounds much too hard to be more than an OOC headache.

Selmak's suggestion of a weaker version of a level drain effect seems alright. I would be concerned over CON drain given the fact removing any +con armor would be liable to accidentally kill you (as we already see that time-to-time). Let alone, if all it is is CON drain, PC's can just have a +12 Con set of armor to run around in (although they must need to drop other +stat to manage, so that might balance itself). Tinkering with the heal spell scripts means only what, Cleric's take a healing ability penalty? Or is the system trying to run a check that the PC being healed has to take a reduced heal effect? And if it doesn't affect healing kits, then those will just be spammed when the heals are weaker. I'm not even sure how you have reduced damage effects but not so that they affect spells- the mage who couldn't hit you with a stick can't hit you with a stick even more; but can still blow you up via fireball with no difference?

Xaviera's idea makes me cringe. Do you have to be logged in for 7 to 16 hours just to make up a death? With the high rate of "well, it's a good time to log anyways," I'd be prompted to start logging in and sit to do nothing just to wait of my 7-to-16 hours penalty! Given that it reads like you must be logged in for the dice to roll every 1hour; otherwise you miss the chance to recover.
Otherwise, if it records how many hours you've been logged out, and rolls for every hour that you were logged out 1 time, then I can see it being more okay. It wouldn't be much differen than being forced to wait x-time to be allowed to revive. Although this style means you can revive and still do the chat RP or lower hunts if you're not too weakened.

IronAngel's... I don't like the movement decrease. Monks will laugh a bit and everyone else will just be OOCly irritated that it takes them that extra 30minuts to get to an NPC to sell loot they got before they died. Or that they can't keep up with anyone, frustrating others if anyone it trying to travel in a group. It's already seen to be a problem between PC's who run about and PC's who walk, or are overburdened and must walk.
I like the lives counter system. But I don't like that you can't regenerate any lives until you've used all of them. So I get harsher and harsher penalites, even if I didn't play the PC for a day, or two, or a week. I should get some kickback to regenerating lives if I'm taking breaks from the PC- after all that is the idea behind this! You force me to burn off every life, taking all the worst penalites, and then wait to regen back to "square 1" means I might as well go suicide and get my PC killed at the pace I want so I can plan ahead that "coming event, oh, I'll use my worst penalites now so I have the weak ones on time for that". If we have a constant (maybe slower) regeneration, people will be able to be rewarded for resting the PC at any time they're missing a life. Not only once they've gone suicidal to just get the penalites over with.
It took me a while to think about it, but I see why you set the x3respawn, x2scroll raise, x1 cleric raise system. Looks good there.

----

One thing I'm adamant against here: Slow Effect Penalites on Waling Speed. All I see is the OOC headaches, no matter how good they sound as penalties. If I go to rest the PC by playing safe, staying low, and all that, I'll be annoyed as the dickens (x10!) if I'm trying to go anywhere. On top of that, if I choose not to log out and I get into a hostile zone or situation (lets say I have to cross out of Cordor to outside of Bendir dale where you can be hostiles)- I'll be epic boned with no way to flee!

Last edited by Godo on Sun, Dec 20 2009, 23:40 PM, edited 1 time in total.

I also like Irons as well, a nice setup but with a few tweaks.

If a spell is used to raise you then perhaps no penalties, that would give much more usefulness to clerics and such. Scroll use base penalties and respawn the X2 penalties. Also eliminate the free OOC raises all together. I would also suggest a low level free of penalties, say to level 10 perhaps.

If decided to remove the gold loss cap I would suggest putting in a bank at least, the bank could even charge say a 2 to 5% withdraw fee as well.

Edited: Also have cartable corpses as well, that way they could be carried, with a heavy encumbrance, so players could try and find a cleric to raise their friend. Again giving clerics much more meaning and value.

Perhaps it might work in drow rp, but for surface ive seen too many IC conflicts turn to OOC ones.

Where as before people simply got up after being killed I can see this turning into a "well I did get sent to the fauge plane for 4 hours, so -thats- why I missed the meeting, reschedule/kick up a fuss".

The intentions here are good, I fully understand that but my faith in the playerbase is limited. I would love to be proved wrong, but my view is all or nothing.

I live Xaviera's suggestion, only the times that I come up with are slightly different to her calculations, but numbers can be tweaked.

No reason we cant combine yours and mine, Iron.

Mine is intended to produce short-term (ie. ~1 day) consequences of death that have an IC effect and are RP-able, yet that dont cripple you - first time, anyway. They would apply to any sort of death - PvP, PvM or DM event. This is 'resurrection sickness' and has nothing to do with number of deaths.

I think that adding specific penalties (eg. bards lose 2 Cha, barbarians lose 1 str & 1 con) as someone suggested is more work and requires more calculations (= more lag). We could treat your suggestion, Iron, as one more variable on that inventory item (number of lives remaining) that I proposed. Then my system is used for the short-term penalties and yours is used to determine time in the Fugue plane, for example.

In fact, you could combine the two by having the number of lives remaining modify the penalties imposed upon raising by my system.

Let's say you have 10 lives. In my system, you temporarily lose 0/1/2/3 points from each stat and your level if you roll 1-4/5-7/8-9/10 on 1d10. If you want to impose harsher penalties when you have fewer lives left, just modify that 1d10 roll by 10 minus the number of lives remaining. In other words, someone with 9 lives left would add 1 to each d10 roll, so the chance of losing 0/1/2/3 points would change to 1-3/4-6/7-8/9-10. If you only have 5 lives left, it's +5, so the chance of losing 0/1/2/3 points becomes 0/1-2/3-4/5-10. If you die with only 2 lives left (+8 to the roll) you can expect to lose 2-3 points per stat and 2-3 levels for a RL day or two, after you've spent your time out in the fugue plane. And of course all of these penalties are cumulative. :twisted:

You could even add another level to the penalty range: 0/1/2/3/4 on a roll of 1-4/5-7/8-9/10/11+. Normally you couldnt roll 11+ on 1d10, but pile on enough previous deaths and you're in trouble.

Still need to discuss the exact penalties while dead and what IC/OOC modifiers there might be (hitting respawn, raise, resurrection, etc.).

EDIT: Oh, and Torzeng... the elapsed time is RL time, whether you're logged in or not. If you've died and taken a -1 penalty to a couple of stats, I dont think that's a big deal, and if you dont feel like continuing through the Spires with a headache and a limp you can lumber back to Cordor and plot to overthrow the city instead. Or you can switch to an alt, knowing you'll likely be back to pretty much full health in the next RL day or two anyway (unless you got nailed badly and repeatedly).

Well, i suppose as far as my suggestion, you could always add negatives from carrying a persons body, as in being slowed and/or unable to equip weapons while carrying the body to dicourage most from takes ones body... but at the same time it would give them to appearance of a permadeath, til at least the next reset, at which point if your not raised by then you could start in the fugue and respawn with penalties or something.

Reset would make things difficult, because i don't know if negative effects and penalties could sustain between them, much less pickable corpses. At the very least i suppose the death could generate a headstone marker at the spot of death.

I played on one server that would repawn you in a graveyard as a wraith and you would need to initiate a convo with a certain NPC to respawn and that would then raise you with several penalties. Similar to WoW you could run around the server as this in a state of GS and no one could see or hear you until you got a raise.

Torzeng wrote:

I'm not even sure how you have reduced damage effects but not so that they affect spells- the mage who couldn't hit you with a stick can't hit you with a stick even more; but can still blow you up via fireball with no difference?

Actually, I goofed. It doesn't add a damage penalty, it increases your chance to miss with an attack. It also makes you take slightly more damage than you would.

The point I was making is that NWN doesn't have the necessary code in place to create a chance to miss with an offensive spell (or lower the DC for example, which is as good as missing if the target saves at the lower DC). It would have to be added from scratch.

Even then, it sounds like people are looking for death penalty effects which linger a lot longer than ten minutes. I suppose you could make it last longer, but IMO you would then have to make the amount of penalty less over the penalty time, or stagger them so that some effects intentionally wear off before others.

So for example, the physical shock (-CON) to your system might wear off first. Then the mental shock (-Attack, -Spell DC) goes away as your mind clears. There's still a lingering feeling of dread after that with no effects, but the mental symptoms may return at random for a few minutes at a time. This continues until you've had three/four/five episodes of mental symptoms, or you have to respawn again in which case the whole thing starts over.

I didn't mention the reduced healing in the above example because quite right, no matter how much you tinker with cleric scripts, it's quite likely that someone will just healkit you, and healkits are hardcoded.

Chance to miss' with a offensive spell is your SR - SR is to spells as AC is to weapons.

As I said before, I have no objection to the idea of carrying around a 100 lb corpse either, and I particularly like the idea of being unable to equip weapons or cast spells while doing so.

The major downside of my own idea would seem to be the record-keeping and possible resulting lag. I assume that the character save routine that saves you every 10-15 (?) min is a script? You could add a few lines to that to store the time you last checked your recovery and recheck if appropriate. This would slow down the character save script slightly but the effects would be spread out over an entire reset rather than checking every PC every hour on the hour.

A (possible) upside would be that DMs would have to have the ability to reset the death counter (eg. in the event of griefing). If they wanted to be really nasty for some reason, they could set your lives to 2 left and kill you, forcing you to the fugue plane (or whatever) and making you come back with some serious penalties. It would also give them another means of applying modifiers to stats that would be (relatively) unaffected by spells, depending on how the penalties were designed to work in combination with raise/res/etc.

I would suggest simply removing the gold cap on the respawn. Then make scrolls unavailable but at the same time raise the dropchance for blankscrolls and have the playerclerics supply raisedead/ressurection scroll. Alternatively add a first-aid kid that can raise players but with a penalty (movement speed, ab, ac decreases etc) until a real cleric has healed the subject or X time has passed and call it natural regeneration.

Yurell wrote:

Chance to miss' with a offensive spell is your SR - SR is to spells as AC is to weapons.

Even assuming that the casters in question have to penentrate spell resistance regularly, you still have the problem of applying an effect which decreases your chance to get through spell resistance.

Quote:

XP penalty on death is dumb anyway, and will never truly hurt the character. It's just an annoyance to the player, it doesn't actually harm nor hinder the character in any meaningful way except to slightly push back the time before he gains another level increase by making them have to add another 10-40 minutes of hunting random things back in. This is especially because you can't even actually lose a level from XP loss upon dying.

I'd prefer that instead of XP loss that, upon dying, you were stuck with some un-removable negative levels (like when a wight level drains you) for a set period of time, to represent a wounding to your soul that has to heal. This would actually affect the *character* too, since their capabilities would be weakened for whatever the duration of whatever the amount of negative level penalty was.

Quote:

Well, when I suggested a negative level penalty I meant even if you get raised normally and don't click respawn you'd suffer negative levels. Respawn would either just be for if there's no cleric or someone with scrolls around (in which case you'd get ported back to a bind point) and maybe have some additional penalty, such as the gold loss and maybe something else too.

Terra_777 wrote:

I would suggest simply removing the gold cap on the respawn.

I kept suggesting that in the other topics. Seems a perfectly reasonable approach to me.

Edit: This means if you earn, on average, x gold before dying you should approach a total of 10x gold ... if you have less than 10x, the average gold earned will be greater than the amount lost through death, and if you have more than 10x you will lose gold as you approach this value.
That, of course, assumes that there are no expenses. Even so, eight times seems like a reasonable maximum to get. And if you object strongly, remember that in a party you don't have to worry about respawning.

This also hurts epics far more than lowbies, since one needs over four hundred thousand gold for this change to have any effect.

Iron: What should be decided on before going any further in discussion is what you want to accomplish with the 'Penalty'. Whats 'wrong' thats not being done 'right' at the moment. Untill we know that specific metric formulating a proper answer to that isn't going to work.

As it stands most of these ideas just show me that people are looking for creative ways to make people want to not hunt because PVM becomes even more of a 'tedious chore'.

Any penalty should operate on the concept that death is unavoidable in pvm, It will occur eventually, and sometimes out of your control. It should also operate with the idea that a death is guaranteed in PvP.

Once we know what we want to 'solve' with the penalty we can then decide we should also exactly define what version of 'penalty' we want to apply.

Penalty:
1 : the suffering in person, rights, or property that is annexed by law or judicial decision to the commission of a crime or public offense
2 : the suffering or the sum to be forfeited to which a person agrees to be subjected in case of nonfulfillment of stipulations
3a : disadvantage, loss, or hardship due to some action
3b : a disadvantage imposed on a team or competitor for violation of the rules of a sport

Too many people seem to be pushing towards definition: 1, when they should be Focusing on 2, or possibly 3 in my opinion.

Penalties should not cause suffering to a person, they should not make the game or the server 'UNFUN'. So far anything that I have seen will not accomplish the goals of making death penalties simple, uniform, and a penalty instead a punishment.

Suffering in Definition #2 is more of a 'Cost' associated with violation, an.. 'early termination' fee.

A penalty is what occurs when you do an undesired action. One would think that xp and gold loss is undesireable in PvM. You want to make them be something wanting to be avoided, but not cause the player of the character suffering. You also want them to be uniform in effect regardless of build or other dynamics. This is why 'Uncapping' is not fair. If the current cap is to low, raise it, but to remove it completely is unfair.

It's not 'teaching against death' because of the way lag and the server works, they do ocassionally happen on some builds. Like everyone's favorite potion lag = Death for melee characters.

Also PVP penalties can never have the same effect as PVM. It puts too much power in the hands of players and thereby griefers.

Yurell wrote:

Terra_777 wrote:

I would suggest simply removing the gold cap on the respawn.

I kept suggesting that in the other topics. Seems a perfectly reasonable approach to me.

Edit: This means if you earn, on average, x gold before dying you should approach a total of 10x gold ... if you have less than 10x, the average gold earned will be greater than the amount lost through death, and if you have more than 10x you will lose gold as you approach this value.
That, of course, assumes that there are no expenses. Even so, eight times seems like a reasonable maximum to get. And if you object strongly, remember that in a party you don't have to worry about respawning.

This also hurts epics far more than lowbies, since one needs over four hundred thousand gold for this change to have any effect.

I've hit 800,000 gold before level 20 on several PCs.

At ECL 30, I feel 200,000gp is the maximum that a respawn should cost.

A death of any type at ECL 30 should cost 40,000 gold that is 'gone' in armor/item repair.

Dwagin wrote:

I've hit 800,000 gold before level 20 on several PCs.

Well, this will make it harder.

Dwagin wrote:

At ECL 30, I feel 200,000gp is the maximum that a respawn should cost.

Why?

Dwagin wrote:

A death of any type at ECL 30 should cost 40,000 gold that is 'gone' in armor/item repair.

Why does armour only break when you hit 30? Wouldn't a lowbie's armour be easier to break? Why does the extent of the damage increase with how powerful you are, when you are fighting the same monsters?

For the purposes of cumulative deaths. What i do see is the Job system coming into play. Make the penalties permanent and only removable by Items produced via the Job System.

On death roll d100 and attract a cumulative penalty.

-5AC can only be cured by armor kits produced by an armor smith.
-5 skills by a potion of somesort.
-5 AB cured by a Weapon fix kit produced by a weapon smith.
-1 str fixed by a potion of bulls restoration (Crafted potion of Bulls Str + Crafted Lesser Restoration Potion for instance)

For me personally this will help spread the gold around the playerbase as I personally with a Level 30 who rarely dies would prefer to use my Job Points on Market Gardner, Preacher, Relic Hunter.

The suggestion of one who does not script obviously so I am unaware if temp effect A can be cured with curative A or if Curative B will restore subrace negative X.

So instead of being market garndener, farmer, and orchasrder it will only be the jobs that fix these. Not viable, IMO.

Last edited by Dwagin on Mon, Dec 21 2009, 1:50 AM, edited 1 time in total.

Yurell wrote:

Dwagin wrote:

I've hit 800,000 gold before level 20 on several PCs.

Well, this will make it harder.

I don't usually buy my first death with a PC till it's in the 20's.

Yurell wrote:

Dwagin wrote:

At ECL 30, I feel 200,000gp is the maximum that a respawn should cost.

Why?

Because The average metric of coinage on hand at ECL30 seems to be on the 750,000gp range.

Dwagin wrote:

A death of any type at ECL 30 should cost 40,000 gold that is 'gone' in armor/item repair.

Yurell wrote:

Why does armour only break when you hit 30? Wouldn't a lowbie's armour be easier to break? Why does the extent of the damage increase with how powerful you are, when you are fighting the same monsters?

Who says I'd let the other folk get off with it?

Alternatively you could just apply it as a 'Diamond tax' or 'Reagent tax' to be deducted from you, in order to utilize the raise scroll properly on you.

((150gp * (ECL -5)² )) * 2 = Penalty in GP for respawn.
((150gp * (ECL -5)² )) / 2 = Penalty in GP if raised.

That yields a gold penalty:

ECL:
5 = 0gp
10 = 7,500gp Respawn, 1,875 if raised.
15 = 30,000gp Respawn, 7,500 if raised.
20 = 67,500gp Respawn, 16875 if raised.
25 = 120,000gp Respawn, 30,000 if raised.
30 = 187,500gp Respawn, 46,875 if raised.

XP Penalty:
10% of the xp required to reach the next level loss on respawn, 2.5% on raise.

Ergo, if you need 10,000xp to get from level 9 to level 10, a death would cost you 1,000xp to respawn, and 250xp from a raise. This penalty is static, its not dependant on current xp, just character ECL.

That's the change I'd make for PvM.

I'd give PvP killed targets a 3 minute cooldown where they can't be 'raised'.

Edit: I'm of the opinion that XP/Gold penalties for PVM deaths are perfectly fine and acceptable means of penalty and make perfect sense IC, and are the least annoying to script/code/enforce without having to jump through hoops. They're a bump in the road, annoying, stings a bit but doesn't ruin your day. I would add some penalty to the fact you died, even if you got raised. Why? Because. It doesn't teach you anything if you don't get a little sting. A little pain is a good teacher. Too much is a dismotivator.

TormakSaber wrote:

So instead of being market garndener, farmer, and orchasrder it will only be the jobs that fix these. Not viable, IMO.

It is viable given the range of different negative effects that can be applied and the range of items crafted that can fix them.

AC: Armor/Weapon Smiths
Skills: Find a teacher get a lesson
Negative Stats: Herbalist/Alchemist
Negative levels: You'll need a Preacher
10% elemental vulnerabilities: Find an Arcanist

etc etc etc etc.

Crafted Potion of Bulls str? You need beef and a herb. Crafted Potion of Con. Chicona and Quicksilver (examples)

Add a safety net insofar as only items of very good -> high quality will restore your missing stats and you'd see more specialisation in the Job system.

At the moment I see the Job System as added fluff and see penalty restoration as making it a mechanical nescessity.

Hell -1str. . .go see one of those Men at Arms, Instructor types and get a pep talk to restore that negative str stat, rather than it giving you a bonus +1 to str for 5 turns or whatever it is.

Quote:

Add a safety net insofar as only items of very good -> high quality will restore your missing stats and you'd see more specialisation in the Job system.

Now it only functions for level 18+ rank 3 members of very specific jobs. what happens if there's no one around or you're not that high of a level?

I think there is a line to walk between making Death meaningful and just plain being an OOC obstacle where it is hard to "fix".

fearun is a faith based world big time..the faithless get punished..I would like to see that faithless could not be raised -AT ALL- it makes no sense that a god should grant sucha favor, since the gods have no respect for the faithless.

That's a rather big punishment for not realizing at creation that we are a server that makes use of a field that few even figure out exists at character creation, or what it meas and does. It would be like permakilling you based on your "Age" field. Does ANYONE take that seriously?

TormakSaber wrote:

It would be like permakilling you based on your "Age" field. Does ANYONE take that seriously?

*raises hand slowly*... I have to know the ages of my characters...at least at creation.

I do agree though that something a little detrimental should happen to Faithless upon death. Perhaps the first time, youre asked "Did you forget/not know, or is your char actually Faithless?". If someone honestly forgot, they get informed, and perhaps a chance to choose one from the whole list right there. If they choose Faithless, then next time, upon any any raise chance, 50% chance of fail. That, or just cannot be raised until reset... heathen bastards.

But in all seriousness, we should look into it. I lost count the times I've had characters walk around infront of both mine and other clerics and say something to the effect of "Pffft. Gods? Man, whatever, like those things really matter. Never effected me coming back from the grave before*shrug*."

if i was to go for any the idea here it would be ironangels, thou i would also love to see raise scrolls got rid of completely so that nobody is getting raised unless its a cleric or somehow raised with a dm plot.

TormakSaber wrote:

That's a rather big punishment for not realizing at creation that we are a server that makes use of a field that few even figure out exists at character creation, or what it meas and does. It would be like permakilling you based on your "Age" field. Does ANYONE take that seriously?

I've already lightened Xavi's hair once and RP'd that she had a few streaks of gray (before she recently dyed it red). She is aging and even makes jokes about her memory and getting old. Metalien's eponymous PC also aged quite a bit (before being rejuvenated). Wasnt it Qirlan who requested a widget based on aging? I'd take an aging widget with penalties only if DMs wanted to drop one on me.

Of course, the age in the age field isnt the same as her actual age now.

I do expect to have to retire Xavi permanently based on age sometime in the next year or three. :wink:

Forest for trees. I meant "if you permadied randomly one day based on a timescale we decided because you put an arbitrary number in a field that gets no use ordinarily".

Not everyone fills in the deity field at creation. Many do it in game when they bind at an idol. But ICly they may still worship a god.

I don't like any of the suggestions thus far.

Having to walk to your corpse in semi-GS'ish-mode works on some servers. But on Amia I unfortunately see a shitload of metagaming of that function, in going into areas you shouldn't be or earsdropping/spying on characters you otherwise couldn't spy on.

Iron's suggestion seems geared towards how drow function, and not so much at all towards how the rest of the server functions.

Also, for Iron's system to have an actual impact, as is suggested, it looks like one would have to kill a character repeatedly to have desired results.

All in all... I sort of lean towards Dwagin's post.

The point of having a death "penalty" is not to keep a player from playing the game, but to bite the dust and then regain what is lost.

Having stat decreases, level decreases, blindness, deafness etc works as short term implications after a recent death, and has a very practical purpose in the case of PvP, for example. In order to rid of the *Raise dead -> Immediately chugs a heal potions -> Starts re-buffing -> Re-joins the fight*.

But with stat penalties and severely reduced combat abilities that last for days, even weeks, would mean that whenever someone would bite the dust enough times, they're stuck with social RP or having to bite the dust even more.

It's possible to add Spell Failure in order to prevent 100% effective casting, btw. To those who were discussing that.

Removing the gold cap entirely isn't something I would recommend, since it isn't reasonable for some to suffer more than others just because they've spent the time and effort to gather more gold.

Unless you also want to compensate by having 10% of your DCs removed, to make death sting for those who never hunt for gold or loot, but focuses more so on being involved in plots, events and casual RP.

I don't have any suggestions of my own as of yet when it comes to implementing death penalties that intend to enhance RP more so than make parts of playing on Amia a tedious and discouraging choir.

I'll try to think about it, though.

Quote:

Removing the gold cap entirely isn't something I would recommend, since it isn't reasonable for some to suffer more than others just because they've spent the time and effort to gather more gold.

This is obviously accompanied by a banking system, but frankly if you have 100 million gold, losing an uncapped 10% so you're at 90 million, is pennies. Same for losing 500k if you have 5 million. It's nothing. Even 100k at 1 million. That;s 2 bits of loot in your average hunting grounf.

I agree that the more severe a mechanical penalty is, the shorter it should last. That's why I said above, that you would "have to make the amount of penalty less over the penalty time."

You know well enough that the current problem with the respawn penalty is that hardly anyone is going to hit respawn when they can get a raise later on. So either make respawning and raising a little more equal in some regards, or get rid of one or the other.

Coming back from death is a process that goes on for a bit longer than the duration of your average raise casting. Whatever method you decide on, it should reflect some of the trauma that the recently raised go through, otherwise why make such a big deal out of it? Easy enough to change the respawn interface to read 'You are Just Resting'

Quote:

ou know well enough that the current problem with the respawn penalty is that hardly anyone is going to hit respawn when they can get a raise later on.

Except at 30 when I count people respawning 5 10 15 times to kill a +5 boss because it's meaningless compared to the 5% chance of loot.. THAT needs to be halted.

Make the death penalty apply when you die instead of after you respawn then everyone will be a lot more carefull in there actions, additional penalty if you respawn.

Last edited by Jyro X on Mon, Dec 21 2009, 10:55 AM, edited 1 time in total.

Dwagin wrote:

I've hit 800,000 gold before level 20 on several PCs.

How? The most gold I've ever seen pre-20 was around 200k. That's a silly amount.

The most gold I've seen so far after 20 is around 500k.

TormakSaber wrote:

Quote:

ou know well enough that the current problem with the respawn penalty is that hardly anyone is going to hit respawn when they can get a raise later on.

Except at 30 when I count people respawning 5 10 15 times to kill a +5 boss because it's meaningless compared to the 5% chance of loot.. THAT needs to be halted.

Yes it's much less dangerous to a lvl 30 when they don't have to worry about re-leveling their character...

And money is practically useless to them at that point seeing as they've probably stocked up close to a life-time supply of healing pots and bought all the gear they need that they can get from shops.

The death penalty as it stands currently is really only the most dangerous to people trying to level their characters. Once you hit 30, it's like "SAFE! - HOME BASE!"

Kind of annoying really.

My level 14 WM has 160k. Had 200k+ at previous levels as well.

TormakSaber wrote:

Quote:

ou know well enough that the current problem with the respawn penalty is that hardly anyone is going to hit respawn when they can get a raise later on.

Except at 30 when I count people respawning 5 10 15 times to kill a +5 boss because it's meaningless compared to the 5% chance of loot.. THAT needs to be halted.

15 minute cooldown on PvM respawning will fix that.

Mind that the simpler you make the implementation the less chance you have something breaks.

Addendum: I'd not make death fun. That misses the point.

There should not be a cap on gold loss at any case, we're already struggeling with getting money out of the economy.

*Spawns something nasty on Prescia.*

TormakSaber wrote:

Forest for trees. I meant "if you permadied randomly one day based on a timescale we decided because you put an arbitrary number in a field that gets no use ordinarily".

I' know that I'd fill the age scale with a negative number if that happened, or just avoid playing half orcs and humans since the live a tenth as long as elves.

Jyro X wrote:

Dwagin wrote:

I've hit 800,000 gold before level 20 on several PCs.

How? The most gold I've ever seen pre-20 was around 200k. That's a silly amount.

The most gold I've seen so far after 20 is around 500k.

I've had a million at sixteen with my bard.

Just make it an uncapped percentage of your wealth based on level, hehe. Higher taxes for the the rich and the high and mighty!

Dev Disco wrote:

Just make it an uncapped percentage of your wealth based on level, hehe. Higher taxes for the the rich and the high and mighty!

1/3 level %

Still caps at 10%, but there is no limit.

Kjetta wrote:

There should not be a cap on gold loss at any case, we're already struggeling with getting money out of the economy.

*Spawns something nasty on Prescia.*

Like twenty of those Frost ball flinging gargoyle bastards?

Kjetta wrote:

*Spawns something nasty on Prescia.*

*Hides behind greater sanctuary*
Seriously though, if uncapped I will go with three options:
1. PC Bankers
2. Never go on another hunt
3. Never hit the respawn button

Dramatic_Prince wrote:

Kjetta wrote:

*Spawns something nasty on Prescia.*

*Hides behind greater sanctuary*
Seriously though, if uncapped I will go with three options:
1. PC Bankers
2. Never go on another hunt
3. Never hit the respawn button

And such choices are your prerogative.

Yurell wrote:

Dramatic_Prince wrote:

Kjetta wrote:

*Spawns something nasty on Prescia.*

*Hides behind greater sanctuary*
Seriously though, if uncapped I will go with three options:
1. PC Bankers
2. Never go on another hunt
3. Never hit the respawn button

And such choices are your prerogative.

As is your random spam comment.

Uncapped gold penalty might potentially encourage a barter economy.

Death Penalties (no permadeath talk here!)

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