A game where returning from the dead is automatic

[OgreBattle]

So I started reading All You Need is Kill, which is about a soldier who gets killed in an alien invasion but he comes back to life the day before he died, and this keeps on happening every time he dies. He then spends every cycle of life trying to survive and in doing so gains more and more experience, getting closer and closer to finally surviving as well as saving others. D. Souls is also a popular series now that quite a few TRPG folks have heard of, and focuses its gameplay on coming back after you die with your experience intact to face the challenge once more.

Now, how could that work for a tabletop game? It would obviously be party based, so if someone dies a TPK would be ideal to keep everyone on the same page (though you might get a dramtic "final survivor accomplishes their cosmic mission, breaking the cycle")

Here's some approaches I think could work:
All You Need Is Kill Style:
-You're all trapped in a bullshit Tomb of Horrors-esque dungeon, death abounds everywhere.
-Demons burst forth on the Xth day and kill everyone, how can you stop them from coming forth, or become strong enough to slay them?

D. Souls Style:
- When you die you respawn at certain holy/unholy location and the adventure continues

[Previn]

Huh, so that's where Edge of Tomorrow movie got it's entire plot from.

[OgreBattle]

Huh, so that's where Edge of Tomorrow movie got it's entire plot from.

All You Need is Kill was originally a Japanese novel, then Hollywood bought the rights to it and changed the name. This manga adaption was created to drum up interest in the movie because Japan likes Tom Cruise.

[A Man In Black]

So it's Groundhog Day the RPG.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Eclipse Phase is an RPG where your mind has been digitized, and you periodically back it up. When you die, your backup is installed into a new body.

[the_taken]

Eclipse Phase is an RPG where your mind has been digitized, and you periodically back it up. When you die, your backup is installed into a new body.

But it doesn't send you back in time before your death to try again.

-

I'm trying to wrap my head around making several time looping event segments to puzzle through. Where if you get past the first obstacle of dying trying to get through D-Day or escape the dungeon or whatever, you then have a Week of crap you have to get through as the next time loop puzzle thing. Then after that you have a Month to prepare for the BBEG to show up as your third layer of Puzzle Time Loop Madness.

Can you imagine having to live through the events of Lord of the Rings where you start in the Shire with Frodo and if you fvckup you die and Frodo dies and the Ring Wraiths get the One Ring and bring it to Sauron and Game Over Bad End. And every time you get further along in the story but die you have to restart back in the Shire with Frodo and his three little friends getting chase by Ring Wraiths.

[Hicks]

Sounds like every video game ever before the invention of the battery backup save file.

[silva]

Sounds like every video game ever before the invention of the battery backup save file.

QFT.

[A Man In Black]

So how are you going to make the encounters you already solved interesting on iteration #4?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

This is how my group treated Fate Points when we played the various Warhammer RPGs. Burn one and your life is saved by either coincidence or deus ex machina.

When talking with a friend from the group, one idea for a game that came up while brainstorming was that, instead of a metagame currency like FP, what a homebrew could possibly do is state every player having a phylactery with so many charges, probably 2 since that gives you "three lives". Each time they die, a charge is consumed, and any fatal or DoT injuries are regenerated. Restoring the charges is possible but not trivial, thus becoming a strong motivator for player behavior.

What spurred the discussion was, in part, making something like Dark Souls on the tabletop.

[Mask_De_H]

A built in understanding that you have planar patrons/a friendly cleric/a tank full of clones is an easy way to do the Dark Souls style of revival. All You Need Is Kill style would need to either have parts of the playspace randomized or be a Gygaxian nightmare world where the old school, die and roll up a new Bigby/Rigby/Zibgy/Qbey aspect allowed characters to keep metaknowledge.

[Scrivener]

So how are you going to make the encounters you already solved interesting on iteration #4?

This is the tip of the iceberg of problems.

Either you have to make the problem solvable from the get go or you have to cheat and your players will know.

Let's look at a quick plot-

Evil mayor sends party to "kill" a dragon, so dragon doesn't eat villagers
Party gets ambushed by goblins if they go through the woods.
They traipse through the woods and meet bandits who are really trying to overthrow the evil mayor and dragon.

Or the party goes underground and fights an owlbear nest
They meet old hermit McGillis who will fight them, or show them he trained the owlbears

Party goes to fight the dragon.

The "win" conditions are recruiting the bandits or McGillis to help fight the dragon, because killing the mayor makes the town turn on you and the dragon still eats people.

If you let people play through the same story over and over again, you'll need some pretty obscure outs, like knowing a bandit is the daughter of Greta the baker, or that McGillis loves mushrooms. If you don't there is a good chance your PCs will stumble on the "win condition" without having to repeat everything. And if have multiple solutions half of the work you do will never see the light of day.

When your PCs refuse to search through the minutia of details (which is needed to have a not readily apparent solution) every MC will start to make easier outs. This means in order to have your multideath adventure the plot will start it having fake choices.

The real plot of any adventure is:

Difficult challenge is proposed and party hopefully cares about it
Random encounters, hopefully well built and add to the story*
Tool/knowledge/macguffin is acquired for the ultimate goal
More random encounters
Boss fight

In your resurrection system instead of going down a long road and fighting 2.5 trolls, the party's first 2.5 choices are always wrong, which feels disingenuous. Effectively make the party lose a bunch of combats and hope they don't notice that the world is shaped by where they decide to go that afternoon.

*I of course don't mean roll on a table for everything, but the ooze you fought before the dragon isn't memorable or important.

[Lokathor]

I heard of a game like this once. A person set up a scenario in the Revolutionary War where the player was commanding a regiment of troops. Each player played through on their own, but other players would watch. The scenario start was consistent, but the actions of the player drove the reactions of the world, which would lead them down different paths. It was run at a convention, and at first the players would get themselves killed. But the next player would have out of character knowledge and were encouraged to use that to try and get themselves through, until after several iterations a player was able to beat it.

[radthemad4]

I'd encourage joining a different faction in each 'playthrough' in order to learn their plans, their tricks and their real motivations. Then in the end they can decide to pick one faction, unite some of them, kill all of them, start their own, etc.

[Parthenon]

So wait, if you know you are going to lose the battle you automatically kill yourself. And what is special about the deployment?

Just to make sure- if you die on day X, you go to day X-1. If you kill yourself as soon as you respawn on day X-1, do you respawn on day X-2?

[Nath]

So it's Groundhog Day the RPG.

This may involve a slightly different mechanism, as in Groundhog Day even if the protagonist doesn't die, he still goes back in time past a given hour.

Day Break explored the same idea for drama rather than comedy, and as much as 13 episodes over nine hours. In both case, one key is to allow the story to move forward by not repeating challenges once the characters have understood how to deal with them. It can also be convenient to hand-wave what happen for the rest of a day and go back directly to the starting point again to try something new. But in TTRPG, the players will likely insist on using every minutes available to them, forcing the GM to play each day in its entirety.

[Ancient History]

There was actually an indie d20 supplement with the "Temple of Resurrection" where PCs explicitly got auto-resurrected there (sans gear) each time they died. I could dig it out for a kind of bizarre OSSR if anyone's interested.

[hyzmarca]

So it's Groundhog Day the RPG.

This may involve a slightly different mechanism, as in Groundhog Day even if the protagonist doesn't die, he still goes back in time past a given hour.

Day Break explored the same idea for drama rather than comedy, and as much as 13 episodes over nine hours. In both case, one key is to allow the story to move forward by not repeating challenges once the characters have understood how to deal with them. It can also be convenient to hand-wave what happen for the rest of a day and go back directly to the starting point again to try something new. But in TTRPG, the players will likely insist on using every minutes available to them, forcing the GM to play each day in its entirety.

Majora's Mask also did this, though in its case it did so by locking in challenges once fully completed. So you only needed to beat a dungeon once.

[codeGlaze]

There was actually an indie d20 supplement with the "Temple of Resurrection" where PCs explicitly got auto-resurrected there (sans gear) each time they died. I could dig it out for a kind of bizarre OSSR if anyone's interested.

Fuck yea.

[radthemad4]

I think Majora's Mask is probably a good inspiration. All NPCs will have schedules, and as the players level up, they'll unlock more areas and notice more things.

An idea that comes to mind: Shortly after they start, the players get ambushed by a bunch of ninjas every time. If they start to wonder why it happens every time, they might question one and find out they were followed. Then if they actively search around their 'spawn point' next time they restart, they'll find an invisible ninja who's been stalking them and has alerted his comrades each time, leading to your ambush. Then they could subdue him, charm person him into telling his friends that the players found him and he had to kill them all in self defence, and then follow the ninjas to their den.

This is just one potential scenario. It doesn't have to go exactly like this. Perhaps someone just rolls a twenty in listen and hears the invisible ninja after respawning at some point. Perhaps one of the players picked up Blind Fighting[Tome] at some point, leveled up and has a BAB of 6 now, so he detects the ninja with Tremorsense. There could be any number of ways to find the invisible ninja.

Littering the world with stuff like this would probably make for a fun game. e.g. at some point they find out that a certain NPC will betray them, so on a later run they can plan for it, betray them first, etc.

[Vebyast]

I once tried putting together a campaign that's vaguely related to this idea. Basically, idea was that the player characters weren't explicit individuals, but rather Heroic Personalities that would hop through history to possess/inhabit/inspire particular individuals, which would turn that NPC into a PC temporarily and turn them into a copy of that player's build. Replaying the same scenario repeatedly from different perspectives with more advanced builds was explicitly a design goal. I'd build an entire world and plot its history all the way out through a crushing loss to the forces of darkness, and then the players would select and inhabit particular characters to try to save the world. Player characters were explicitly unaffected by the deaths of the characters they were possessing, and I figured that I'd try to reward players for keeping their characters alive, some kind of balance between kamikaze missions and building a strong light-side civilization.