What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[K]

Yeh, shitty ASCII games from the 70s don't seem to have anything to teach me.

The fact that permanent character death was discarded as soon as computers had enough memory for a Save file is a pretty strong argument for why it's a shitty mechanic.

The latest version of Nethack is from 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack), and still has a decent number of players. Please note that this is just the number of people playing on one particular server, which is actually generally less convenient than playing offline.

Nethack does have a save mechanic, it just deletes the save file when it loads it.

Nethack does have really quick and easy character generation, though, and you're not expected to get too attached to your characters.

500 players? Is that supposed be a lot for a game with world-wide distribution?

[RadiantPhoenix]

500 players? Is that supposed be a lot for a game with world-wide distribution?

That is not the total number of players, that is the subset of those who played on a particular day who:
* Did so while connected to that particular server
* Didn't quit
* Didn't win

The first is the biggest limiting factor; playing a single player game on a server is inherently more inconvenient than playing it offline. There are also other public Nethack servers, and an unknown number of non-public Nethack servers.

[Swordslinger]

I mean, as far as I know, Diablo II was the only game that risked true character death, and only when you played Hardcore Mode.

RPGs: The Witcher 2, Diablo 2, Dungeon Hack, any ROGUE-like, the older Wizardry games, Ultima 2 would autosave your progress as you went along so you couldn't go back. I believe it was also possible to permanently die in Star Wars Galaxies if you were a jedi.

Any multiplayer strategy game has this too. You're expected to play out the game as is, and if your nation gets overrun in Civ V or Master of Orion, you're out of the game. This may not be character death in the conventional sense, but those civilizations took a long time to build up and some were expected to be permanently crushed. Like character death, you were losing something you put a lot of time into.

It's a simple rule that the more sadistic your game, the quicker people burn out.

While it's true that games that are ridiculously sadistic will drive people away, the same is true that games that don't present any real risk of failure often make people bored.

Why do you think so many people bet on sports?

They want something real at stake. They want risk. Risk creates excitement. Playing a game where you know failure is meaningless (or even worse nonexistent) is boring.

[K]

500 players? Is that supposed be a lot for a game with world-wide distribution?

That is not the total number of players, that is the subset of those who played on a particular day who:
* Did so while connected to that particular server
* Didn't quit
* Didn't win

The first is the biggest limiting factor; playing a single player game on a server is inherently more inconvenient than playing it offline. There are also other public Nethack servers, and an unknown number of non-public Nethack servers.

A few thousand players of a free game with worldwide distribution and little character development seems to prove the opposite point of the one you are trying to make.

[K]

I mean, as far as I know, Diablo II was the only game that risked true character death, and only when you played Hardcore Mode.

RPGs: The Witcher 2, Diablo 2, Dungeon Hack, any ROGUE-like, the older Wizardry games, Ultima 2 would autosave your progress as you went along so you couldn't go back. I believe it was also possible to permanently die in Star Wars Galaxies if you were a jedi.

Any multiplayer strategy game has this too. You're expected to play out the game as is, and if your nation gets overrun in Civ V or Master of Orion, you're out of the game. This may not be character death in the conventional sense, but those civilizations took a long time to build up and some were expected to be permanently crushed. Like character death, you were losing something you put a lot of time into.

CivV has saves. I seem to recall MOO also having save points (but I'd have to reinstall my copy and find the Vista patch to check it).

But that's immaterial, because you can immediately play another game.

It's a simple rule that the more sadistic your game, the quicker people burn out.

While it's true that games that are ridiculously sadistic will drive people away, the same is true that games that don't present any real risk of failure often make people bored.

Why do you think so many people bet on sports?

They want something real at stake. They want risk. Risk creates excitement. Playing a game where you know failure is meaningless (or even worse nonexistent) is boring.

If failing the adventure and not accomplishing the story goals is not enough risk for you and you need everyone to risk losing their characters, I'd like to suggest that you go find another way to get your fun because RPGs are not for you.

Go play chess, but remember that every time you lose a game you lock the board in a cabinet for 24 hours.

[A Man In Black]

RPGs: The Witcher 2, Diablo 2, Dungeon Hack, any ROGUE-like, the older Wizardry games, Ultima 2 would autosave your progress as you went along so you couldn't go back. I believe it was also possible to permanently die in Star Wars Galaxies if you were a jedi.

Any multiplayer strategy game has this too. You're expected to play out the game as is, and if your nation gets overrun in Civ V or Master of Orion, you're out of the game. This may not be character death in the conventional sense, but those civilizations took a long time to build up and some were expected to be permanently crushed. Like character death, you were losing something you put a lot of time into.

Witcher 2 caters to a dwindling, hardcore, and most importantly solo audience. Nethack revels in its perversity (and is sort of a competitive game), is a solo game, and has character creation that takes less time than tying your shoes. The rest of those computer RPGs are decade(s!) old.

CivV and MOO are competitive games, and even 4X games have gone to a lot of effort to introduce "lost" gamestates less than completely annihilated, to allow players to continue to play as a vassal state.

[Stubbazubba]

All these video game examples aren't really applicable because you can immediately start again. Now, if, when your civilization was defeated in CivV, the program wouldn't open again until next week, that would be something, and that something would be terribad, and no one would think that was acceptable. So with D&D's character creation/design mini-game, which is widely popular (see CharOp boards), you can't also have unpredictable character death. Defeat states that take you further from your goal instead of expelling you from the game are perfectly acceptable consequences, I would wager, to the majority of players, and considering the relative nonexistence of permadeath even in solo games or MMOs, I think the gaming industry generally agrees with this.

[Fuchs]

SWG's perma jedi death was dropped real quick, even though it actually was "lose all progress if you don't get a medic to raise you within 30 minutes", and was soon extended to "... and it's the 5th time this happens".

[Josh_Kablack]

So, in tonight's Champions game, we had a weird psychicly induced/ past life recall session - where one of the characters flashed back to an adventure set in the French revolution - and the MC passed out various revolutionary soldiers so we could game out the combat for presenting key nobles from escaping with a metaplot macguffin. As players we knew (from modern day history and character knowledge) that the nobles died during the revolution, the central flashback character lived through the revolution and the macguffin was lost sometime in the past 200 years - but we didn't know which, if any of the other characters lived, and we were in the middle of a combat for the fate of the revolution, where both sides were using swords and muskets and nobody had resistant defenses.

This added a dramatic tension of uncertainty since neither victory, nor survival of any (save one) of the PCs were in any way assured. ( Heck, we know that every one from 1792 is dead by the point in the twentieth century where the main game is set ) However the key point is that the MC sprang this on us and passed out the flashback characters - giving us a couple of char points for minor customization and just until the terrain and minis were set up to spend them - total chargen was less than 5 minutes effort - including making up names and arguing over which swords were appropriate to the era. The continuing characters that players have investing hours in building and months in playing were not threatened in this combat.

[Swordslinger]

Defeat states that take you further from your goal instead of expelling you from the game are perfectly acceptable consequences, I would wager, to the majority of players, and considering the relative nonexistence of permadeath even in solo games or MMOs, I think the gaming industry generally agrees with this.

Yes, given that defeat is generally very common in video games, the actual impact of any one defeat is lessened.

This is just not the case in Tabletop RPGs, where defeats happen very rarely. Thus when those defeats happen, they have to be something you fear.

See, "failing the quest" isn't even a huge drawback, because it just means you get another quest later that might be related to your last failure or you move onto a totally new quest, but that hardly matters because you were going to get a new quest anyway, because the game is about quests. One can argue that it can make the next quest harder, but it's already been defined that PCs can't die, so increasing the difficulty isn't an option either.

You could dock them treasure, but again, why should they even care, it's not like they need those +3 swords to compete, the combats are easy as cake. All those great items and abilities I've got are irrelevant, because my opponents are training dummies. I might as well stick to a wooden practice sword, because it doesn't matter. I can take on the Tarrasque with only my bare hands because I'm immortal. Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

[K]

Defeat states that take you further from your goal instead of expelling you from the game are perfectly acceptable consequences, I would wager, to the majority of players, and considering the relative nonexistence of permadeath even in solo games or MMOs, I think the gaming industry generally agrees with this.

Yes, given that defeat is generally very common in video games, the actual impact of any one defeat is lessened.

This is just not the case in Tabletop RPGs, where defeats happen very rarely. Thus when those defeats happen, they have to be something you fear.

See, "failing the quest" isn't even a huge drawback, because it just means you get another quest later that might be related to your last failure or you move onto a totally new quest, but that hardly matters because you were going to get a new quest anyway, because the game is about quests. One can argue that it can make the next quest harder, but it's already been defined that PCs can't die, so increasing the difficulty isn't an option either.

You could dock them treasure, but again, why should they even care, it's not like they need those +3 swords to compete, the combats are easy as cake. All those great items and abilities I've got are irrelevant, because my opponents are training dummies. I might as well stick to a wooden practice sword, because it doesn't matter. I can take on the Tarrasque with only my bare hands because I'm immortal. Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

No need to keep strawmanning. We understand that story and character doesn't mean anything to you and the very idea of heroes winning battles is morally offensive to you.

We get it. You want to pretend that your skill has anything at all to do with your survival and that you are somehow beating an objective game world and not challenges calculated by a subjective DM.

Either add something new to the conversation or back off, because your position is clear.

[RadiantPhoenix]

A few thousand players of a free game with worldwide distribution and little character development seems to prove the opposite point of the one you are trying to make.

Given that Nethack has approximately zero advertising budget, I think that describing it as having 'worldwide distribution' is misleading. Just about every game that can be played offline has worldwide distribution.

I also mentioned that think that the proportion of Nethack players who play on a public server is almost certainly very low (<= 0.01), because playing on a public server means competing against everyone else on the server for high scores. What proportion of Solitaire players do you think play online?

Now, I think I should revisit another point:

Yeh, shitty ASCII games from the 70s don't seem to have anything to teach me.

This is an appeal to novelty, and is invalid because Nethack has many things that we do agree to be good that many "modern" RPGs don't have.
* Nethack allows a high degree of interaction with the game world, such as being able to bypass challenges by digging around them to get to the next dungeon level.
* Nethack actually (with some exceptions, such as the scroll of genocide) has enemies use the items they have, rather than having them drop items with no relation to what the monster is (see: Gnome with wand of Death)
* It has continued support and updates to fix places where the game just doesn't work.

In conclusion, Nethack is a valid game to consider for inspiration.

That said, I don't think that permadeath in D&D should be as hard to avoid as permadeath in Nethack. They're different sorts of games, and we're never going to get character generation as quick and easy as Nethack's into D&D.

EDIT: Fixed a quote tag, and replaced a typo.

I'm also not entirely certain that death-as-death should be in D&D at all...

[echoVanguard]

Quite simply, K, I'm not entirely sure that you understand your own position. You've repeatedly accused others of straw-manning in this thread, while consistently engaging in that behavior yourself. You decry the behavior of others who disagree with you as controlling and spiteful while declaring that other people should run their games the way you want them run, whether they like it or not and whether they agree with you or not.

One of two things is happening here - either you're not communicating very well, or your opinion is demonstrably invalid.

echo

[Shadow Balls]

So I assume you don't play in card tournaments (Euchre or CCG or whatever), because in those there is a chance that you will be knocked out of the running and spend the rest of the night watching other people play?

You mean the tournaments that are almost always Swiss-style or double-elimination, just because of this concern? I don't know a thing about Euchre, but most CCG tournaments don't run single-elimination unless they have qualifying rounds or fuck-off huge player pools, for this very reason.

Tournaments have double elimination or similar to attempt to minimize the luck element of a good player being eliminated by a fluke. It has nothing to do with not wanting people to sit out since as several others pointed out the eliminated people are just going to go play against each other to pass time. The closest D&D parallel to this would be some sort of contingency plan to avoid death, be it by a cheap and easy rez, save rerolling abilities...

You complain about failure = death, but that's one of the nicer things that can happen to you.

In one instance, a character got hit by a 1% chance critical hit. In another, a critical hit nearly one shotted someone (and then a follow up attack did kill them). Everyone involved was entirely fine with that as the dice were rolled openly, and it happens.

If someone had tried to tell me that I was in the wrong for allowing the dice to land where they did, or claimed that I felt entitled to ruin people's fun because the archer got a fucking headshot which means that someone was in fact shot in the face I would instruct them on the fine, time honored art of going and fucking themselves and then finding a nice fire to die in.

No need to keep strawmanning. We understand that story and character doesn't mean anything to you and the very idea of heroes winning battles is morally offensive to you.

We get it. You want to pretend that your skill has anything at all to do with your survival and that you are somehow beating an objective game world and not challenges calculated by a subjective DM.

Either add something new to the conversation or back off, because your position is clear.

Says the guy who went from complaining about relativism to a straw man about how anyone that lets a character die is out to get them, and then launches into another straw man here about how story and character doesn't mean anything to someone because they want... actual risk. And that if there is a chance to lose, that chance must be 100%. If it were not for your grammar being readable, and I did not look at the name, I would be unable to distinguish your post from one of shadzar's.

[A Man In Black]

Tournaments have double elimination or similar to attempt to minimize the luck element of a good player being eliminated by a fluke. It has nothing to do with not wanting people to sit out since as several others pointed out the eliminated people are just going to go play against each other to pass time.

And, again, only fuck-off huge tournaments run double-elimination. Any tournament that is not some sort of hardcore competition for a prize or title (and while those tournaments are high-profile, they are the exception, not the rule) is run Swiss-style, because they are going to have people's kid brothers and somewhat-disinterested SOs and bratty teenagers, and telling those people to either play with random strangers who also lost or fuck off is not good for the hobby.

In one instance, a character got hit by a 1% chance critical hit. In another, a critical hit nearly one shotted someone (and then a follow up attack did kill them). Everyone involved was entirely fine with that as the dice were rolled openly, and it happens.

If someone had tried to tell me that I was in the wrong for allowing the dice to land where they did, or claimed that I felt entitled to ruin people's fun because the archer got a fucking headshot which means that someone was in fact shot in the face I would instruct them on the fine, time honored art of going and fucking themselves and then finding a nice fire to die in.

The game is poorly designed for having a 1% chance to get crit and explode.

[Chamomile]

No need to keep strawmanning. We understand that story and character doesn't mean anything to you and the very idea of heroes winning battles is morally offensive to you.

We get it. You want to pretend that your skill has anything at all to do with your survival and that you are somehow beating an objective game world and not challenges calculated by a subjective DM.

Either add something new to the conversation or back off, because your position is clear.

Says the guy who went from complaining about relativism to a straw man about how anyone that lets a character die is out to get them, and then launches into another straw man here about how story and character doesn't mean anything to someone because they want... actual risk. And that if there is a chance to lose, that chance must be 100%. If it were not for your grammar being readable, and I did not look at the name, I would be unable to distinguish your post from one of shadzar's.

That particular post is an ironic callback to something Swordslinger posted himself a bit back. It sounded pretty terrible when Swordslinger wrote it so I don't know why K thought it would sound better the second time, but regardless I don't think the content of this post specifically is a perfectly accurate representation of K's views, since he was making it fit into the framework of another post.

[Shadow Balls]

Tournaments have double elimination or similar to attempt to minimize the luck element of a good player being eliminated by a fluke. It has nothing to do with not wanting people to sit out since as several others pointed out the eliminated people are just going to go play against each other to pass time.

And, again, only fuck-off huge tournaments run double-elimination. Any tournament that is not some sort of hardcore competition for a prize or title (and while those tournaments are high-profile, they are the exception, not the rule) is run Swiss-style, because they are going to have people's kid brothers and somewhat-disinterested SOs and bratty teenagers, and telling those people to either play with random strangers who also lost or fuck off is not good for the hobby.

I don't know what Swiss style is. But by your own admission the serious ones do it not because of some concern about people sitting out but to make it more about skill than luck.

The game is poorly designed for having a 1% chance to get crit and explode.

The 1% chance guy didn't die. He lost around 60% of his max HP, but since his current HP was higher than 60% he survived. The other guy had a 2% chance of that happening to him. He also didn't die from that, but he did die when he got hit again right after by a different enemy.

The point of this being that in addition to people dying because they are being stupid, sometimes people die through no fault of their own because they are simply unlucky. People like K are not only saying that it is wrong for characters to die for being dumb, but that it is wrong for them to die for any other reason as well. And that it is wrong for them to fail their saving throw vs Glitterdust. Because all of those things result in a player sitting out for an extended period of time. And I'm not just saying that because of that one post, as he has been fairly consistent in his viewpoint throughout the thread.

[tzor]

500 players? Is that supposed be a lot for a game with world-wide distribution?

I forget the number of max connections that the MPGN Kingdom of Drakkar server could support at any one time, (and we had several servers running) back using 1990's Unix systems but a 500 player per day number for a given specific server sounds pretty good to me.

[hogarth]

This added a dramatic tension of uncertainty since neither victory, nor survival of any (save one) of the PCs were in any way assured?

Did anyone die?

[RadiantPhoenix]

So: The game needs a mechanic that gives people a way to participate in the game while their characters are for some reason (e.g. hold person, death, being elsewhere) incapable of participating in what's going on.

[tzor]

Ironcially, I always found that the biggest problem being a DM was the exact opposite. The times when the player was present but the character was unable to be active was rare; the times when the character was active and important but the player was missin was far too often.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Ironcially, I always found that the biggest problem being a DM was the exact opposite. The times when the player was present but the character was unable to be active was rare; the times when the character was active and important but the player was missin was far too often.

Oh, I guess we need something for that too.

[Josh_Kablack]

Did anyone die?

No, but we did have two of the four temporary PCs get very close - one more *minimum* damage sword or shot hit would have dropped either to subzero BODY and bleeding to death, one more *maximum* damage hit would have dropped either straight to -Body, go directly to Dead, do not pass go.

[FatR]

Go play chess, but remember that every time you lose a game you lock the board in a cabinet for 24 hours.

As this is still supposed to be about DnD - pretending to be an actual retard is an inferior form of trolling. Yesterday you still had enough subtlety to bait me.

[FatR]

Defeat states that take you further from your goal instead of expelling you from the game are perfectly acceptable consequences, I would wager, to the majority of players, and considering the relative nonexistence of permadeath even in solo games or MMOs, I think the gaming industry generally agrees with this.

Permadeath exists in DnD? I mean, past level 5 or so, when character generation actually starts taking longer than 1-1.5 more hours (and there are alot of games where you can lose as much or more time due to getting wiped, or forced to quit due to not being able to beat a boss). And death in DnD expels you from the game? WTF?