Ranger Sheck's Blog

Computer Role-Playing Games are notorious for lacking in actual ‘Role-Playing’. Your typical hack-n-slash CRPG takes the mechanical concepts behind pencil-and-paper role-playing games and automates them, giving these games a much greater focus on combat more than anything else. Once the mathematical base of a CRPG is established, often times the role-playing aspect is grafted on afterward, like fake skin on a robot. On the surface, it looks like a role-playing game, but underneath beats the gear-filled heart of a cold, calculating mechano-man.

Due to the combat-centric nature of most CRPGs, one of most malformed aspects of their ‘role-play’ is Death. CRPGs provide faster and more plentiful combat, which inevitably leads to a great deal more death than a pencil-and-paper RP session. Depending on the game setting, unchecked death of both non-player and player characters alike can really distort any kind of believable storyline. Many CRPGs go out of their way to explain the use of magic and divine intervention in their settings, but most of the time not only is the death of character usually extremely temporary, character “respawning” is generally flimsily explained (if at all). Non-player death fits into two categories: either non-player entities stay dead once killed, never to be heard of again, nor have their deaths questioned by anyone else; or upon death some cosmic timer ticks over and respawns them periodically.

I’d like to talk about the abuse of death and non-player entities some time, but today I want to focus on player death. In a pencil-and-paper RPG, death is usually permanent. If you have a generous Game Master, there may be ways around it, but chances are pretty good that there’s going to be a creative plot-line to go along with any form of resurrection. In a single-player CRPG, death is usually pseudo-permanent; I say pseudo because you can always reload a saved game. If the game is party-based, then you may have that typical flimsily-constructed method of resurrection (e.g. take them to church and say a little prayer/pay a little cash and presto, alive again).

In an online CRPG, you don’t have the luxury of reloading a saved game. To keep people from just giving up, game designers need a way for players to respawn. Let’s face it, no one is going to keep coming back to a game if they have to make a new character every time they die. The old telnet-based MUDs set the standard for player respawning – upon death, you found yourself back in your home town (usually in a church or other sanctuary). You probably lost a level and all of your equipment and maybe even your gold. Banks became extremely important to players that needed to get back into the game after a death and may have stashed extra equipment and money. MMORPGs started out following the MUD standards; however, as time goes on, MMORPGs attract more players who have less and less gaming experience (RPG or otherwise), and have subsequently softened the blow of Death, so to speak. In many MMORPGs, dying does not result in loss of equipment or skills or levels or whatever. A player may lose “experience points”, or in some cases merely acquire an “experience debt” that has to be worked off.

In many cases, whatever the Death Penalty, player revival typically goes unexplained. In your average fantasy MMORPG, you die, you respawn at some kind of “home point”, and maybe you have to sit out some “death effects”. No one lets you know which god kindly plucked your body out of one place and trans-dimensionally reconstituted it in another place, dusting you off, patting your behind and wishing you well on your next adventure. A notable exception to this norm (speaking primarily of fantasy-based MMORPGs) is PlaneShift, in which if you die you awaken in the underworld. Not much explanation is needed for that situation, and I think it’s a creative way to deal with death. That being said, if you’re not familiar with the game, navigating your way out of the maze-like underworld can take you nearly an hour (unless you’re lucky enough to run into another lost soul who knows where they are going).

What’s a computer role-playing game designer to do? History shows us that any integration of player death/resurrection and a believable role-playing storyline ain’t gonna happen. So we expect players to accept resurrection (with weapons and armor still in tact) as a run-of-the-mill activity. Happens all the time, no big deal. They accept magic and monsters and all the rest of it, why should we focus on believable death scenarios?

Sadly, we’re forced to resort to using death as a venue for penalizing a player for biting off more than they can chew. This is the part where role-playing collides with game-play. The more you attempt to incorporate story-like role-playing into character death and recovery, the harder the game becomes. When death is frustrating, players quit, and with persistent online games, the loss of a player is the loss of regular revenue. So designers are forced to turn their backs on role-playing to compensate. In my opinion, as the years go by many games have over-softened the Death Penalty. This is especially true of MMORPGs, who prefer to keep players no matter what and often sacrifice challenge for revenue.

When I was in the initial planning stages of design for Pioneers of Aethora, I had a bug up my butt over the ever-weakening Death Penalty I’d seen in MMORPGs. In my game design, a player has a collection of eight characters, four of which can be placed into an active party at any given time. You go into combat with your four characters, facing off against a group of non-player characters. Winner takes all. The role-playing explanation is that defeat means surrender, and the victors should strip everything away from the defeated, no matter which side wins. The losers walk away empty-handed. Sounds fair, right? And I got out of trying to explain death, because no one actually dies! Meanwhile, since you have eight characters total, you can bench injured characters and give them a rest while you play with fresh characters. No divine intervention or beam-me-back-to-town tricks called for. I thought I had the role-playing aspect and the death penalty nicely wrapped up.

Of course, there were a couple problems. First of all, defeated characters lost all their equipment – not just what they were wearing and wielding, but what they had in their inventories as well. Since there is no bank (as of yet) in Aethora, the only way to stash extra equipment is to move it around and make sure it’s not in the inventory of any active characters. Obviously, this kind of stock-piling is quite the pain in the neck – but failing to do so would result in a player losing a ton of equipment in a defeat. Secondly, there is no way to judge what the ability of your opponents will be before you jump into a battle – in some areas, the encounters occur randomly without your choice to engage. This problem makes it possible for players to end up in combat they could never win. Finally, there was no way to retreat from battle.

Some players just dealt with these issues. Other players I believe accepted the penalty for what it was, but I fear many may have lost interest in the game along the way in unspoken frustration or perhaps even boredom – acquiring new equipment might mean going back to fighting enemies well below the player’s challenge level. One player (who happens to be a real life friend of mine) suddenly became extremely vocal about the issue a few weeks ago, and I decided to reevaluate my game’s Death Penalty. After mulling over the possibilities, I came up with some options that I feel provide some kind of balance to those ever-conflicting forces: role-playing, challenge, and player enjoyment.

First off, I changed the loss of equipment to be only the equipment being worn and wielded by the characters upon defeat. The non-player characters aren’t carrying unused equipment around anyway, so it still seems fair. The RP explanation? The victors can only walk away with so much stuff, so they assume your best gear is the gear you went into battle with. Secondly, adding the ability to flee from battle was essential. There is no real role-playing reason for keeping this feature out of the game, my reason was purely mechanical. In Pioneers of Aethora, skills are earned in real-time during combat – you take a swing with a sword, you have a chance of increasing your sword skill right at that moment. So my concern was that allowing players to flee from battle might entice some players to go into fights and notch up a few skills, then run off. Therefore, in order to maintain some challenge, fleeing characters lose a few skill points.

It’s actually worked out rather well so far. If a player senses defeat, they can choose whether they will lose equipment or skill points on a character-by-character basis. Since the fleeing option has been implemented, I’ve seen it used quite often. What’s encouraging is that a player who flees from battle often enters another battle somewhere else shortly afterward – a sign that the death penalty is not deterring defeated players from continuing play.

The party-system in Pioneers of Aethora plays a large role in making defeat play well with role-play. MMORPGs and other CRPGs don’t have that luxury if a player represents just one character, but can’t they do better than RETURNING TO HOME POINT?

(if you’ve held on to the story this long and want to read the short blurb I wrote for the players, it’s in this update, with links to more details in the in-game forums. Registration required to read the in-game forums.)