aw, I knew I should've read everything before posting... my bad :D
Vaipa>
Quote:Well, a more in-depth discussion on this topic could be found around this site:
www.realmsofkrel.com
that's the site I was talking about in my previous post... :)
Quote:3) I supose its clear you'd have to tone down the frequency of deaths, its common for an inexperienced mmog player to die more than 5 times in an hour. Thats quite a strain on the bloodline, and if they have to re-equip, travel and gain skills again, seriously boring.
you don't need to have permadeath on normal fights, only with specific monsters, or quests, or whatever, witch would be pretty rare...
Quote:Slightly off-topic, but what about the concept of no death at all. Why does an MMOG have to be about creatures in life-or-death battles?
yes, I partially agree with this (not with the no death at all, rather with not necessarily death).
what I mean is, in most (if not all?) mmo(rp)gs where there are potentially lethal fights, a fight ends up with the death of one or more players/npcs(mobs).
it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
you can have an unconciousness level, wich is basically a life level beyond witch you fall unconcious, but do not die (your life level progressively goes down, until you reach another life treshold, and wake up from the pain. if you don't heal yourself quick enough, you'll die anyway).
a fight (assumed between two players/mobs) is considered won as soon as one of the two fall unconcious (note that you can still die directly without going through the unconcious state if the last damage taken was high enough). then the other player can either choose to finish its oponent (but he doesn't gain anything in doing it, except personal satisfaction), or walk away, leaving the defeated opponent alive (he stills gets the experience and all, and can loot the body)
frostburn>
nice idea about the spirit fight to gain a body...
about this:
Quote:odily remains, and items:
The only logical thing I can think of is that the body drops where he dies, and all the items are lootable.
what we do is quite similar, everything is lootable on a corpse, but as this can be _very_ annoying (even if you've got friends around to "protect" your body the time it takes you to either be ressurected or for your spirit to come back from the cemetary and reacquire the body (system similar to wow on this cemetary/soul point of view, except a few differences), and as players would really be pissed off, we also have an item protection spell. different skill levels on this spell allows to improve the protection, and there also is a counter spell (much harder to learn/master however), that can deprotect items.
basically, you have a protection quota that depends on your level on that spell, that you can freely spread across multiple objects, and balance protection time over protection intensity.
for the same protection quota used on an item, you can either protect it very strongly, but for a short period of time, or protect it more weakly, but longer.
(or protect one item very strongly for a long time, or lots of items less strongly for a shorter time, etc...)
the protection is automatically activated when you die. if you take too long to come back and reacquire your body, and if time goes past the protection spell time, other players/mobs will be able to loot the protected item(s).
and the protection intensity is used for the counter spell. if you protected very strongly a given item, only players very skilled with the unprotect spell will be able to loot that item. (takes quite a long time to get a good unprotection skill, whereas it's pretty quick to get a good protection skill, so it balances things out)
Quote:Without a body:
When your body has been killed you exist in a non-corporial form. You can levitate some distance over the ground, go through some walls and objects (not ground though), and cover ground at a much larger pace than you could with a body. You can't do anything in this form however, so you have to posess a being to interact with the world.
but you can/could interact with other spirits like yourself at that moment, or access certain places unaccessible for material beings. basically be in a parallel spirit world. (have things that could harm/help your spirit, interact with them, etc...)
Quote:Keep in mind that the dropping of attributes with age only applies to physical attributes. Mental stats like intelligence and, more importantly, wisdom will grow linearly through a character's lifetime.
at some point, mental attributes will also begin to fall inevitably...
Quote:The bloodline idea is a complete departure from role playing in the traditional sense. Just because death of a character is permanent doesn't mean that it is catastrophic. Quite the opposite.
I'd say it's even necessary at some point...
Quote:Intermarriage with other households could be encouraged for political or eugenic reasons, and some sort of aging dynamic would require the uber-characters to pass into legend and let others have a shot.
or, as an uber character passes into legend, it can also enchant a magical item (like a statuette that allows you to call the spirit of the deceased hero to do/cast something linked to what that hero was so good at), the more powerful the character, the more powerful the enchantment.
Quote:I believe that in order to create a more compelling game world that you HAVE to integrate player property ownership into the cities.
there is also the technical problem of such a thing, and efficient management/display of dynamic cities in a large world can become really hard... (I assume 3D worlds, it'll be easyer in 2D though...)
Quote:I envisioned time passing quite a bit faster than that. The problem with a system like this is that you have to have a balance. If time passes too slowly then you have to go to great lengths to limit death as you need enough time for new family members to come of age. However, if time is too fast then it would get ridiculous if it took you 5 game years to get from point A to point B. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to determine in a system like this.
about time, you can't just accelerate the time scale. distances are the same, and travel/battle times should be the same too. there isn't any necessity to have a ration between days/months/years similar to what we have in the real world. or even to have days or weeks or months or years.
in your mmo world, a normal lifetime for a human could be 25 cycles, each cycle being 83 days, each day being 6 hours, (beyond the hour, imho it's better to keep a coherent time frame with ours, so the player doesn't get _completely_ confused and lost :)).
that would make a lifetime last roughly 518 days, so a bit less than a year and a half (considering that the character gets unplayable as it gets too old, or when it's too young, if its efficiently playable lifetime is only, in the above example, something like 19 cycles, this will make a playable lifetime of 394 days.
now for seasons, if there is a winter and a summer, and in-between seasons, and if we assume a season cycle == 1 cycle, a player sees a full season cycle every 20 days or so... it not too fast, but not too slow either :)
Quote:As for the game evolving, that is a great idea. Instead of simply releasing "expansions" you could progress the game world.. excellent.
yes, it's a good idea, but it also brings its whole load of technical problems...
Quote:Remember also that not everyone will be on every day, or even every week. Maybe you could have automatic e-mail updates on the status of the bloodline. A quick status report on each member, and a summary of new business, like formal offers of marriage arrangements or other communiques from other players. Running a bloodline might be more than just inhabiting a character and killing goblins with it; you'd be the head of a social unit.
good idea :)
Quote:There could perhaps be a web interface to manage your blood line. In the case of a casual player that plays maybe only on the weekends, they can log into a web page for 5 minutes from work and take care of what needs to be done.
if I recall correctly, there is something like that in everquest2 (although not about bloodlines, but I think you can access your stats and other player's stats through their website)
Quote:Another little nugget. I am totaly against a "con" system. For those of you unfamiliar with a con system, it is a system commonly used in mmorpgs to give the player an exact or ballpark guess as the level of a target. In this way characters can choose only enemies that are close to their level. I think these systems are bad. Instead I would replace them with a system in which enemies can only be judged by physical appearance. Strong characters will be taller and broader than others. They will show more muscle definition. In contrast, a weak character may have poor posture and a beer belly. As characters age they will get taller and more well-built. as they grow old they will shrink and become feeble; perhaps getting an arched back and grey hair. This way players would have to target their opponents based on a gut reaction. Of course it could be possible for a character to be strong but a terrible fighter, or old and a quite good fighter, but these variations would only add to the adventure.
I totally agree with you.
same thing with mental/spirit/mana/magic/whatever that's not directly visible physically, you can/could "sense" the aura of a character, perhaps through some spell that makes it visible to the player. this also adds the possibility to make this aura hideable at wish (a skill to learn), adds some strategy ;)
Quote:Many of you have added ideas that will prevent or at least slow down this phenomenon (such as the length of an in-game year, etc) but eventually, once a player *did* grow his bloodline to epic proportions- who's going to play all the available characters in the family?
other players. if a "family" is seen as a collection of players that can be played by more than one person. if for example instead of making a "clan" with some fellow players whom I'm used to play with, I make a family, and let my fellow players play the members of my family (that'll be their family too).
this would prevent having one family per real player (as it can become quite heavy :D)
the only problem with this is that the incoming players would already need to have an existing character. so it would be good to make some free members of your family available to new players (instead of explicitely "giving" them to someone already registered...) although this can be problematic, as you don't know who will take it, and you might not like him at all. dunno if it's good or bad...
er, sorry, just saw this:
Quote:that if families become to big, you can decide to put certain members of your family into the "new player pool" and a player that starts anew could have the option to take over the name
Quote:While I have thought about the idea of intermarriages and sharing bloodlines, I actually think extending this system that far is a bit too ambitious. There are a number of issues that arise from that sort of system that make it extremely complex and I haven't been able to figure out, nor has anyone presented a way to me in which it could be done simply and effectively (in my mind at least :]). I also think the idea of integrating actual sexual reproduction in a game may not go over well (even though there will be no actual "sex" depicted).
lol. that'll make the game 18+, although you'll probably have an increased <18 players population ^^
joke apart.. I don't see the problem with this kind of reproduction. it's much more logical, adds lots of possibilities, and isn't that hard to implement (maybe harder to balance, although I don't really think so...)
Quote:I think that intermarriage would be missed. With players manifesting families, an economy of genetic material would be expected.
clearly
Quote:One additional thing I was thinking of was... say you don't manage your characters very well, and you DO run out of people to play due to getting them all killed. Then, long-lost relatives come and you play them -- at a cost. They will have lesser stats since they weren't directly involved with the rest of the bloodline.
mmh, you make it sound as if it was easy to get a character perma-killed.
it shouldn't, and if you really managed your family that badly, then you're out. and just have to start again (your family is destroyed and ceased to exist anyway), or find another family that can welcome you (although I'm not sure anyone would want to welcome such a horrible player that got all its bloodline destroyed, except if it was an accident ^^)
sorry for the (relatively) long reply...
[Edited by - sBibi on January 21, 2005 12:21:12 PM]
