Incorporating death into the wound system

[Sevenless]

Right now we have this eternal tug of war over permadeath and how to handle it. The biggest issue is if you die you can never catch up to where you could have been. Sure you can quest all day, but you could have done that before you died as well. We need a catchup mechanic that somehow doesn't impede your ability to advance normally, at least for the most part. Why not a wound?

Mortal's Coil: Your eyes burn, and little of this bright world makes sense. Your soul has been wrenched from the slumbering abyss.

It applies the same penalties to skills/abilities that death would beforehand except there is no penalty to INT and it is done through the "+/- system" rather than to the raw stats. Purchased skills and credo progress are left as is. Burying your corpse/skull heals the wound in the same ways the current mechanic returns lost progress.

Questing could, if we so desire, be another source of healing. Obviously ancient root shouldn't heal this wound, although we could consider having some kind of mystic related craftable that could speed up the process.

Benefits:

-Because int is untouched and all of your stats are for advancement purposes identical your character continues to gain progress just as they would, while also suffering the full impacts of death as they are currently.
-There are potentially active ways to undo death's impacts, which might help players feel more in control of the healing process and have a way to vent their frustration.
-This system does not rob the current death mechanics of any depth or features assuming healing time is tuned appropriately.
-If desired, this could still be done through the inherit system, meaning we keep the whole new name/new hearthling concept intact.

Unaddressed:
-There's no where in this addition to help late joiners catch up to world current.

[Vigilance]

so instead of dying, you get sent to the character creation room or something with this wound?

a casual's paradise, the giga-concussion. it's worthwhile to figure out if the game in general needs to be softer or harder on death/catchup, but i wouldn't be fundamentally opposed to this as a softcore replacement to death. i'm just not sure if we need this, since i wouldn't agree with death being soft on PvP in this case, and in PvE this is too harsh to start applying in any case of knockout-by-catastrophe (ie, animals "killing" you as is being discussed here (but of course softer than flat-out death)

so, softer death/catchup mechanics, to appeal to a wider audience, or maintain a super niche and undesirable gameplay, as we had? i'm not sure where i stand on that.

[Sevenless]

Is it softer if the wound takes 3 months to heal? However you want to tune that it can be soft or hard.

I honestly feel like this would be most impactful for high end PvP characters trying to maintain world best, while PvE players would be impacted by death more or less the same as now. Death would still be a pain in the ass to recover from, but it wouldn't rob you of the potential gains you could have made during that time. Which matters jack all to most PvE players I know of tbh.

[vnsmirnov]

You can sell the Resurrection Token. $ 200 and in 10 real days the body is resurrected as a zombie. Keeping stats. With intelligence 1.

[shubla]

"I never catch up" is the worst reason not to play the game.
There will always be that russian who has bot to farm q1000 carrots while your carrots are only q600. Even if you played the game non stop from day 0

[Sevenless]

"I never catch up" is the worst reason not to play the game.
There will always be that russian who has bot to farm q1000 carrots while your carrots are only q600. Even if you played the game non stop from day 0

To be fair, the illusion of it works just fine.

We're in a constructed environment, it wouldn't be the only intentional psychological manipulation.

[Aceb]

Not sure if this wouldn't make things confusing?

[Sevenless]

Not sure if this wouldn't make things confusing?

I'm starting to think maybe I'm just bad at explaining.

[Lojka]

it won't be too much confusin, because it will be written on the wound, like:

Code: Select all

Death's door -30

You was nearly killed!
Heals natturaly 1hhp / day

masonry -30
agility -30
...

Ways to heal:
pray to gods
do quest line
...

it is still better than current system