Hello there,
another topic on your 2018 aom coop hero rpg campaign/sandbox multiplayer scenario.
The old scenarios suffered a lot from Permadeath. You start with 4 people and if one died in the first 10 minutes you'd probably all resign and restart, so that he can be in the game again. Somewhere above 10 minutes you'd just go on. Where this minute mark is for you personally tells you how good a person you are. Also other people might wanna go on so you can't just resign as a good person, you'd have to take their feelings into consideration too.
However it is possible to go through the trouble and make hero scenarios without Permadeath in the first degree. Which versions do you know about, what are the Pros/Contras and how can it be done?
Respawn at designated Monuments
In the Long Road Scenarios (of which the 2nd is still bugged and abandoned) but also in the new Phoenixborn/Azarath Scenario I took inspiration from Spellforce (the first one, TOoD). There are "Hero Monuments" or later "Phoenix Shrine's" on this map. The heroes can run around and activate them as their new respawn point by going close. On activation a godly thunder is heard and it says " activated monument 7" in chat, so everyone knows where he will respawn when he dies.
Death Penalties
However the respawning has to come with a cost. If it does not, you can just send your hero into the enemies, go get a tea, and when you're back and he died and respawned after 10 secs again you can just send him there again.
One good way I think is using High Scores, which show up in chat telling how many deaths the players accumulated thus far and which hero/player accounts for how much of it. But that is not much of a gameplay penalty.
Hero Specific Death Penalties
The Long Road Home tried to have different penalties for heroes, some of which aren't horrible. Hippolyta has a gold trickle which helps her buying upgrades, but on death she is down to 0 gold again, while the other heroes keep what they collected. Jason get's a -1x Modifier against myths (but starts with +1x) so at the end after several deaths he gets scared of cyclopes, does barely any damage against them and get's killed. Chiron is a horrible one, he is 1 minute (and a half) hostile to his allies, so he feels like singleplayer a bit. But in Long Road North (to which that penalty initially got invented for) he can activate his Rogue Mode intentionally to go up to NPCs and kill them, when no other hero is around to witness it.
Very stupid ones are like Ancestors spawn on the map (Atalanta) or Life Drain when you let your wife die (Ajax).
General Death Penalties
Long Road North started with the "Curse". A player returning from the dead is cursed. He has like 2 LOS, cannot recruit army and cannot be healed by fireplaces.
You have to visit a priest and pay 20 gold for a "The curse has been lifted!"-Sound. (4 priests on the map, one of which is always disappeared. Also Chiron can kill any one of them for his quest)
The LOS, healing and recruit penalty is not good.(While the idea of the curse is nice. Especially with that sound available. For the next curse I thought of deactivating XP gain on kills while cursed, that's all. But I'm not sure if it should be a death penalty to be cursed.)
Phoenixborn/Azarath however has another approach on Death Penalties. The game get's harder the more the players die. Here at first one kind of Enemy get's stronger with every new Death, +9 HP for Huskarls. Also the gold army recruitment cost gets up by +1.
Next there are some milestones, like on 3 deaths, 9 deaths and so on the enemies get more updates or some other effect happens.
That is not too shabby, though the later effects (like after about 50 deaths every new death hides the map again) are kinda meh. Also especially in noob rounds with a lot of deaths the game get's somewhat difficult to beat. So it's not too good either.
Lives left
Some map I was allowed to test yesterday and fell in love with had a life counter for the players. You start with like 3 lives which allow you to respawn and get consumed when you do that. However you may also gain some lives when playing.
Heroes left
Some idea I'm playing with is another Permadeath, but not in the first degree anymore. If you die, your units go hostile (or die), but you get a hero selector back. The heroes already picked are not available anymore, but there are some left so that you can start with another hero story and try to complete that.
The biggest issue here would be to put the player back to level 1 undoing all the upgrades he got, so that he starts as a fresh level 1 hero anew. Maybe you'll also need to disable hero specific mechanics.
After all players go through all the heroes, the game is lost. On a 2 player game the players have more options, but are only 2. On a 4 player game one player will probably eat through most of the heroes, while the other ones will have not many left should they die. But who knows before playtesting that online.
The heroes left is similar to the lives left mechanic, in that there is an amount of deaths allowed to the players. However with the "heroes left" that pool is shared (which I like) while with the "lives left" it is easy to implement more lives as a reward.
Any other ideas for defeating Permadeath?
Feel free to add.
Which versions do you prefer and why?
One thing which is important to me is to work in general mechanics. I don't want to implement a death mechanic for each hero anymore, because that is much work and thus limits the amount of heroes available to the players.
Otherwise I am very undecided. I like to go with the "Heroes left" but I also love the part of the "Lives left" idea, in which the heroes are able to push off the threatening "deaths allowed" limit one by one and maybe allow the stronger players to carry the weaker ones.
A solution to combine both systems seems to be to add new heroes to the selection. Like there are starting heroes but in game the players unlock more heroes for when they should die. However if you wanted to play one of those in first place (esp. if they are stronger) you might want to suicide to get him. Imagine 2 players after unlocking suicide for a hero and only one gets him <_< sounds horrible. But otherwise I like this idea most now. The amount of respawns which can be gained as reward is very limited on this version. Like the map now shows spots for 16 heroes on 4 players. Half of them may be disabled at the start until their quest is resolved and their journey get's available.
Should there be a way to switch heroes around? Like you have your Ajax level 7 and return him to the pool, so that you can start as Hippolyta level 1 and play her story instead. I think that would be great, but that sounds horrible to trigger for now. Still the best solution on the "Heroes left" mechanic thus far. You could park your Ajax level 7 and another player might pick him up there (since putting him down to level 1 would neglect the story he already played through to this point).
Another solution of re-allowing dead heroes maybe after a while and as a reward sounds like a triggering nightmare for now... x_X ...also I like that their stories in the world can end, so no to that.
Hero Pool Model
To summarize what sounds good for now:
> A pool of starting heroes is available to choose from.
> Heroes can be returned to the pool and retain their level.
> Players can choose from all heroes available in the pool and start at the heroes level.
==> Thus players are allowed to switch heroes around.
> Dead heroes are removed from the pool.
> Reward heroes are added to the pool.
> If there is no hero available at the pool, the surviving players are hinted to one of the hero reward quests. Thus a player waiting in the empty pool can get a hero again maybe 20 minutes later when the players finally got him to be available.
> If there is no hero available at the pool and no reward hero can be unlocked anymore, the player without a hero looses the game. (But will still stay in the game so that he can participate in chat)
> When the pool is empty and no player has a hero anymore, all players loose.
Azarath Metrion Zinthos
Steam: Order of Azarath
Twitch: twitch.tv/orderofazarath
Discord: Azarath @ https://discord.gg/3ENKJeb
another topic on your 2018 aom coop hero rpg campaign/sandbox multiplayer scenario.
The old scenarios suffered a lot from Permadeath. You start with 4 people and if one died in the first 10 minutes you'd probably all resign and restart, so that he can be in the game again. Somewhere above 10 minutes you'd just go on. Where this minute mark is for you personally tells you how good a person you are. Also other people might wanna go on so you can't just resign as a good person, you'd have to take their feelings into consideration too.
However it is possible to go through the trouble and make hero scenarios without Permadeath in the first degree. Which versions do you know about, what are the Pros/Contras and how can it be done?
In the Long Road Scenarios (of which the 2nd is still bugged and abandoned) but also in the new Phoenixborn/Azarath Scenario I took inspiration from Spellforce (the first one, TOoD). There are "Hero Monuments" or later "Phoenix Shrine's" on this map. The heroes can run around and activate them as their new respawn point by going close. On activation a godly thunder is heard and it says "
However the respawning has to come with a cost. If it does not, you can just send your hero into the enemies, go get a tea, and when you're back and he died and respawned after 10 secs again you can just send him there again.
One good way I think is using High Scores, which show up in chat telling how many deaths the players accumulated thus far and which hero/player accounts for how much of it. But that is not much of a gameplay penalty.
The Long Road Home tried to have different penalties for heroes, some of which aren't horrible. Hippolyta has a gold trickle which helps her buying upgrades, but on death she is down to 0 gold again, while the other heroes keep what they collected. Jason get's a -1x Modifier against myths (but starts with +1x) so at the end after several deaths he gets scared of cyclopes, does barely any damage against them and get's killed. Chiron is a horrible one, he is 1 minute (and a half) hostile to his allies, so he feels like singleplayer a bit. But in Long Road North (to which that penalty initially got invented for) he can activate his Rogue Mode intentionally to go up to NPCs and kill them, when no other hero is around to witness it.
Very stupid ones are like Ancestors spawn on the map (Atalanta) or Life Drain when you let your wife die (Ajax).
Long Road North started with the "Curse". A player returning from the dead is cursed. He has like 2 LOS, cannot recruit army and cannot be healed by fireplaces.
You have to visit a priest and pay 20 gold for a "The curse has been lifted!"-Sound. (4 priests on the map, one of which is always disappeared. Also Chiron can kill any one of them for his quest)
The LOS, healing and recruit penalty is not good.
Phoenixborn/Azarath however has another approach on Death Penalties. The game get's harder the more the players die. Here at first one kind of Enemy get's stronger with every new Death, +9 HP for Huskarls. Also the gold army recruitment cost gets up by +1.
Next there are some milestones, like on 3 deaths, 9 deaths and so on the enemies get more updates or some other effect happens.
That is not too shabby, though the later effects (like after about 50 deaths every new death hides the map again) are kinda meh. Also especially in noob rounds with a lot of deaths the game get's somewhat difficult to beat. So it's not too good either.
Some map I was allowed to test yesterday and fell in love with had a life counter for the players. You start with like 3 lives which allow you to respawn and get consumed when you do that. However you may also gain some lives when playing.
Some idea I'm playing with is another Permadeath, but not in the first degree anymore. If you die, your units go hostile (or die), but you get a hero selector back. The heroes already picked are not available anymore, but there are some left so that you can start with another hero story and try to complete that.
The biggest issue here would be to put the player back to level 1 undoing all the upgrades he got, so that he starts as a fresh level 1 hero anew. Maybe you'll also need to disable hero specific mechanics.
After all players go through all the heroes, the game is lost. On a 2 player game the players have more options, but are only 2. On a 4 player game one player will probably eat through most of the heroes, while the other ones will have not many left should they die. But who knows before playtesting that online.
The heroes left is similar to the lives left mechanic, in that there is an amount of deaths allowed to the players. However with the "heroes left" that pool is shared (which I like) while with the "lives left" it is easy to implement more lives as a reward.
Feel free to add.
One thing which is important to me is to work in general mechanics. I don't want to implement a death mechanic for each hero anymore, because that is much work and thus limits the amount of heroes available to the players.
Otherwise I am very undecided. I like to go with the "Heroes left" but I also love the part of the "Lives left" idea, in which the heroes are able to push off the threatening "deaths allowed" limit one by one and maybe allow the stronger players to carry the weaker ones.
A solution to combine both systems seems to be to add new heroes to the selection. Like there are starting heroes but in game the players unlock more heroes for when they should die. However if you wanted to play one of those in first place (esp. if they are stronger) you might want to suicide to get him. Imagine 2 players after unlocking suicide for a hero and only one gets him <
Should there be a way to switch heroes around? Like you have your Ajax level 7 and return him to the pool, so that you can start as Hippolyta level 1 and play her story instead. I think that would be great, but that sounds horrible to trigger for now. Still the best solution on the "Heroes left" mechanic thus far. You could park your Ajax level 7 and another player might pick him up there (since putting him down to level 1 would neglect the story he already played through to this point).
Another solution of re-allowing dead heroes maybe after a while and as a reward sounds like a triggering nightmare for now... x_X ...also I like that their stories in the world can end, so no to that.
To summarize what sounds good for now:
>
>
>
==>
>
>
>
>
>
Steam: Order of Azarath
Twitch: twitch.tv/orderofazarath
Discord: Azarath @ https://discord.gg/3ENKJeb
[This message has been edited by Izalith (edited 03-04-2018 @ 02:48 PM).]