Battle System / Alternate Resurrection

[Grakor456]

No offense to anyone who has this opinion, I just find the "If you don't want your character to die, don't put them in situations that might kill them" logic a little silly. This is an RP server. We're not playing a competitive game, we're playing a cooperative one where we're all coming together to tell a story. Why does enjoying combative RP have to involve a willingness to see your character die?

Now this is of course me playing devil's advocate because I admitted I didn't like the original suggestion myself. Something to think on, however, is this. The rules should be designed to encourage roleplay...combative roleplay especially, since this IS the World of WARcraft. So the question is, what encourages more roleplay...more dramatic death scenes, or more frequent combat scenes? I believe it is the latter.

[garrett]

The best way to encourage more roleplay in all it's forms is to simply remove penalties.

I think you have to look at this from two perspectives.
From the character perspective, you take into account their personality and their willingness to fight.
From the player perspective, look at the punishing aspects of the rule.

While not all players may see the system as punishing, I would imagine that at least some do. So alter the system.

If the death system were taken back to just the week wait before IC resurrection, players would be less inhibited. The paladins could step up and battle for their cause as the character's personality warranted.

The simplest answer to a problem is usually the one you should first look at using. If only because the simplest answer is usually the one everyone can live with. I say live with instead of be happy with. You will never make everyone happy, but if they can live with the rules, and still step up to RP then you have achieved something.

Stealing something from the new beer commercials, in which you have the "Too Light" answer to a problem coupled with the "Too Hard" answer, to see that the beer in question is "just right".

So let's apply that here.

:Too Light:
Remove the death penalties entirely. No resurrection wait. No loss of limbs or other injuries resulting from the death. Characters can IC rez just as soon as possible.

:Too Hard:
Increase the death penalties, make things more restrictive as a result of IC deaths. Lower the number of total resurrections your character can receive before permanent death.

Now, let's look at the results of what would happen from each of these.

In the Too Light field, people would probably abuse the rules, being people in general. Characters would die a lot more, but at the same time RP would probably occur a lot more, because you don't get punished.

In the Too Hard field, people will stick to their "safe" areas, or contested areas. They can leave PvP turned off, so nobody can attack them, the RP is stagnant at best, because we simply don't have enough members of each race to do that sort of RP. If they travel to other areas, they do so "OOCly" and refuse to RP with others they encounter in that areas.

Both of these are bad. The RP is going to suffer. So ultimately we need to find that good beer in the middle ground, that's neither too light or too hard, but just right.

I am with Grakor in that we need to put our personal feelings aside on this and do what will get more combative roleplay involved in the server at large.

I personally think there are a couple ways this can be achieved.
1) Silver Tokens could be given out to those that participate in conflict RP.
2) Leave the 7 day waiting period in place for IC resurrections, leave the injury part solely to the discretion of the character's player.

[Kretol]

Perhaps it may be time to indeed remove the lasting penalties associated with death. After all, folks already need to post a resurrection thread that a GM could disapprove as it is.

At any rate, though, I'll once again remind folks that the whole detrimental side of death (the original 'only one rez' thing, the bad effects from it, and especially the character warnings) were initially brought in due to people doing reaaaallllly stupid things, as Grak already mentioned. Charging headfirst into a stronghold of evil so they can play the perfect hero and expect to live... or, as another example, someone going alone into the base of some evil organization (the Karazhan catacombs), finding a large group of people, and continuously ignore warnings to leave, all the while spouting insults and arrogant remarks. Ahhh, 'Thunder God.' That was amusing.

[Krent]

Stuff 'n things

I am not of the "If you don't want your character to die, don't get into conflicts!" mentality. I'm of the "If you don't want your character to die, then politely approach your opponent OOC'ly and inform him of this so you can fight to incapacitation". Not every fight has to lead with character death. There's nothing wrong with having your character incapacitated / knocked out / forced retreated. The victor stills gets the glory of victory, and the loser still has injuries / loss of pride / what have you to deal with. But the loser doesn't have to worry about all the death penalties!

In my opinion, people need to recognize that every player has a right to their character. Death is powerful as a literary tool, and not something we just wanna reduce to Dragon Ball Z level. "Oh look everyone died again GOHAN GO GET THE DRAGON BALLS SO EVERYONE CAN BLINK MAGICALLY BACK INTO EXISTENCE!"

It is because of this that I try to emphasize reaching out to the other players you're involved with and communicating with them. Tell them you don't want this to lead to death, and as long as it's within reason, you'll find that most players will be happy to oblige. Within reason being "Not charging Stormwind head on as a lone orc".

Some might go "WAAAAAAAAH, META GAMING~!!!!!" but I simply think it's common etiquette. We're a pretty small community here (although I'm happy we've grown larger than before), so we should all try to get along OOC'ly and not shy away from working out stuff.

If we hold onto this common etiquette policy then there's no need to make the death penalties harsher or lighter than they already are. There would also be no need to fear players stepping into conflicting RP areas, because they can at least know that the other players are civil enough to not slaughter them off a lucky roll.

[Touchseed]

I wanna rant. Uhh, I think character warnings are kinda uhh... Horrible. I think people like to throw them around casually like it's a threat (And to some extent it is.) but beside that it's not too useful. Once given a character warning you have two choices, or at least that is what the other party wants you to think. Stay and die, or leave and get bored. Getting bored is no option for me, heh.


Pertaining to the topic, the only time I'm cool for the retcon death things are in large warfare settings where NPCs of mass numbers are dying and In no way shape or form am I letting those computers have all the fun.

[garrett]

I do like the concept of character warnings.

If a Horde and Alliance character meet, it's nice to have a whisper to establish any intentions should things lead to a conflict.

I agree that the idiots that are doing stuff to deserve it should get beaten to a bloody pulp, no question about that. But if two come up on each other and things lead to combat, it's good to know where you stand, whether if you are going full out to the death, or the forced retreat thing. Or even if you simply aren't in the mood for confrontational RP and you both just go your separate ways.

Choice is almost always a good thing. And in this, players should really have the option of a choice.

I know that if I came up on someone that just randomly attacked without going through any of this, I'd likely put them to ignore in any way I could, and just ignore them altogether.

[Krent]

Character Warnings are silly. There's a big difference between what I describe as common RP etiquette and character warnings. With what I'm saying, it's just a friendly whisper made to another individual used to accomplish two simple goals:

The system of combat used (Trust or rolls).

Fight to the death, or fight to the incap.

And that's that.

With a Character Warning, most people somehow get off on announcing them boastfully on LFG.

CHARACTER WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!! YOUR CHARACTER IS ABOUT TO BE ATTACKED AND MAIMED AND POTENTIALLY KILLED BECAUSE HE STEPPED ON MY CHARACTER'S SHOE LACES. PREPARE FOR TROUBLE!

MAKE IT DOUBLE~

It gets worn out, fast. One of the reasons why I keep LFG / chat in a seperate window to be ignored 95% of the time.

And I think that Touch's idea of having this ret-conned death scenario to work better in large scale mass wars. Where tons of doods are just going at each other on those epic Peter Jackson-esque scenes. Would be a lot more plausible and make a lot more sense, as the scale of the battle is just so....huge.

[freelight]

I like the current system. I think it makes the most sense.
If your character dies, they *die*. This is, indeed, a very important invent in the life of not only your character but everyone around them. To take away the significance of this would be unfair to everyone who would otherwise get RP out of a character's death. I have a character who I am very attatched to (probably way more than I should be) and I would be really upset about losing her, but she does get into dangerous situations and she does sometimes do stupid shit, and every time this happens, I accept the possibility that she may die or have other terrible things happen to her.

On the other hand, the setting is a fantasy world, and as Grakor said, sometimes it is best to step away from realism a little. We do have resurrections, and the current resurrection system is, in my opinion, fair. Upon character death, the player must write a Resurrection post and it has to make sense. Plus, there is a mandatory week wait time before the character can come back, and during this time, there is a lot of potential for RP among anyone who may have known or been close to the dead character. After your character does come back, he or she has to suffer the detrimental effects of the resurrection, generating further RP.

It is also important to remember, even if you OOCly know that your character will be resurrected, ICly, this is never a sure thing. ICly, another character *attempts* to bring your character back to life. Nobody should be playing a character who can simply *poof* people back to life without breaking a sweat. Resurrection RP should be intense, emotional, and it should take time. Aside from this, if your character is being resurrected, this means that somebody *really* wants them back, and such characters should be very involved in the RP and the IC uncertainty and tension surrounding it. If resurrection is RPd along these lines, it won't happen 5 times a day.

[Dotsy]

The point made is that players don't often like their character being killed, which has lead to many people trying to "play it safe" in many cases. I mostly think that the person playing the character should have the ultimate decision in their character's fate.

The main problem with lifting restrictions to get players to get into combat more is that the combat itself turns unrealistic. Imagine the world with no penalties for anything. A world where anyone and everyone lives forever. No one would be afraid of dying, they would do anything and everything, because they know "They Can't Die". It's only human nature.

I'm not saying every character should die; I'm saying that they should be able to die if the player is purposely letting them die. Another problem arises from this idea too though: If a player has his/her character invade (Thunder Bluff) by his/herself and doesn't want his/her character to die, what's to happen? I beleive players should have the ultimate decision, but they can't use "I don't want him to die" alibi to justify something like the said "one man invasion".

This is what I've always thought the system should be, and I'm sure it's somewhat like this, right now.

Like stated before, people shouldn't be afraid of each other OOCly, if they don't want their character to die, in a fair fight, then state it. I know many of the players here to have a great deal of respect for issues like this one.

It's something that CotH prides itself for in it's RP: Realism.

[Drust]

I think the system is good as it is, if a character can die and just randomly come back to life acting like nothing happened the character won't be cautious and won't think things through because he knows that if he dies he can simply come back, it's best as it is because it causes the character to think over the situation instead of running in and hoping for the best.

[DaveM]

The OP was (essentialy) about characters RPing the NPCs that another character wants to kill. I can't see why that's needed. Your character kills, fine. Why do you need another RPer to take the fall live for that to be true? Or is the problem perhaps that you havn't really given much thought to ways in which conflict RP doesn't end up in death against actual other characters while being sure you want conflict RP?


Them, it kinda went to this-

Too Light: Remove the death penalties entirely. No resurrection wait. No loss of limbs or other injuries resulting from the death. Characters can IC rez just as soon as possible.

In the Too Light field, people would probably abuse the rules, being people in general. Characters would die a lot more, but at the same time RP would probably occur a lot more, because you don't get punished.

(...)

I personally think there are a couple ways this can be achieved.
1) Silver Tokens could be given out to those that participate in conflict RP.
2) Leave the 7 day waiting period in place for IC resurrections, leave the injury part solely to the discretion of the character's player.

I really disagree with this analysis.

You don't get more RP because there are less penalties for dieing. You get more irrational agressivity. You get less realism in preservation of self. Realistically when you die, you lose EVERYTHING (or more) - we can at least simulate that with a limit of "lives" and/or "consequences". I think relaxing this too much would overstep the balance between realism and fun.

On 1): People RP what they want to RP, as much as they want to RP. I don't see why a particular type of RP should be supported this way. let's give tokens for Love Stories, Political plots and Accurate Depictions of Day to Day Life on Azeroth whil we're at it.

On 2): 2) IS the "Too Light" option. Charcters would die a lot more. Again. And again. 7 days, nine characters.. Hmm, I can die 1,28 -ish times a day. If I don't reroll anyone.

A much better soution IMO is to promote (as it is promoted) that conflict is almost exclusively oriented to non-death consequences. Get up from severe beatings all you like.

2 cents.

[rentreality]

There's a problem with the analysis that, if you don't want your character to die, you shouldn't have gotten them into that situation to begin with. That problem is twofold: god-moders or metagamers, and hyper-aggressive killers.

God-moders/metagamers are completely un-subtle: "I SEE YOU THERE! ...even though my back was turned, only your head was visible over that hill, you're wearing a camouflage hat, and you're half a mile away! CHARACTER WARNING c'mon posse let's go KILL HIM!!!!"

Hyper-aggressive killers, on the other hand, can be more subtle. For instance, there was an issue with a Scarlet Crusade guild here a while ago where certain members of it would corner and kill Alliance members on Alliance territory, and typically do things to attempt to deny the players resurrection (feed the bodies to ghouls, burn them, hide parts of the bodies, etc.). When a character is cornered, beaten by arithmetic, and their body is destroyed in a manner that prevents resurrection -- and it's all within the rules -- people get understandably upset.

[DrinkArizona]

I partially agree with Rent. When I posted earlier, I didn't mean..you know, give no option for mutual agreement. Maybe have an agreement with the other player to not burn the body/etc? Because no room for a rezz is just plain mean.

[garrett]

You know, if I was killed by another player, and they pulled that kind of crap, I would just ignore it. Maybe it's not within the rules, but things like that should just not be allowed to start with, unless there is a very good reason for it to begin with.

Actions like that might be kept within the personality of the characters, however it's just a slap in the face to the other player in my opinion.

There's a thing called player courtesy that needs to be observed at all times. It's not even something you have to study on, it's just something any decent player would do for another.

We used to go over stuff like that all the time on NWN MP servers. When you die there, they can just fiddle with your gear as much as they want. However, player courtesy demanded that full looting of a player corpse is something you did not do. Taking one item could be acceptable, but totally screwing them over like that was just taking it too far, even if you hated their guts.

The incidents with burning corpses, mutilating them, feeding them to ghouls, all that nonsense, is a huge step across the line of player courtesy.

I'm not sure what the GMs would state about such things, but I personally would never accept something like that happening unless I was convinced the other character had an extremely good reason for doing it. It's the same as if I was walking OOCly through the wilderness and I was ambushed by a group that tried to push me into IC roleplay for being there. I would ignore them and walk away, if they persisted beyond that, I'd just put their characters on ignore and likely refuse to RP with them ever again.

As you may have guessed, I have little tolerance for people that do stuff like this without good reason. It's the cheapest form of RP, if it can even be called RP.