Title: Voluntary Death Option
Summary: Add a checkbox (perhaps in the Politics page beneath the renaming option or in the Actions page beneath the change class option) that, when checked, allows your character to be susceptible to death from serious wounds, including infiltrator actions and battle wounds without having to be a Hero. Death would still be a chance and not a guarantee. An old age limit can also be set either by default or by a player as an RP tool.
The status of being mortal or not would only be visible to the player of that character. By popular demand, the choice to be mortal would be permanent once checked.Details: A segment of the playerbase believes their character should be capable of dying from the various hazards in the world. Currently, the only way to do this is by becoming a hero, in which case you still cannot generally be killed except for a tiny chance in battle. This allows those characters who do wish to have the capacity for death to have a
chance to die. Furthermore, this puts the control in the player's hands and is entirely voluntary. This ensures
only players who wish to die by these methods will be affected.
This checkbox could also be toggled off at any time should a player have second thoughts. (It has been suggested that this would be supported more as a permanent decision.) The chance of death can be reasonably small, if desired.
Old age death timers (again, entirely optional) provide an alternative to simply deleting or retiring the character. These could be implemented with an input box that accepts an integer. Since age in BM is not directly tied to actual time, force the death to trigger only on natural age growth rather than wounds. (That is, if the death timer is set to 60 and a character aged 59 is wounded and his age jumps to 62, the timer would trigger when the character ages to 63 naturally.) Include reminders to give players an opportunity to change the timer or write a roleplay.
Making the choice to be mortal or not private keeps infiltrators from specifically targeting only characters who are willing to die.
I am woefully ignorant of the coding challenges of this, so my apologies if it is too complex.
Benefits:
- Puts the choice of death in the character's hands, not an infiltrator or other entity's hands, the usual reason for preventing character death.
- Allows for roleplay opportunities surrounding death.
- Makes the infiltrator class potentially more relevant without inherently buffing it.
- Adds a mechanic that is strangely absent without forcing it upon players (in violation of the cited concept of the game).
- Allows non-heroes to die, so one is not necessarily forced into the restrictions of the class. To my knowledge, death is not an advantage.
Possible Exploits:
Players toggle it off when they become aware of an impending assassination attempt. This should not be a problem immortality is already considered the norm.Players may intentionally toggle it on when they become aware of an impending assassination to incite more severe action against the infiltrator's realm or person. In my opinion, this would energize the game and it's not like infiltrators are not already severely punished.
The previous exploits centered around the toggle, which has been dropped. The new list assumes it cannot be toggled.- Players may RP a martyr's death, despite this being one of the features of the Hero class. This may be countered somewhat by not being announced continent-wide. Honestly, it should be the playerbase's choice as to whom is a martyr; currently some heroes die and are not treated as martyrs. Some aren't even worth the fanfare attached to them as they did some distinctly "unherolike" activities while alive.
