BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => BM General Discussion => Topic started by: Wolfang on August 08, 2013, 02:30:59 PM
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As I didn't want to clutter up the 'post one suggestion' thread I wanted to continue this discussion here, as has been suggested by several people, but summed up quite nicely by Indirik's post:
(Why does this forum not have a spoiler function?)
My "one thing" is actually two things that others have mentioned:
1) Forced mortality once your character has reached a certain age. Keep things the way they currently are, until yor character hits, say, 60. Then they become mortal like a hero. And as they get older and older, the chance to die from wounds gets higher. Eventually, *everyone* should die of old age. Start at 80 or so, and have a small, but growing, chance of dying from old age once every RL month. No more immortal characters who will never, ever have any chance of dying.
2) Start the one-noble-per-island rule on every continent. Don't force-deport anyone, just make it so that if you already have an active noble on an island, you can't start or unpause another. Events over time (deportation, death, retirement, pausing, etc.) will, over time, thin the herd. (Yes, this will mean that if you pause both of your characters, you will only be able to unpause one of them.) Combine this with #1 above, and you will sooner than later get to a situation where everyone has one noble per island.
My initial suggestion, to start of this topic, is that MORTALITY could work as such.
If you are not a hero, you remain immortal until the age of 60. After which, from the age of 60 to 70, your character gets chance hits of old age killing him.
Every turn, there is a small percentage of chance that your character dies. Say 0.0005 chance. The chances of dying, after 1000 turns would be 39,3% chance.
From 70-80, a chance of 0.001 => Chances of dying after 1000 turns would be 63,2%
80 years +, a chance of 0,002=> Chances of dying after 1000 turns would be 86,5%
Now these numbers are only an example, and can be lowered or raised as I am not sure how many turns it take for someone to become a year older. It would still be possible for someone to become really really old, but just like in real life, you need to get lucky.
Furthermore, this chance roll of dying should be rolled again everytime a character participates in a battle.
Ex:
Age 73 character. The turn ends and a roll of 0,001 chance of dying happens. If player participates in a battle, this roll occurs again, 0,001. (So you get two hits in one turn of 0,001 chance of dying)
[THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH IS SIMPLY TO DISCUSS HEROES AND HOW TO KEEP THEM IMPORTANT]
Now, Heroes would become more 'redundant' because of this. I suggest a hero gets an 'unit setting' option to Fight to the Death or Fight Until the Last Man, or name it what you will.
This setting will increase the character's CS by a certain percentage, say, 20%. But it will increase the chance of the Hero to die fighting significantly, regarddless of whether you win or lose the battle. This will make Hero character useful, as they can turn the tide of battle, at high personal risk, but it will further allow the players more control over which battles they would rather have their hero characters die in. If you really want your character to die to finish a storyline epicly in a great last battle, you can set this unit setting, it will not guarantee death, but it increases the odds.
The ONE CHARACTER RULE, sort of leans on the mortality mechanic. As the mortality mechanic would increase character rotation in general, we want to avoid that players simply line up a secpond character to pick up when the older character dies of old age, as this would be counter productive against one of the reasons to include mortality for older characters.
There are other reasons that have been mentioned in recent discussion to have a one character rule such as:
- title hogging
- playing both characters as one
- creating in essense OOC unbreakable connections between realms where players have a character in each
- many people just play one character and drone the other
- etc
(note that I am note reqquesting the removal of 2 character per player rule!)
So hopefully the discussion remain on-topic and is constructive.
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Age is about how a player feels but in optimal conditions, from what I have read it would be approx 84 turns per year, or 42 days. This changes with how easy or hard of a life the player leads. If a bureaucrat has an easy life he could live 5 years real time, BEFORE he even gets a 0.001% per turn chance of death. That is a small turn over, except for already old players.
That also means, that per game year that person has a 0.084 percent chance of death in the first year. In fact he has a 99.5% chance of living till hes 65.
The turn over would be far, far to low to even bother with. You would have to be really REALLY unlucky to die. Not even worth coding unless its a significant chance, like 0.5 or 1 percent per turn for someone over 60.
In my opinion, if you play from a young noble then its anywhere between 4 and 5 years real time before you get to this point. A 2% chance of dying each day is not a far cry. This is 1013 for petes sake, it really should be 40 because life expectancy for nobles was like 35-45, less for peasants. 50 was considered ancient, and we have a ruler in Perdan who is currently 90 in game. People barely live to 90 now, let alone in 1013.
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Well yeah, the chances can be tinkered with, as I don't know how many turns it takes for a person to grow older. If it's 84 turns per year, the odds can be increased quite a lot :)
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In my opinion, if you play from a young noble then its anywhere between 4 and 5 years real time before you get to this point. A 2% chance of dying each day is not a far cry. This is 1013 for petes sake, it really should be 40 because life expectancy for nobles was like 35-45, less for peasants. 50 was considered ancient, and we have a ruler in Perdan who is currently 90 in game. People barely live to 90 now, let alone in 1013.
It's difficult to find good sources for medieval life expectancy, since you really need to know what are the assumptions. We should completely discount child mortality, for example, because the characters start at 16. I found an interesting one that says that in the 13th century, members of the royal family of Wales (which were of similar social classes as most nobles in BM) that reached adulthood had an average and median life expectancy of 49:
http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/
We also have to remember that this is a game. What would a 1% chance to die at 19 bring exactly? It would only kill your character before you start to actually do anything interesting with him. I think it would just be aggravating for no reason. I can see the advantages of starting the counter around 50/60 years old, which is roughly 4 years real-time, a reasonable time to create an interesting character story arc with closure.
Also, can we get a statistics of how many characters are 70+ in the game? 90+? I have the feeling it's a very small number, as it should be.
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I wasn't saying a 1% chance of death at 19, I was saying if the arbitrary "age of mortality" is 60, then start the 1% a turn then.
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I wasn't saying a 1% chance of death at 19, I was saying if the arbitrary "age of mortality" is 60, then start the 1% a turn then.
Sorry, I misread. 1% per turn is huge though, you would have less than 50% chance of making it to 61. The date of death should never be known with such precision.
I say at any point, you should have a more than 50% chance of making it for another RL 6 months, so you never get the certainty of a rapid death. You just know you're at risk. You can achieve that with 0.2% chance per day (0.1% per turn). Characters would then have only a 20% chance of making it past 78, and 8% of characters would make it past 90.
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Either your maths is off or mine is, because at the age of 77, implying the 0.1% has been applied to every turn for the past 17 ingame years, there is a 146% mortality rate on that. By my reckoning you get 64% chance of living for 6 IRL months, which is roughly 4.5 in game years. You would have roughly a 50% chance of surviving past 66 and a 40% chance by 67. Infact, according to the statistics you shouldn't be able to survive past 72.
I'm not saying thats a bad thing, because 12 ingame years is still 16 months, which is pretty reasonable and would provide the right amount of turn over. Thats after of course, 4ish years of previous gameplay. Setting a "cap" of 5 years and 4 months per character wouldn't be a bad thing really. Of course there are always statistical anomalies so there could be someone who cheats the stats time and time again, even possibly to the age of 90, like how people in real life can get to 120ish even though most die in there 70's and 80's.
To be honest it would nice to be amazed by someones age in this game beyond the "Really? That person has been playing that character, in the same realm for 9 IRL years? Holy Crap" type thing. If someone cheated the mortality rate until they were 90, stats would say they should have died 2 and a half times over. That would evoke the same awe as if you met a 110 year old in real life. Like you could spawn roleplays about "That leader of such and such who just won't die, I wonder why the gods favor him so much".
Also with this mortality percentage you could add a bigger chance of death at the hands of an infiltrator for older people. I mean, I have seen some fit old people, but I just can't see a 90 year old fighting off a 30-40 year old in a sword fight. Not if the younger one is trained to kill. I mean yeah a battle hardened old general may not be easy to take down because of experience, but even someone in there 70's-80's is pretty frail.
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Either your maths is off or mine is, because at the age of 77, implying the 0.1% has been applied to every turn for the past 17 ingame years, there is a 146% mortality rate on that.
Then I suspect that yours is, because a rate like that can never go higher than 100%.
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Either your maths is off or mine is, because at the age of 77, implying the 0.1% has been applied to every turn for the past 17 ingame years, there is a 146% mortality rate on that.
17 IG years is 17*84=1428 days=3.9 RL years.
I assume you simply did 1428*0.1%=143%. As Anaris said, it doesn't work that way: it doesn't go above 100%, and in fact in never quite reaches it.
The correct way to count it is to consider that after each day, you have a 99.9% chance of being still alive. Then the probability of being still alive after 1428 days is 0.999^1428 = 24%.
To be honest it would nice to be amazed by someones age in this game beyond the "Really? That person has been playing that character, in the same realm for 9 IRL years? Holy Crap" type thing. If someone cheated the mortality rate until they were 90, stats would say they should have died 2 and a half times over. That would evoke the same awe as if you met a 110 year old in real life. Like you could spawn roleplays about "That leader of such and such who just won't die, I wonder why the gods favor him so much".
Really, how many characters currently are 90? I feel they are rare enough that I am amazed when I meet one.
Edit: replaced turns by days as per Indirik's comment.
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we want to avoid that players simply line up a secpond character
You are trying to solve a social problem with a mechanic. People WILL line up a 2nd character. If you restrict character count, that character will simply not be created until the other is dead. But I can guarantee you that if this were to be implemented, the replacement character would show up in the realm the day after the other one died, and be handed all the titles and other stuff as soon as game mechanics allow for it.
And if we increase those limits further, say raising prestige limits, the replacement character will simply be made and "leveled up" on another island and then immigrated as required.
Players WILL find ways around this.
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Really, how many characters currently are 90?
56 characters are 90 or older, 44 of them are not paused.
EC (17/17) and AT (21/15) have the highest counts.
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You are trying to solve a social problem with a mechanic. People WILL line up a 2nd character. If you restrict character count, that character will simply not be created until the other is dead. But I can guarantee you that if this were to be implemented, the replacement character would show up in the realm the day after the other one died, and be handed all the titles and other stuff as soon as game mechanics allow for it.
And if we increase those limits further, say raising prestige limits, the replacement character will simply be made and "leveled up" on another island and then immigrated as required.
Players WILL find ways around this.
I doubt that.
Even still, just make it a rule in the Social Contract. Bam, done.
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You are trying to solve a social problem with a mechanic. People WILL line up a 2nd character. If you restrict character count, that character will simply not be created until the other is dead. But I can guarantee you that if this were to be implemented, the replacement character would show up in the realm the day after the other one died, and be handed all the titles and other stuff as soon as game mechanics allow for it.
And if we increase those limits further, say raising prestige limits, the replacement character will simply be made and "leveled up" on another island and then immigrated as required.
Players WILL find ways around this.
You're right, it wasn't meant to stop them but rather discourage/make it more difficult.
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56 characters are 90 or older, 44 of them are not paused.
EC (17/17) and AT (21/15) have the highest counts.
56 out of 1815 is 3%, it's not like it's an epidemic. It suits me fine.
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Here's the math. a 1% chance of dying means a 99% chance of not dying.
so if you apply that per turn:
.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99*.99=86.87% chance of not dying the first week, or a 13.13% chance that your character does die.
And that's only 14 turns! After 2 weeks (28 turns) you have about a 30% mortality rate.
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Really, how many characters currently are 90? I feel they are rare enough that I am amazed when I meet one.
Check the ruler roster on AT ^^
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Check the ruler roster on AT ^^
This is the truth.
Ruler of Tara is 91. Ruler of Talerium is 94.
The average ruler age on Atamara is probably 70+.
It has dropped slightly recently. It used to be much higher.
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Old characters have history, they have personalities, background, character.
New characters are bland. They are usually just embodiments of their players, without any proper RP surrounding them. RPs written by their players tend to be cheesy, because anyone can make up anything.
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Old characters have history entrenched power, they have personalities established friends and enemies, background stuff that is hard for new people to learn about, character.
New characters are bland vital for the game's future. They are usually just embodiments of their players great ways for things to change, without any proper RP surrounding them. RPs written by their players tend to be cheesy different, because anyone can make up anything they bring a new face to things.
Fixed that for you.
Your previous statement was full of statements which just indicate a reason this game is dying.
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The percentage roll hits and such can be discussed later between the devs or in the open, if it is considered a good idea, but I would rather the attention remain on whether the players think this is a viable idea and whether they would be good or bad to implement in the game?
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Age is about how a player feels but in optimal conditions, from what I have read it would be approx 84 turns per year, or 42 days.
If you base it on the seasonal cycle for the two islands that have seasons enabled (FEI and Dwilight), then you get this: 21 days (3 weeks) per season * 4 seasons per year = 84 days (12 weeks) per year
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I do think that a properly instituted universal mortality system is a good idea. Yes, some players may replace their dead character with a new clone. But not all of them will. I'd wager to say that most players won't do that. And if even half of them don't, then we're 50% better off than we were, right? :)
Anyway, there are some important considerations that need to be addressed to make it a good game mechanic that improves the game, and not just something that kills characters.
The immortality that characters have is important to maintain while the characters are young. People need to be able to play their characters for a decently long time before they have to worry about them dying. A new character dying of "old age" when they're 23 brings no benefits to the game, even if it only happens to one out of 100 characters.
We shouldn't check for death of old age too frequently. We don't want people to have to play Russian Roulette on a daily (or twice daily!) basis. To prevent statistical flukes from claiming too many characters, checks should be made on an infrequent basis. Once a week, or even once a month is plenty.
If this were implemented, it wouldn't be unreasonable to extend it to dying from your wounds getting worse and infected. Kind of like already happens, but remove the cap and just let the *really* bad cases kill the victim. To make sure that too many characters don't die from wounds in battle, the wound healing system will have to be checked to make sure that we don't end up with half the people that get wounded ending up dead from infections. But if we do this, you could end up dying from any wound, no matter how it is received including: getting beaten while preaching, advy getting beaten by a noble, disloyal peasant mobs attacking when you try to hold court, infiltrator knifings...
We wouldn't necessarily want people to just log in one day and have their supposedly-healthy character died overnight with no warning. There would need to be some way for the player to know that their character is getting sick and on their death bed, and will soon die. Some new "terminal illness" status, or something, where they only get one or two hours a turn for the next three or four days, and then die.
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Old characters have history, they have personalities, background, character.
New characters are vital for the game's future. They are usually great ways for things to change. RPs written by their players tend to be different, because they bring a new face to things.
Both statements are valid. Ideally you want a healthy mix of both old and new in any given realm.
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I like Indirik's idea about mortality.
About clones, I saw some in Avalon named 1,2,3 and 4. Terrible. But I'm not against let people create a new character like a son or another parent coming from the familiar background to try to take the titles and power, it just need to be done by some system, like rebellion (not to take the government, but a certain claim), duel or political support. People will try to do it since, many times, they like the "familiar game", a certain realm or just the history he built around his family in a certain realm or continent. Along mortality, some cultural changes like houses, marriages and strong claims can solve many problems and instigate internal troubles and sparks wars in general.
We can do it with the actual system of guilds, but if you enforce it with some mechanics, people would try it more often to consolidate power and disestablish power around.
I even like the idea of let another player play a son of yours instead of yourself. It's something I'm trying to do for some years with one of my chars.
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Fixed that for you.
Your previous statement was full of statements which just indicate a reason this game is dying.
Seriously? And I get a warning for this as well?
Can people NOT distinguish "new characters" from "new players"?
New PLAYERS are necessary. By definition, they can't be stale wannabe duplicates of past characters, because the players are new. Forcing OLD players to create new CHARACTERS, however, is pointless, aggravating, and stifles RP.
The richest RP is RP that builds upon existing material, not long narratives that a random schmuck pulls out of his ass about various interactions with NPCs he also controls himself.
In the fourth invasion, mortality was brought in for everyone. And lucky us, Enweil was the one targetted by the NPC faction for which the code was the most likely to generate mortality. We lost, what, 12 nobles? It !@#$ing killed the realm. A bunch of doubles eventually came, but it was never the same as before. Slowly, ties reformed between the various families, but never like before.
It was a death blow for Enweil, which has been agonizing ever since, and it is NOT something I would want to happen elsewhere, to other realms. Mortality does not stimulate renewment. It just hastens disinterestedness, because more and more people lose access to the characters they love playing, or enjoy playing with.
I think it takes me at around one year to gain any kind of interest in new characters I create. I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. And I still miss the characters I lost to death, and I'd much rather have Jean-Olivier or Nicolas back then Jeanne, Stanislav or even Guillaume. And the last two of these went high enough in the ranks to become rulers.
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Seriously? And I get a warning for this as well?
You both did.
Can people NOT distinguish "new characters" from "new players"?
New PLAYERS are necessary. By definition, they can't be stale wannabe duplicates of past characters, because the players are new. Forcing OLD players to create new CHARACTERS, however, is pointless, aggravating, and stifles RP.
I strongly disagree.
As far as RP goes, I find new characters to be the most interesting.
The richest RP is RP that builds upon existing material, not long narratives that a random schmuck pulls out of his ass about various interactions with NPCs he also controls himself.
How does the second half of that sentence have anything to do with the first half? I have never seen any correlation between newness of character and level of interactivity in RPs.
In the fourth invasion, mortality was brought in for everyone. And lucky us, Enweil was the one targetted by the NPC faction for which the code was the most likely to generate mortality. We lost, what, 12 nobles? It !@#$ing killed the realm. A bunch of doubles eventually came, but it was never the same as before. Slowly, ties reformed between the various families, but never like before.
It was a death blow for Enweil, which has been agonizing ever since, and it is NOT something I would want to happen elsewhere, to other realms. Mortality does not stimulate renewment. It just hastens disinterestedness, because more and more people lose access to the characters they love playing, or enjoy playing with.
Frankly, I really don't think you are the best qualified to judge that. You were one of the most prominent members of Enweil before the Fourth Invasion, and, as you say, you personally lost powerful characters to that death. You also, I would say, heavily identified yourself with Enweil as it existed during that period. This is a perfect recipe for bias.
I would also say that if Folcard hadn't been the ruler of Riombara when he was, there was a real chance that Enweil and Riombara could actually have repaired their relations. That means that the turnover that those deaths caused contributed to meaningful change within the realm.
Honestly, Enweil may not be the best example for this anyway, since it's a democracy. The best examples would be realms with long-standing elect-once rulerships and deeply entrenched powers behind the throne (dukes and such).
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You both did.
I strongly disagree.
As far as RP goes, I find new characters to be the most interesting.
How does the second half of that sentence have anything to do with the first half? I have never seen any correlation between newness of character and level of interactivity in RPs.
Frankly, I really don't think you are the best qualified to judge that. You were one of the most prominent members of Enweil before the Fourth Invasion, and, as you say, you personally lost powerful characters to that death. You also, I would say, heavily identified yourself with Enweil as it existed during that period. This is a perfect recipe for bias.
I would also say that if Folcard hadn't been the ruler of Riombara when he was, there was a real chance that Enweil and Riombara could actually have repaired their relations. That means that the turnover that those deaths caused contributed to meaningful change within the realm.
Honestly, Enweil may not be the best example for this anyway, since it's a democracy. The best examples would be realms with long-standing elect-once rulerships and deeply entrenched powers behind the throne (dukes and such).
Guillaume got more powerful in Enweil than Nicolas did. I still had a ton more fun with Nicolas than I did with Guillaume, even if the latter even went so far as to form his own realm and personalize it as I wanted. The turnover wasn't generated by mortality. Handkor survived. The turnover happened because he left on his own, and because Guillaume accepted to give up to give the rest of the realm a chance. Had I wanted to, I could have stayed ruler in Enweil and assured its doom. I was ruler until the Jidington Armistice, after all, and I never stopped contact, and ennobled my advy there as soon as the war started. I am not tied to any particular era of Enweil, for I have played there since quite a while.
And really, elections are meaningless with figures like Handkor. The only times I (or anyone else) got elected ruler while he was there is when he either got wounded/captured at the right time, or when, at the end, he become less active and simply didn't run. A ton of realms have their own "Handkor", that they just re-elect over and over and over, no matter what.
And the "turnover" is really mostly a result of nobody caring enough anymore to campaign. Turnover by apathy, is that really what we seek? Had a chracter from an established family ran against Edriadsomething or other (cool dude, but I cannot remember the spelling) first time he campaigned, I doubt he would have won it. Now we have Valentine, which isn't really turnover either, he's been around for quite a while. Soon, both will have left. The rulers aren't getting replaced, they are just all giving up. The mortality totally destroyed the social dynamics of the realm, and the rest of the invasions destroyed the material strength of the realm, leaving it a hollow shell.
As for history and RP... New characters have yet to achieve anything. They have yet to interact with anyone. No accomplishments, no mistakes, no projects, no aspirations. Everything about them is determined solely by the player behind them, because there hasn't had any IC interactions to affect them. If I cared for stories people pulled out of nowhere, I'd go read a book. But I don't, instead I play a social game. New characters are purely the products of their creators, whereas old characters are the products of their IG environments.
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You are trying to solve a social problem with a mechanic. People WILL line up a 2nd character. If you restrict character count, that character will simply not be created until the other is dead. But I can guarantee you that if this were to be implemented, the replacement character would show up in the realm the day after the other one died, and be handed all the titles and other stuff as soon as game mechanics allow for it.
And if we increase those limits further, say raising prestige limits, the replacement character will simply be made and "leveled up" on another island and then immigrated as required.
Players WILL find ways around this.
When a character dies, put 6 month lock on that player creating a new character on that continent. Players who have characters old enough to die from old age will have been around for multiple years and should either already have several characters elsewhere or enough slots to do do so if they wish. By doing this you stop the dead characters from being instantly replaced with new ones, and 6 months (or even 3) seems ample time for things to change enough that they don't simply have their titles handed back to them, and it also forces people to spend some time investing playtime in other continents, realms, etc.
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I do think Chenier has a point. The effects of mortality on Beluaterra were too much. Too many nobles died. Completely hollowing out a realms leadership might introduce turnover, but it can also turn previously healthy and vibrant realms into husks. This will be the unintended consequence of reintroduced mortality I think. You're going to lose good characters as well as the bad.
When a character dies, put 6 month lock on that player creating a new character on that continent. Players who have characters old enough to die from old age will have been around for multiple years and should either already have several characters elsewhere or enough slots to do do so if they wish. By doing this you stop the dead characters from being instantly replaced with new ones, and 6 months (or even 3) seems ample time for things to change enough that they don't simply have their titles handed back to them, and it also forces people to spend some time investing playtime in other continents, realms, etc.
So, stop people playing in the realms and continents that they might most enjoy?
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In the fourth invasion, mortality was brought in for everyone.
Agreed. We tried mortality and it was an abysmal failure. Unless someone has a concept that goes way, way beyond "make everyone mortal", I'll not take him seriously.
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When a character dies, put 6 month lock on that player creating a new character on that continent.
Sorry, that idea doesn't pass the giggle test.
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Sorry, that idea doesn't pass the giggle test.
God, I hate it when people use stock phrases like that, especially when "giggle test" just leaves it to subjective opinion...
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God, I hate it when people use stock phrases like that, especially when "giggle test" just leaves it to subjective opinion...
Preventing people from playing in the realms they love for such a long time doesn't seem like a great way to improve retention.
A week, maybe... 6 months, though? Way too harsh.
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Agreed. We tried mortality and it was an abysmal failure. Unless someone has a concept that goes way, way beyond "make everyone mortal", I'll not take him seriously.
I think you have to look at the context, though, Tom.
As Chénier said, part of the problem with mortality in the Fourth Invasion was that, well, it was an Invasion. Daimons and Monsters, by their nature, are vastly more likely to kill people than regular human troops.
Another part was that we just didn't tune it well enough. Adding mortality should require a lot more testing—I can even think of some good ways to gather significant data before we send it live, if we were to do anything of the sort. This would allow us to watch the mortality rate in normal play, and see if we think it's too low or too high.
Finally, yes, if we activated mortality gamewide, we would lose some players.
But guess what? The same is true of any major change we can make that we hope would push the game in a more positive direction, including closing islands. I think we really need to be past the point where we're saying, "This change would cause some old players to leave the game, therefore we shouldn't do it." We need to seriously evaluate the long-term benefits and risks of such a change, and see if we believe it would improve the gameplay for the people who remain enough that it would likely improve retention.
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I think you have to look at the context, though, Tom.
I do. Invasion or not, all that is just details. The point is that mortality is largely random, unplanned and highly disruptive. The later can be a good thing, but here's the thing: It won't disrupt what we want to. If you think mortality would upset the power balance on any island, you are mistaken. The kings will simply hide behind their troops, send your men to die in their stead and hole up in their palaces. Real world, meet game.
Like many, many other changes we have tried over the years, here is what will really happen: The established powers will barely feel it. The small guys, the casual players, but also the small realms struggling to survive against the established power blocks will be the ones who will really feel it.
For every time the ruler of one of the power blocks we want to break up is killed, there will be five times the life of an upstart ruler who could upset the power balance and bring more dynamics into the game will be cut short.
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I do. Invasion or not, all that is just details. The point is that mortality is largely random, unplanned and highly disruptive. The later can be a good thing, but here's the thing: It won't disrupt what we want to. If you think mortality would upset the power balance on any island, you are mistaken. The kings will simply hide behind their troops, send your men to die in their stead and hole up in their palaces. Real world, meet game.
Like many, many other changes we have tried over the years, here is what will really happen: The established powers will barely feel it. The small guys, the casual players, but also the small realms struggling to survive against the established power blocks will be the ones who will really feel it.
For every time the ruler of one of the power blocks we want to break up is killed, there will be five times the life of an upstart ruler who could upset the power balance and bring more dynamics into the game will be cut short.
You seem to be thinking of this as primarily a battle-mechanic, the way it was in the Fourth Invasion where everyone is basically a Hero with a chance to get killed in a scrap, but other people in this thread have also tossed out the idea of age-related mortality, which would address your "hole up in the palace" problem. It obviously needs to be carefully adjusted (for example, making the chance zero until a certain reasonably old age is reached), but I think it's not an unreasonable addition to the game and will prevent characters from ruling the same realm continuously for 10 RL years. You could be right that a player whose ruler dies might just make a new character and get themselves re-elected, but it still creates an opportunity for someone else to try to seize power, and some people will accept the turnover; I did, when Rowan died while he was Vasilif of Astrum.
If the chance of dying is low enough, I think it could still add something good to the game. Too much is too disruptive, as demonstrated in the Fourth Invasion, but the occasional death could be a good thing. Plus, revenge is a great motivator for conflict.
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Preventing people from playing in the realms they love for such a long time doesn't seem like a great way to improve retention.
A week, maybe... 6 months, though? Way too harsh.
Y'all always get hung on the minute details instead of the real point of the idea. It doesn't have to be 6 months, whatever, it can be whatever amount of time is decided would best. 5 minutes or 6 months, whatever passes "the giggle test" (whatever that is). The point was that you have a cooldown period where new people have the opportunity to take hold of the dead character's position and titles and thus when(if) replacement young character pops up it isn't so easy for him to just say "Hey I'm my father's son and he taught me everything he knew hand me all of his titles back."
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You could be right that a player whose ruler dies might just make a new character and get themselves re-elected, but it still creates an opportunity for someone else to try to seize power, and some people will accept the turnover; I did, when Rowan died while he was Vasilif of Astrum.
I accepted the death of a ruler character twice. My characters in both Kingdom of Alluran and Perdan both died as ruler. And my other dead hero was general of Darka. In all three cases I just started a new character somewhere else, and moved on.
In a case like this, where no exploits or abuses are involved, the fact that some people may just make a new character and move him right back where the dead one was (and I'm pretty sure we all know a few places where this has happened), there will be other cases where the player involved will just move on and let someone else take over. The fact that a few won't do that shouldn't stop us from setting up a possibility for other people to move on.
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Mortality is not so terrible like being seriously wounded and have the first day without any change in the status. I will need a week to play with the character just because he's old and was attacked. He cannot die, but I cannot play with him either. He's "dead" for one week. Happily he cannot lose his titles... because one thing is die and give it away, another one is lose it because of a wound that never heals.
Mortality for old age must be enough... if another changes comes along.
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Mortality for old characters really should happen. They tend to stagnate the game and that stagnation plays a role in making people leave as the game does not provide too many ways to remove positions like dukes.
When new players start and get involved into the game, they get ideas that they want to try but most of them require powerful positions to even try. By the time they get those positions, they either forget their ideas to do something else or turn into one of those position holders.
Even if we add this 'mortality' people will find a way to avoid death if they wish. They can just sit in a city or something.
Also, I believe there was a discussion on adding a button to allow your hero to become very vulnerable to death - any wound would kill the character. Maybe we can link both somehow?
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Also, I believe there was a discussion on adding a button to allow your hero to become very vulnerable to death - any wound would kill the character. Maybe we can link both somehow?
The discussion, if we remember the same, was mostly about allowing non-heroes to click a button saying they accept to die if they get wounded badly enough.
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http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,2793.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,2793.0.html)
Is it this one? Though this is for VOLUNTARY death.
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Yeah, that would be very good.
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I accepted the death of a ruler character twice. My characters in both Kingdom of Alluran and Perdan both died as ruler. And my other dead hero was general of Darka. In all three cases I just started a new character somewhere else, and moved on.
You accepted their death the moment you clicked that "hero" button. That is a HUGE difference.
People will accept character mortality if it is the norm from the go, when they know he can die when they create a character. That is why global mortality will work in M&F, because it's there from the start.
Introducing it into BM is a lot more difficult. I'm not entirely averse to the idea, or else we wouldn't have tried it on BT once, but you can't just flip a switch and tell people "tough luck". It has to be a lot more gradual then that.
Years ago, when we reworked wounding, code was added to make the duration of serious wounds less predictable. That code already uses age - older characters will heal slower. It also has code where wounds get worse instead of better, and again older characters have a higher chance of that triggering. It ALSO already has code where your wounds become so bad, you die. That code is not active, but it's there already.
Acceptance is the main reason we never activated it.
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Tom,
If the code is there already, can you give me and the likes of me a box we can tick to activate it for our characters?
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Tom,
If the code is there already, can you give me and the likes of me a box we can tick to activate it for our characters?
Actually, it's not quite that simple.
The code exists to die of wounds, if mortality is activated. Some more work would be needed to make mortality a per-character preference, not just in the wound-healing section, but everywhere a chance would exist to die.
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Anaris,
I would be happy of the chance to die of wounds too. It would be a start, wouldn't it? And at the same time it would be a true test and a vote for just how popular people see the mortality feature, if hero is not the choice of class for them for other reasons.
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Die for wounds is good for old chars, but not for young ones. I believe no ones want to lose a char before in a stupid battle without achieve something.
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Die for wounds is good for old chars, but not for young ones. I believe no ones want to lose a char before in a stupid battle without achieve something.
We have very few hard lines in the game. The current code has a chance dependent on age so that young characters have a very low and middle-age characters a low chance of worse wounds and lower yet to die of them, but it is never zero.
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We have very few hard lines in the game. The current code has a chance dependent on age so that young characters have a very low and middle-age characters a low chance of worse wounds and lower yet to die of them, but it is never zero.
Regardless, I think there should be one for mortality. Every character should have a decently long window in which death is simply not a possibility in order to grow and develop relationships and personality (not to mention accumulate some power and/or accomplishments). We don't want someone's very first character to die after three months of playing in a stroke of freak bad luck, that's just not good for the game.
I would advocate for keeping mortality voluntary (as reflected by the existing hero class option) for all characters under 40 years of age. Thereafter it should be possible for any character to die as you've outlined above, with an ever-increasing chance as the character ages.
I strongly suggest that age-based (as opposed to purely combat-based) mortality be considered as well, to mitigate the problem you already pointed out of the King who simply sits in his palace and never makes an appearance on the battlefield. Clearly the reduced hours aren't a sufficient incentive for people to delete powerful or cherished characters since we have a number of 90+ year old characters running about on the stable islands. At some point, characters that old should simply die. Perhaps there's a small chance that they become ill (resulting in a wound) on any given day after a certain age. Thereafter the wound code that you've already devised would determine whether they get better or not, with the chance of recovery becoming less and less with age.
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I've always been against illness and other random events resulting in character death.
But if there were mortality for old characters, those infiltrator attacks on the 90+ old ruler of Foreverstan would become a powerful threat again...
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But if there were mortality for old characters, those infiltrator attacks on the 90+ old ruler of Foreverstan would become a powerful threat again...
YES! I agree with Geronus' statement of younger characters retaining their immortality. Yet once you pass a certain age (40 may be too young, maybe 60?), you *should* have a chance of dying from complications of wounds. If you don't want them to die of random causes, then let wounds that get bad enough actually result in death. You don't even have to enable mortality from the initial stab. Make it so that it only happens when they get wounded, and then the wounded keeps getting worse. A really nasty stabbing will put them close, but they would still need to get unlucky on the dice rolls to actually die.
Hmm... this would open up mortality to those really old characters that retreat into the priesthood to escape death, too.
And it would provide some incentive for people to drop lots of gold into infil training again.
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YES! I agree with Geronus' statement of younger characters retaining their immortality. Yet once you pass a certain age (40 may be too young, maybe 60?), you *should* have a chance of dying from complications of wounds. If you don't want them to die of random causes, then let wounds that get bad enough actually result in death. You don't even have to enable mortality from the initial stab. Make it so that it only happens when they get wounded, and then the wounded keeps getting worse. A really nasty stabbing will put them close, but they would still need to get unlucky on the dice rolls to actually die.
Hmm... this would open up mortality to those really old characters that retreat into the priesthood to escape death, too.
And it would provide some incentive for people to drop lots of gold into infil training again.
I feel like this could be mortality done right.
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YES! I agree with Geronus' statement of younger characters retaining their immortality. Yet once you pass a certain age (40 may be too young, maybe 60?), you *should* have a chance of dying from complications of wounds. If you don't want them to die of random causes, then let wounds that get bad enough actually result in death. You don't even have to enable mortality from the initial stab. Make it so that it only happens when they get wounded, and then the wounded keeps getting worse. A really nasty stabbing will put them close, but they would still need to get unlucky on the dice rolls to actually die.
Hmm... this would open up mortality to those really old characters that retreat into the priesthood to escape death, too.
And it would provide some incentive for people to drop lots of gold into infil training again.
It will need some thoughtful tuning vis a vis infiltrators. We don't want to turn 60+ year old characters into fish in a barrel (though at the high end of the age range, it should start to get pretty hard to escape death). Some islands, especially the stable ones, have a large supply of very highly trained infiltrators; if the mortality formula is too aggressive, a lot of people will start getting stabbed to death.
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You accepted their death the moment you clicked that "hero" button. That is a HUGE difference.
People will accept character mortality if it is the norm from the go, when they know he can die when they create a character. That is why global mortality will work in M&F, because it's there from the start.
Introducing it into BM is a lot more difficult. I'm not entirely averse to the idea, or else we wouldn't have tried it on BT once, but you can't just flip a switch and tell people "tough luck". It has to be a lot more gradual then that.
Years ago, when we reworked wounding, code was added to make the duration of serious wounds less predictable. That code already uses age - older characters will heal slower. It also has code where wounds get worse instead of better, and again older characters have a higher chance of that triggering. It ALSO already has code where your wounds become so bad, you die. That code is not active, but it's there already.
Acceptance is the main reason we never activated it.
There was quite a gap between the moment I clicked on "become a hero" and the moment that my hero actually died. And despite there being a few moments in his career I would have been glad to see him die in, I was never happy about his death and never really came to "accept" it.
Having death known from the go would make it easier for people to accept, but doesn't mean they'll LIKE it either.
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One perhaps a little silly approach to mortality would be to have a stat called "health". It would be something that started out at 100 and various incidents during the harsh life of a noble would gradually drop it until at 0 your character would die. Age would factor into it but would not automatically drop it. It could be a soft thing in a way that getting wounded _might_ drop it one point at an earlier age, but later with an increased chance. Perhaps even so (unrealistically) that multiple stabs soon one after one would have a lowered chance to drop it.
So you would know where you character is at any given stage. You would know when it was "soon his time", so you could plan your RP:s around it and build his story to a closure. Again, not realistic, but storywise better. In this approach age would be a numeric representation of, well, your character's age, while health would be what you lose when you are tortured and wounded, which at the end effects the hours at your disposal.
This would turn infiltrator attacks from a nuisance to something serious, but yet not overpowered. Each stab would be a meaningful step towards the death of the target character.
100 health would be a nice round number, but it could be any other number too. 100 would be quite sufficient for creating a good storyline.
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One perhaps a little silly approach to mortality would be to have a stat called "health". It would be something that started out at 100 and various incidents during the harsh life of a noble would gradually drop it until at 0 your character would die. Age would factor into it but would not automatically drop it. It could be a soft thing in a way that getting wounded _might_ drop it one point at an earlier age, but later with an increased chance. Perhaps even so (unrealistically) that multiple stabs soon one after one would have a lowered chance to drop it.
So you would know where you character is at any given stage. You would know when it was "soon his time", so you could plan your RP:s around it and build his story to a closure. Again, not realistic, but storywise better. In this approach age would be a numeric representation of, well, your character's age, while health would be what you lose when you are tortured and wounded, which at the end effects the hours at your disposal.
This would turn infiltrator attacks from a nuisance to something serious, but yet not overpowered. Each stab would be a meaningful step towards the death of the target character.
100 health would be a nice round number, but it could be any other number too. 100 would be quite sufficient for creating a good storyline.
I like this idea gameplay-wise (as far as mortality goes, which I don't like from the go), but it does feel way too gamey.
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One perhaps a little silly approach to mortality would be to have a stat called "health". It would be something that started out at 100 and various incidents during the harsh life of a noble would gradually drop it until at 0 your character would die. Age would factor into it but would not automatically drop it. It could be a soft thing in a way that getting wounded _might_ drop it one point at an earlier age, but later with an increased chance. Perhaps even so (unrealistically) that multiple stabs soon one after one would have a lowered chance to drop it.
So you would know where you character is at any given stage. You would know when it was "soon his time", so you could plan your RP:s around it and build his story to a closure. Again, not realistic, but storywise better. In this approach age would be a numeric representation of, well, your character's age, while health would be what you lose when you are tortured and wounded, which at the end effects the hours at your disposal.
This would turn infiltrator attacks from a nuisance to something serious, but yet not overpowered. Each stab would be a meaningful step towards the death of the target character.
100 health would be a nice round number, but it could be any other number too. 100 would be quite sufficient for creating a good storyline.
Interesting approach. I like the idea of seeing it coming ahead of time.
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I like this idea gameplay-wise (as far as mortality goes, which I don't like from the go), but it does feel way too gamey.
It's balancing between realism and gameplay. A sudden death, whilst more realistic, does not let a player bring the character to a closure and wrap things up. I am just pointing out that a sudden death without a warning is not the only option we have to near-immortality.
It has to do with what the actions of our characters matter. You do not now really risk your life and limb when entering combat. Nor do infiltrators accomplish anything on a more permanent basis. The gradual creeping of death would serve its place if it increases the thrill you feel for the actions you do with your character. Just imagine tournaments, where you might actually get hurt and lose something, but with a much lesser chance for it for the youngsters. They would feel different. Risking life and limb, as they really did back then.
Not to mention making ordinary duels count for something.
It's nothing harsh or sudden. Nothing that the players would not anticipate. It would still take quite awhile for an ordinary noble to run through his hundred hurts.
The math of it could be that the age of your character would be the percentage of the chance of losing one point when wounded. Or something similar.
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One perhaps a little silly approach to mortality would be to have a stat called "health".
We have that, it's called "age". The age attribute in BM does not represent calendar age, it represents physical age and you DO "age" when you get wounded.
Still, I do like the idea, and we could convert between the two.
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I've always been against illness and other random events resulting in character death.
But if there were mortality for old characters, those infiltrator attacks on the 90+ old ruler of Foreverstan would become a powerful threat again...
It would be nice to actually fear infiltrators and not just consider them a 4 day nusance.
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We have that, it's called "age". The age attribute in BM does not represent calendar age, it represents physical age and you DO "age" when you get wounded.
Still, I do like the idea, and we could convert between the two.
I like the idea of mortality at 'old age' (from 60 to 90-100?) ! In RL, I often had meet people relatively young but totally 'worn out' (and the opposed). The only thing... maybe it would be good to show both ages, Chronological and 'vital'?
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http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,2793.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,2793.0.html)
Is it this one? Though this is for VOLUNTARY death.
I'm super late to the game, but I'm having a harder time keeping up with the forums now that everyone's focused on a few topics.
I just wanted to throw my solution in there again, since it got deleted (rightfully so) in the other thread. It's pretty similar to the one Jaron linked, though his was earlier. http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,3904.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,3904.0.html)
Now, as this discussion has grown, I like the idea of just dropping it on elderly characters. Seems like a "golden ticket" if you will. As far as "Health" goes, though, I think it's still better as age... Functionally, the two are very similar anyway, and health seems to imply it should be able to get better. Age is a one-way road, even for the fictional Merlin (his is just in the other direction).
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Moderator note: Medieval life expectancy moved to a new topic.
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It will need some thoughtful tuning vis a vis infiltrators. We don't want to turn 60+ year old characters into fish in a barrel (though at the high end of the age range, it should start to get pretty hard to escape death). Some islands, especially the stable ones, have a large supply of very highly trained infiltrators; if the mortality formula is too aggressive, a lot of people will start getting stabbed to death.
It goes beyond that. If you open up actual death to anyone from infiltrators, an infiltrator caught attempting an assassination is immediate fair game for death themselves. Hell, if they're caught badly enough they should die in the attempt.
That said, I'd be open to the idea that people in Council positions and Dukes be fair game for death. I might rethink Gregor's taking the Judgeship some if only because he's by far my most favorite character behind Boeth and Giselle.
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It goes beyond that. If you open up actual death to anyone from infiltrators, an infiltrator caught attempting an assassination is immediate fair game for death themselves. Hell, if they're caught badly enough they should die in the attempt.
Indeed, if an infiltrator was wounded during the attempt, they should stand the same chance to die as anyone else their age taking a wound.