Death in the RPG: Part 1

There’s was an interesting discussion a few days back in the MMORPG.com forums called “why death penalty?“, and it started quite a long discussion regarding what death and the death penalties in RPGs are meant to do.

Among some straight-up idiotic answers were a few gems interspersed throughout the 4 pages of the thread, and they were summarized in this community spotlight at the same site.

One interesting thing to note about popular reaction to this question was the common occurrence of the (in my opinion) “cop out” answer of “it makes you play longer so the developers get more money”. Well, I personally think that’s complete garbage. First, if you die, let’s assume it takes one hour to get back to where you were before it happened (in my experiences, that’s a generously large number for a player with any skill or focus at all). This could be corpse retrieval, regrinding to recoup an experience loss, or myriad other things. Now, assume that a player dies once every 5 hours of play. That means, then, that they’re accomplishing 4 hours of leveling for every 5 hours of play. I think that’s another reasonable number for a moderate player (the kind developers would so easily trick). Now, if it takes 10 days to reach the maximum level, that’s 240 hours of play time, or 288 hours (accounting for the time lost to death (240/5) + 240). A moderate player could be assumed to play 3 hours per day. That means it takes him 80 days of playing to get to cap, and 16 days of playing to recoup his losses from death. What subscriptions do you know of where a developer would be willing to implement a system as complex as a balanced death penalty for an additional amount of time that won’t even have the person buying an additional month of play? (Even if they died twice as often, it would amount to 32 days, which would yield them only an additional $15 per player… or none at all if you consider today’s free-to-play and box-to-play games).

As far as I’m concerned, there are better ways to make the player use those extra 48 hours over the course of their entire game lifetime. Writing 20 new quests would probably take a staff member (who is probably paid less than a developer anyway) less time than implementing a system like this, and I think many would agree that spending 48 hours doing 20 quests would be far more fun than spending 48 hours trying to get back to where they were.

Now, this isn’t to say that I’m not a supporter of the death penalty (*insert comedy track*), but I think that we as gamers can come up with better reasons than this.

One of my favorite answers (or, justifications if you will) is the concept of risk versus reward. If there’s no death penalty, then, to some degree, loot becomes meaningless. If you are able to zerg the same area with one person, with two people (with 40 people?) then eventually, by chance, we should expect something good out of it. How many times have you seen that sad sorry sole grinding on mobs that are 15 levels higher than him, dying every few minutes, but coming out better in the long haul because he’s getting bigger experience hits and a tad more loot per mob than his more reasonable counterparts. If there were no death penalty, this person would be able to do this all the time, without worrying about having to spend the little extra money he’s gaining or losing some other, more permanent aspect of his game experience (maybe his time).

With a death penalty, however, this situation becomes less and less believable. One of the common implementations of death penalty is some version of “losing your stats temporarily”. This happens on timers in some games (WoW), conditions in others (EQ2, getting your shard), and in other games you simply have to deal with it and earn the stats back through mob killing (Guild Wars). Well, if little johnny adventurous was having trouble killing that mob 15 levels higher than him when he was at full stats, then killing it with a big debuff is not going to be an option. So, in that regard, death penalty is a good way to implement further balance controls.

Another reason for the death penalty is the one I like to call the “Darnwinian Death Penalty Theory” and it goes something like this:

Be honest with yourself and decide, is it better to be a high level character that anyone can create and achieve (even the stupid and inept) or high level in a system where it takes strategy, planning and skill to get there.

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Like most, the theory is good, but doesn’t really have as big a place in the real world as it should. How many truly inept people and poor players are still able to get to the level caps and into the bigger end-game guilds? If a player dies more, and it takes a little more time to get back to where they were, all they have to do is play that much more every day in order to keep up with the big dogs. They’ll get to cap just the same as everyone else, it just might take them a bit longer. Anyone who’s ever been in a raiding guild will tell you about the completely inept people who somehow wormed their way through the system.

So, I don’t agree with this theory. Maybe we could rephrase it as:

Be honest with yourself and decide, is it better to have a high level character quickly that anyone can create and achieve (even the stupid and inept) or high level quickly in a system where it takes strategy, planning and skill to get there.

Only to the first wave of people in a given game will the death penalty really matter in this context.

This discussion isn’t over! Stick around for the next part of the extremely engaging series: Death in the RPG!