The Hardest Game Mechanics To Design | Punishing Players and Death Mechanics

Not-games punish players, and that's bad design. Let's take a short dive into the misery created by not-game designers.
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[@viorp5267]

0:35 OK, but it it is really hard in some cases to design systems to account for outright human stupidity. I had players skim the rules, and do something stupid, me tell them that what they are doing is stupid and they shouldn't and then they did it an coped and seethed for it backfiring. 1:09 Punishment for death is an immersion mechanic. You don't want death to feel hollow and pointless as that reduces the stakes in a player's mind and in many cases makes things less fun. Even if it is in practical therms just a time waster or a temporary disadvantage it helps create stakes. 1:56 Yes in 'punishing' players its important that punishment only comes from players actually having agency over it. Which is why I generally stopped including disasters in my nation builder games it adds realism, but oftentimes is just an uninteresting action waster. 3:40 Idk, if you have minecraft with keep inventory on death literally just becomes a tool for teleporting. This makes it so out of caution you don't always wear the best items you have or carry everything with you. it forces you gemaplywise to create transportation systems to get back to your base. It makes staying alive actually something you need to do and pay attention too. As said death is basically an Emerson mechanic. In roleplay games it furthers creativity. In my nation RP or Godgames I never let players revive dead characters. This makes them cautious of loosing characters they came to like and give them ways to maximise their survival and drives creativity by having them create new characters after their previous died. Do it any other way and they will recklessly throw their 'heroes' at problems and then revive them barely interacting in-between. Lack of death punishment makes everything a Dark Souls boss fight. 3:54 I think that is a legacy feature from when games were short and that was used to pad out game length. It's probably unneeded yeah. 4:48 Yes that character is dead. Because you know what happens if you give your players plot armor? They test if a trap is dangerous by jumping into it. They try impossible jumps over canyons... watch critical role. No one can ever die it is awful and boring and gay. What else do players do? They never take an L, they never run from a fight. They never bow down to a strong NPC that can murder them if they piss him off. They don't roleplay. This is why I again never allow a character to be revived. A skilled DM convinces his players their characters can die any time, but never kills them. The fact is though, you need to kill your players if they refuse to engage with the world. If they jump into a pit of acid, if they try to attack the king in his hall, if they are loosing a fight and refuse to retreat. And death is not the end it's the beginning of the next story arc. Of the other player characters taking on the plothooks of the one who died trying to carry on his legacy. Character death is as much a storytelling opportunity as any other. 5:25 Good point 6:00 I avoid flight in my games because from Nation RPs I learned one thing. ANy sort of massed ability to fly inevitably transforms any form of warfare into WW1 style warfare. 6:25 BOOOOOOO, resurrection. BOOOOOOOO, ghosts. 7:50 That can happen only if the Villain is something with reason to keep them alive. You can't do that when they fight an animal for example. Things like that can be done, but need to be done sparingly to preserve the illusion that death is dangerous. 8:50 Yes they will go out of control. Trust me. A character dying is not the end of the story, his party-members carry his legacy onward. Another fun way to deal with death is to have players have disciples once they get to a certain level so then the new PC of the player is the disciple their raised as their prior PC. For a storytelling game to work imo it needs to follow this rule "Actions have consequences. Some consequences can're be reversed."

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

Thank you for this comment, I'll have to address the rest later, but here's my quick-response first: It sounds like you're compounding your problem. Your players are violating gameplay by metagaming if they test a trap by jumping into it and thinking their plot armor will save them, and you're violating GMing because you're punishing your players IN-game for this, rather than outside the game. What you need to do is get your players to not metagame, and then the game can proceed correctly. Also, minecraft isn't a game. I cover this in my 'What Is A Game" video - it's one of the first sections covered I think in the article comparison.

[@viorp5267]

@@GamesbyMarcWolff This kinda comes back to an old disagreement we had on what a game even is. Minecraft is I guess more of a simulation sandbox. I'll give you that. To me the risk of death or failure needs to exist at all times to make a game entertaining. There is needs to be a loss condition if there is a win condition. Preventing player meta-gaming is good and well by just talking with them, but from playing D&D with lots of randos online I can tell you one thing they can't take an L. They don't want to EVER retreat from a fight and you need to use punishments to instill good roleplaying behaviors in new players... especially self-inserting A lot of people come in expecting critical role or worse a video game and you need to be harsh to them to teach them game etiquette and part of that is "if you do stupid shit you get stupid outcomes". "NPCs are not to be killed for fun. If you don't engage with them you might miss critical information. If you insult them they won't want to help you." Later as you said you can do death fake outs or get captured, but you can never set that as what players expect to happen. If players act like pricks out of game they are punished out of game, if they do stupid stuff in game they have to expect the world to act accordingly. You can introduce stakes though other methods, but I think death is integral for two reasons: 1. It's a strong character moment for the rest of the party and can shape the other characters. Introduce new plothooks, revenge plots etc. 2. Character death is not the end of the story. Only a tpk is. The whole game does not end due to one death. Seconsly, even good players will metagame if they see they can get away with it and they want to score a win or know there will be no consequence.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

@@viorp5267 I agree that loss and death need to be at risk for there to be stakes, but here's a slightly different way of thinking about it: Your PCs care more about the impact on the NPCs they meet and the fate of the world they play in more than discomfort to their character. A PC dying on the other hand completely stops their gameplay. The risk of loss and death that are consequences of the PC's actions are to the world in which they are heroes. Their heroism saves the world. Their failures create tragedies. If their character dies and you tell the player to hand you their character sheet then all of that just stops for no reason and that character can never again react to those tragedies and rise to those challenges. It's so much better for storytelling and gameplay, and it's so much more impactful to the PCs, when a favored NPC dies compared to when one of them die. If one of them die, it's still the same player that's going to have to play their next character. At best they could be good at acting and make the character very different, but it's just not the same as the whole party feeling the loss of an NPC friend.

[@viorp5267]

@@GamesbyMarcWolff Character death is not the end of the story. The ways the dead PC changed the world and people around him remains and his legacy is carried forward. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that PC death detracts from a story. I believe it adds to it and the player then can choose if he wishes to play with a new character or not. It all does not stop for 'no reason'. The key is to: A) have the death be player driven - they did something which caused them to die or not B) if possible not be meaningless - for example a noble sacrifice Characters don't just walk around and then explode and die. They die due to mistakes made, lack of preparedness, bad luck, or circumstance. For immersion and stakes to be there death needs to be an option and it can be a good one. There i a fantastic RP game called band of Brothers I think? Players are expected to have 3 characters at all times. They are RPing mercenaries fighting against an exhaustible horde of undead. The characters have roles within the band and are intended to die nearly every session the goal being the survival of the band and potential saving of the world. In such a game you can truly convey a desperate situation and the characters that do live long feel oh so much more special. Making player failure impact the world is important, and way better than PC death. That's why I said the optimal situation is a game where players act knowing death always lurks around the corner, but you don't kill any PCs. Risk of death in games like DnD is mostly a crutch to teach new players to RP and to not self-insert into their characters, but it's an extremely important crutch and you know it's a crutch because death is only a problem in level 1-4 after that dying becomes statistically near impossible and revival options are affordable to players.

[@Bluesine_R]

Failure states are extremely important in for example bullet hell shmups, since those games are all about risk/reward, and are designed around a 1 credit clear framework. These games require a lot of problem solving, practice, quick thinking and skilled play. The fact that there is no saving in these games means that every mistake you make has momentous consequences, and the game must be well designed enough that a sufficiently skilled player will never lose to something that was out of their control. I highly recommend The Electric Underground's video "Why Permadeath Matters" from last September, which was the best video on game design I've seen in a long time. It explains the difference between progression-based design (which can often be determined by "How valuable is a fully completed save file in this game?") and performance-based design (which often applies to arcade games that have no saving). Many modern games would hugely benefit from adopting a permadeath system similar to the 1CC-framework of shmups.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

What you're describing is a scam designed to steal quarters from unwitting players expecting a game.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

Also, I have not seen that video yet but based on what you've just described I'd say everything in it was probably wrong. Certainly everything you've just paraphrased from it is wrong.

[@Bluesine_R]

@@GamesbyMarcWolff That is a common misconception about arcade games coming from people who haven't played almost any of them in their life. Most arcade games had to respect the player's time, because if they were badly designed, the player wouldn't want to come back to it. Arcade games were designed for dedicated players who were willing to spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours in mastering them. It's the exact opposite psychological method compared to the extremely manipulative way modern mobile games treat their players. Arcade games have also been the place where a lot of innovation happened in terms of game mechanics. There was a constant back-and-forth interaction between arcade game designers and top players in both fighting games and shmups. This allowed the creation of extremely deep games with a very high skill ceiling, like DoDonPachi Daioujou, Ketsui, Mushihimesama Futari and Ikaruga. The layered design in these games is something that I truly admire.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

@@Bluesine_R I fundamentally disagree that arcade not-games respect players' time. Every violation of formal game theory describes in excrutiating detail precisely why.

[@GamesbyMarcWolff]

@@Bluesine_R Also, I'm not saying they didn't or couldn't innovate, but they clearly were not trying to in terms of game design. The only thing they were concerned with in that example is sports design.