How will death be dealt with?

[Serris]

I think different wound locations would be interesting but might be hard to program.

As for burns, steady HP decrease and massively dropped stats work.

[Explorer]

Just a note on inventory loss, maybe not ALL of the inventory should be loss. According to the limit, something like half, no?
 

Your character already has a very small inventory so losing half of it wouldn't be much different from loosing everything.

Hmm, I see. But if the total is, say, 10 itens in inventory, it would make a good difference to lose 5 itens of the total.

[Serris]

Just a note on inventory loss, maybe not ALL of the inventory should be loss. According to the limit, something like half, no?
 

Your character already has a very small inventory so losing half of it wouldn't be much different from loosing everything.

Hmm, I see. But if the total is, say, 10 itens in inventory, it would make a good difference to lose 5 itens of the total.

The inventory is only 2 items (3rd item can be carried by a rider).

[Explorer]

Just a note on inventory loss, maybe not ALL of the inventory should be loss. According to the limit, something like half, no?
 

Your character already has a very small inventory so losing half of it wouldn't be much different from loosing everything.

Hmm, I see. But if the total is, say, 10 itens in inventory, it would make a good difference to lose 5 itens of the total.

The inventory is only 2 items (3rd item can be carried by a rider).

Now I feel an idiot. ._. Ok, got it. Half of two items wouldn't be much, that's for sure. <.< Ignore me.

[Malte279]

   Another way to signify severe wounds would be a temporary stat decrease.

That's what I suggested, but I brought it up mainly as a possible "punishment" for a dead character. In case of injuries I think this should definitely be implemented while (no arguing against my own suggestion) I suppose it may be better for a dead character to return at full stat, but with a loss of experience points.

Just a note on inventory loss, maybe not ALL of the inventory should be loss. According to the limit, something like half, no?

Apart from the small inventory the importance of items (other than for completing tasks) will be not nearly as high as in most RPGs. While almost every RPG has permanent items which the character will carry around all the time (usually weapons or armor) I'm not sure there will be even a single such permanent item in the game.

[NaNaNa]

I think different wound locations would be interesting but might be hard to program.

Well it would depend on how you got injured. If you fell from a high cliff, for example, your leg bones would fracture. If you got tackled by a rampaging dinosaur, there goes your ribcage. If you're flying in the air and your wings get messed up, there they go.

[Serris]

Another way to signify severe wounds would be a temporary stat decrease.

That's what I suggested, but I brought it up mainly as a possible "punishment" for a dead character.

The way you said it makes it sound like a punishment is a temporary decrease in the level of an ability (Level 6 tail grab drops to a level 2 tail grab).

I was talking about a decrease in the stats (Ex: strength drops from 50 to 30 for a period of time).

I think different wound locations would be interesting but might be hard to program.

Well it would depend on how you got injured. If you fell from a high cliff, for example, your leg bones would fracture. If you got tackled by a rampaging dinosaur, there goes your ribcage. If you're flying in the air and your wings get messed up, there they go.

Now what about multiple injuries? Ex: Fall off cliff one quest, next quest after you get KO'd by an angry Swimmer.

Or simultaneous injury? Ex: you are flying and you get hit with a burst of lava from a volcano (burns, wing damage and broken bones from possible rough landing)

[NaNaNa]

Now what about multiple injuries? Ex: Fall off cliff one quest, next quest after you get KO'd by an angry Swimmer.

Or simultaneous injury? Ex: you are flying and you get hit with a burst of lava from a volcano (burns, wing damage and broken bones from possible rough landing)
 

Yes, you would get both of them.

After you wake up from this horrifying physically damaging dream, you would need to fix yourself up. Maybe it takes the realism too far, but maybe there could be different ways to heal yourself depending on how you got hurt.

[Malte279]

The way you said it makes it sound like a punishment is a temporary decrease in the level of an ability (Level 6 tail grab drops to a level 2 tail grab).

I was talking about a decrease in the stats (Ex: strength drops from 50 to 30 for a period of time).

My mistake. I failed to make the differentiation of basic stats and abilities.
I really like your idea NaNaNa, to let injuries disable characters from doing certain things (flying, swimming, climbing etc. would be possible options). I know too little about programming to know whether such details as injuries of specific parts of a character would be realistic for us. However, I reckon it might be possible to disable abilities if characters HP bar goes below a certain level (e.g. one could assume that a flyer with less than one third of the HP is likely to have suffered injuries on the wing and even if he or she did not he would be too weakened to fly).

[NaNaNa]

Well, I mean, it shouldnt be too hard for the computer to differentiate between a leg and a head...right?

[DarkWolf91]

Yes, but it might be difficult to differentiate between the scenarios that cause injury well enough to allow the program to determine if what was injured was a leg or a head. I don't know very much about programming either, though, so I don't have a good idea of the nature of that sort of code.

[NaNaNa]

Well, the basic thing would just be to have a specific "painful experience" always injure one part of the body, like a high drop always gets the legs, but this is the least realistic out of all the ways to implement specific injuries

[DarkWolf91]

Yes, that's a good point. I guess it depends on the way that 'painful experiences' are differentiated from one another within the code.

[NaNaNa]

I know nothing about making games like this, but I'm pretty sure differentiation isnt that hard

[action9000]

Well, I mean, it shouldnt be too hard for the computer to differentiate between a leg and a head...right?

That will depend on how we end up making the 3d models of our characters.  Right now, our model maker, Razzie, is making a character as one object.

This means that the model is simply one shape that has been bent and resized and reshaped in order to make something in the shape of the dinosaur that we want.  The problem is, in programming, I can detect when an object has been touched or injured...BUT if our model is all one object like they are now, I literally cannot detect the difference between a head and a leg because the computer sees it all as one big shape thingy - one object.  I have no way to subdivide it into each part we want to be injured unless we make a separate model for each body part and glue them together in-game.  If we did that, it would possible but I'd have to talk to the modellers about that.

Well, the basic thing would just be to have a specific "painful experience" always injure one part of the body, like a high drop always gets the legs, but this is the least realistic out of all the ways to implement specific injuries

This may be possible because we can use the environment and which abilities are active to determine the type of injury, rather than detecting where on the player the injury occurred.

However, I reckon it might be possible to disable abilities if characters HP bar goes below a certain level (e.g. one could assume that a flyer with less than one third of the HP is likely to have suffered injuries on the wing and even if he or she did not he would be too weakened to fly).

This is actually my preferred option.  It's simpler and it won't confuse players as much as wondering how their health is high, yet some abilities aren't working.

[NaNaNa]

Alright then, we'll go with one possible injury for every event, until we turn the characters into many different objects put together

Falling- leg sprain/fracture, reduced speed, agility decrease

Burns- lowered stamina, strength, HP cap, some people think you're too grotesquely hideous to socialize with

Damaged while flying- slower ascent and speed. In major cases, inability to fly

Tackled by dinosaur- broken rib cage, lowered stamina, strength, agility, pretty much everything else. HP slowly decreases

Rocks to the head- dazed and confused. Vision becomes blurred, orientation messed up. If the rock is as big as, for example, a boulder, character might go unconscious

Cut by vines/thorns- minor injury, stamina decrease

Nearly drowning/totally drowning- stamina decrease. Psychological fear of big water for a short period of time

Something like that

[NaNaNa]

Forgot to mention that in the list above, everything except stat losses is temporary

[Serris]

Shouldn't stat loss be temporary as well (healing)? If you made stat loss permanent by injury, people might get upset.

Also what about combat? Should you take various injuries to the body parts as a result of that? Like the enemy might decide to strike for the head or limbs?

[action9000]

Shouldn't stat loss be temporary as well (healing)? If you made stat loss permanent by injury, people might get upset.

Agreed.

As for the idea of having your stats temporarily reduced after death:
What would it accomplish?

It would make it more of a pain to get back to the adventure you were doing, and if it lasted long enough, it would make it more of a pain, or even impossible, to complete that adventure. This would be an especially big disaster to swimmers and flyers, who heavily rely on thier abilities to get around.  If their abilites' functionality is greatly reduced, this could really be annoying for awhile.   Would this really be a good thing?

Also what about combat? Should you take various injuries to the body parts as a result of that? Like the enemy might decide to strike for the head or limbs?

I'm still not too sure what I think about having different body parts getting injured.  I think that will need some more discussion.  I'll post something again shortly; my mind isn't coming up with anything useful to say right at this moment.

[Serris]

We need some way to make death a hassle so people don't abuse it as a teleportation method.