Goblin Squad Member
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I would love to see burials as a mechanic in this game. It would provide a really interesting choice for players when they encounter the corpses/husks of other players.
The way I envision in-game burials, broadly, it would take some amount of time, maybe a full minute or two of uninterrupted concentration to enact the process, and it would provide a benefit to the deceased WITHOUT providing a direct benefit to the adventurer performing the burial.
So why waste your time burying someone else if it isn't going to help you? It is a choice to perform an altruistic act (please don't argue the definition of altruism here, replace it with 'pro-social' if the previous term offends you). Good aligned players might feel inclined to bury the body to aid the deceased in their next life (which happens to be starting immediately one hex away). Evil aligned might feel just as inclined to loot.
Perhaps the benefits conferred on the deceased through burial are:
-Reputation bump
-Reduced death penalties (whatever those end up being)
-Hiding the corpse from other players and preventing looting (or making looting more difficult by incurring an additional reputation downshift for grave robbing).
Or maybe the corpse is surrounded by monsters and you just can't spend the time clearing the path and defending the body (or have your friends defend while you bury), but passing by nags at your conscience so.
Could be a very neat effect on the player behind the character as well.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I completely support this idea. I also like the possibility of an alternative, raise dead, only available to very powerful players which would return the dead to their corpse and negate death penalties. This should be expensive and draining though with burial being far easier to do.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Death is a big part of religion. Adding features to aid in the practice of religion would certainly help the religions of Galarion to be much more developed and important part of the game. Formal funerals might be nice too. A formal funeral might actually result in the person coming back with no penalties or even a buff.
For the truly evil, if there is a mechanic that leaves you unconscious rather than dead, give a mechanic for human sacrifice. The character perform an action that takes a long time. Results in the unconscious victim dying, the person performing the sacrifice gets a buff and a huge boost toward evil. And the victim might suffer additional penalties. You would probably need to have a required evil alignment to do it and possibly certain Cleric skills would be required too.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Death is a big part of religion. Adding features to aid in the practice of religion would certainly help the religions of Galarion to be much more developed and important part of the game. Formal funerals might be nice too. A formal funeral might actually result in the person coming back with no penalties or even a buff.
For the truly evil, if there is a mechanic that leaves you unconscious rather than dead, give a mechanic for human sacrifice. The character perform an action that takes a long time. Results in the unconscious victim dying, the person performing the sacrifice gets a buff and a huge boost toward evil. And the victim might suffer additional penalties. You would probably need to have a required evil alignment to do it and possibly certain Cleric skills would be required too.
It certainly could turn into something more elaborate. Maybe burials are a class specific mechanic (limited to divine classes).
With sacrifice, I imagine that might belong to a separate mechanic, maybe something more ritual like that requires the coordinated efforts of a couple players to carry out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would like to see it come with a text notification and note on your death log of if you were buried and by whom.
This lets players know who's got their backs and can turn a death into a positive experience that results in new friends.
Andius, your comment on the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves blog thread is what inspired this idea (and I wrote about it briefly there). I originally thought burying the dead would keep their items safe from looting as an alternative to 'sending' them to the player.
I liked that it would encourage a greater camaraderie among players (Good aligned in this case likely), a feeling like we aren't alone and maybe we can watch out for each other.
I question the idea of a text notification, but maybe you could re-skin it as having left a message on the cairn stones or whatever grave marker you used (since we think they might be coming back to get their stuff). I fear for nasty messages that might be left, since this is the internet after all, but maybe it would be a nice way to encourage someone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I question the idea of a text notification, but maybe you could re-skin it as having left a message on the cairn stones or whatever grave marker you used (since we think they might be coming back to get their stuff). I fear for nasty messages that might be left, since this is the internet after all, but maybe it would be a nice way to encourage someone.
I think what he meant was an automated message saying "This guy has buried your body," and it keeps a record of that in an event history you can go back and look at.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I question the idea of a text notification, but maybe you could re-skin it as having left a message on the cairn stones or whatever grave marker you used (since we think they might be coming back to get their stuff). I fear for nasty messages that might be left, since this is the internet after all, but maybe it would be a nice way to encourage someone.I think what he meant was an automated message saying "This guy has buried your body," and it keeps a record of that in an event history you can go back and look at.
Yeah, I followed. From an RP perspective, I don't know how a player would automatically 'know' who buried their husk, so I tried to think of an alternative that doesn't require 'magic' as an explanation and in turn wouldn't make magic feel mundane.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really like this idea. Creating 'evil' spells that violate graves and generally making graves difficult to violate (perhaps the death curse is 'worse' if you violate someone's grave?) It seems wrong that allies have so little they can do to help someone who has died versus enemies.
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Goblin Squad Member
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People don't usually come back to life either, so it's not really a problem, Goddess of Fate can tell them :P
I've heard similar arguments for other mechanics (the bounty system) and I guess that's fine.
The purpose here is to make something that feels more organic and genuine, rather than just be hand-wavy and say 'it's magic and we say so'. There's no need to diminish magic in the PfO world by consistently reducing it to a mechanic explanation with minimal substance. A creative solution can be easy and much more powerful for the gaming experience.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like this idea particularly both the good and evil RP aspects. It would be especially cool if you could use the husk of a player to anaimate undead, and there was someway the husk was recognisable as a player. Imagine taunting someone with an animated zombie version of themselves.
It would also add an interesting element if animate dead spells required a player husk as a component of the spell. This would force Necromancers to actively go out and face off against other players to amass there undead army of zombies. all the while suffering the consequences of there evil was (bounties, alignment and rep hits). Though this would have to be balanced in someway as we wouln't want to encourage griefers.
If the above mechanic was used then it could add a valuable money stream for CE types who provide husks for Necromancers to use and animate. The real issue is balancing between griefers and real rp CE characters who happy to provide a 'resource' to necromancers for a price.
EDIT:
Perhaps there could be an option to pick up the husk (which could be used for the animate undead spell or other foul purposes), but leave behind a loot bag. This way if someone wanted to be CE and kill and harvest player husks they could without getting a 'griefing' tag. Sure they're not nice because they are killing random players. However, its for RP purposes rather than to full loot someone. This could give a legitimate reason for CE types to earn money by selling the husks and provide consequences for necromancers and husk harvesters alike. This mechanic would also add to meaningful player interaction IMHO. Especially if the animated husk carried the orginals characters name.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Perhaps there could be an option to pick up the husk (which could be used for the animate undead spell or other foul purposes), but leave behind a loot bag.
More interesting to me, with the option a good player could carry the body back to a temple and a proper funeral ritual could be performed. This could become especially meaningful to a player if their body took up a lot of inventory space because that would mean that the person doing the funeral went out of their way just to give the deceased a nice funeral.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Perhaps there could be an option to pick up the husk (which could be used for the animate undead spell or other foul purposes), but leave behind a loot bag.More interesting to me, with the option a good player could carry the body back to a temple and a proper funeral ritual could be performed. This could become especially meaningful to a player if their body took up a lot of inventory space because that would mean that the person doing the funeral went out of their way just to give the deceased a nice funeral.
Interesting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As an additional note, the devs seem to like the idea of players defending territory for a set period of time (a couple of different proposed scenarios have described this type of action). They brought up death as an example of when they thought this would come up: when your friend dies, you don't loot his body because it will destroy some of his items as stated:
However, if another player finds your husk before you do, they'll be able to loot it. They won't recover everything that you had in your inventory—just a random selection—but the rest of your inventory will be destroyed and removed from the game. If you die surrounded by allies, they can't just pick up all of your equipment for you, as doing so would cause some of it to be removed from the game, but your allies could attempt to defend your husk until you return to it, so that you lose nothing but travel time.
This didn't seem too well received by people in the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves thread, so maybe burials will provide an alternate mechanic that could be manipulated to establish a similar effect but will resonate better with the players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea in principle, but I have a question. How long would the graves stick around for? It would be really silly if it ended up like UO and players couldn't walk 3 feet in the wilderness without tripping over a grave.
It is the same reservation I have about individual/non-instanced player housing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea in principle, but I have a question. How long would the graves stick around for? It would be really silly if it ended up like UO and players couldn't walk 3 feet in the wilderness without tripping over a grave.
It is the same reservation I have about individual/non-instanced player housing.
Depends on the number of people I suppose, it'd have to be tested, maybe a few days or a week or so?
Mind you, they don't have to be marked graves.
Daniel.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea in principle, but I have a question. How long would the graves stick around for? It would be really silly if it ended up like UO and players couldn't walk 3 feet in the wilderness without tripping over a grave.
It is the same reservation I have about individual/non-instanced player housing.
Depends on the number of people I suppose, it'd have to be tested, maybe a few days or a week or so?
Mind you, they don't have to be marked graves.
Daniel.
They don't need to be marked. They could also be visible only to the resurrected player the grave belongs to.
I also didn't have in mind that they would last very long given the rate of resurrection. Maybe an hour? Maybe you only have the most recent (or the first) grave-site as a permanent (or semi-permanent)?
I suppose all the specifics will depends on the graves purpose. If it's just to protect loot and items, then the owner shouldn't have more than some small amount of time to recover. If it's also for dark rituals, then 24 hours would give the necromancer enough time to actually find a grave without forcing one to appear himself. And so on.