DTs

[jrizz]

1)
 - You're at 9 SS's lost, you now have the option to seek out an NPC healer and be set back to 'half-strength' with your soul, or 5 SS's remaining.  The process of doing this weakens you, you lose half your total experience, and lose a point of constitution (white not green, so permanent).  You can do this as many times as you want until you bottom out on that stat (i.e. 3).  So let's look at an example.  

I really like the stat point loss idea on this but instead of doing a bottom out kind of thing make so that the most you can lose is 5 points or so. The XP loss is quite large and might be a bit much for a pay to play world. One level lost I think is sufficiently rough. So basically it could be done 5 or so times at a loss of stat points and levels (read XP).

[lonnarin]

I think we're all kicking ourselves now for killing Sinthar before first reverse engineering those Bloodpools and unlocking his secret to uncanny immortality.  Human sacrifice might not be potent enough for Soul Mother to trade, but dragon souls... *licks his lips*  Maybe if we kill Fisty and eat his still beating heart that might have some effect.  At the very least, Soul Mother might be a little more nervous next time when she comes collect!

I find however if every time you die you say a quick poem to Soul Mother or scream out "Ahoy my pale, sexy morbid one, I'm back!"  She tends to roll high.  You wouldn't believe how many 99s Farros gets, heheh.  I imagine only a skald could have the deathly, doomish voice that could possibly woo her.  Athus had it all wrong, why fight her?  That'll just make her more bitter and vengeful.  Let the lady of utter death feel that she's wanted, remind her that she's pretty, and don't forget to send flowers on her deathday. Everybody's always cursing her name when loved ones die, tricking her with phylacteries, trying to kill her... but does anyone ever really think about HER feelings?  

[EdTheKet]

Everybody's always cursing her name when loved ones die, tricking her with phylacteries, trying to kill her... but does anyone ever really think about HER feelings?

Yes, two people to be exact

[Acacea]

Not so! *raises her character's hand as well* She has been on a personal quest about the soul mother for a couple decades now...

[lonnarin]

Besides, shouldn't we be cursing the Harvester instead?  He's like the collections agency, the taxman involved.  As I understand it the Soul *Mother* is the very reason babies have life in them to begin with.  After all the faithful souls are recruited by their respective gods, the rest of the pagans and heretics have to travel that long thread, avoid getting kidnapped by demons on the way and hopefully those that reach the end of the thread-trail are recycled into a new blank slate.  New body, new strands, the only down part is you forget all those "levels" fromy our past life, and you can't exactly choose the race, so you might be a goblin this time.

So we are essentially immortal in the sense that this soul power is neither created nor destroyed, but being transferred into 3 basic options 1) dutiful Afterlife with our gods (eternal until they fall, I guess) 2) reborn unaware of our past lives as a newborn baby with a clean slate and all threads intact, or 3) consumed by a demon army and warped into a soldier to hopefully rise in the ranks and become the next Xandrial.  Permadeath is just the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one.

Now undeath, I see that as breaking this natural cycle.  We haven't truly defined that yet, but as I see it, they're like the ones who rather than follow the trail after death or join a god or get reborn or turn into a demon, used their force of will, or were ripped back into it by somebody else's accord via necromancy to "trick the system" so to speak.  Revenants refuse to stay down and move on until their task is done, Liches cheat with phylacteries like offshore bank accounts avoiding the taxman,  ghosts perhaps got VERY lost on the way, or something holds them here, etc. In that sense, powerful necromancer beings sort of starve the life cycle, by using necromancy to stop the recollection portion of the cycle.  This could be why places overrun with necromancy are "blighted".  This overwhealming aura of negative energy disrupts all the standard positive life energies, stunting or killing plant growth, making creatures sickly, etc.

Negative energy vs positive energy seems to indicate the type of frequency of the life energies, and maybe that type of frequency is much like matter/antimatter in science fiction, or positively and negatively charged ends of the magnet.  The lifecycle seems to be based on moving positively charged energies, standard soul enegy.  Necromancy could essentially flip the magnet sides on it, or ionize the soul particle so to speak, so that the souls involved are pushed away from the primary intended direction of the cycle, rather than drawn to it.  Of course dispersing the "magnetic field" of the necromancy via killing the will binding it together works in sending the soul back, as would "repolarizing" it with positive energy, healing an undead to death.  One could conversely solve the mortal problem like telling his wife goodbye or slaying the one who slew him to allow the soul to willingly repolorize himself from negative to positive energy.

Oh man, I should never have read The Physics of Star Trek.  Now I'm taking an engineer's approach to investigating fictional mythos.

[Script Wrecked]

Just for the sake of discussion, that would make the healer NPC more powerful than the Soul Mother.

Not if the NPC healer was the Soul Mother! *que sinister plot music*

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

much like matter/antimatter in science fiction,

Science FICTION?

Antimatteris REAL.

[SteveMaurer]

Let me put in a few comments with my old game RPG designer's hat on.

What we're discussing here is just another variation of the age-old attempt at balancing dramatic tension vs gameworld realism.  In other words, "role playing" vs "power gaming".

So-called "Power Gaming" is the realism side of the equation.    When death is permanent, everyone is a "power gamer", for completely legitimate reasons.   The U.S. military, for example, thinks nothing of spending a million dollars to buy and use a missile rather than risk soldiers in some dramatic mano-a-mano setting as most first person shooters would have you think armed conflict looks like.   Artillery was the main method of killing soldiers in WW2.  This, because to quote Patton, "You're job isn't to die for your country, your job is to make the other poor bastard die for HIS".    It is the objective of every soldier and sailor to "powergame" so as to make every fight completely and totally unfair - boring even (except for the people doing the dying, of course).

But it's very hard to construct a story of personal valor and daring-do from  such cold, impersonal, logic.   PCs walking around with one SS loss from death may act "realistically" for once their lives, but games are supposed to be fun, and this requires some forgiveness of risk-taking.

The question is how to do this and still keep the dramatic tension, which is what makes games fun.    Dramatic tension usually has one or more of the following elements:[LIST=1]

• A significant penalty for performing unsafe actions
• A feeling of constant risk, never a moment of pure safety
• Varying degrees of risk based on controllable circumstances
• Uncertain methods of mitigating the risk or undoing the penalty
• Proper risk/reward balancing
• Accessibility of risk mitigation
• A time limit
• Potential to create role playing conflict
• Minimizing OOC death issues

Judging by these criteria, the current death system is a mixed bag.  The penalty is severe, but it happens too predictably.  There are varying degrees of risk based on level, but this isn't really controllable.  Mitigation is nearly impossible, and utterly inaccessible to all but the highest powered PCs (no one will do a ECDQ vs the Soul Mother on behalf of a non-Epic PC, and it never until the PC is permed).  There is no time limit, and no real potential for conflict.  Resurrection is overpriced and mostly worthless.

In short, the current death system has many of the elements that would give it dramatic tension.  Better than auto-XP loss system in many ways,  it is still too lax at the beginning, and too severe at the end.  I'd give it a solid "B".  

Still, it is what it is.   Ed has invested too much thought into the cosmology to just abandon it for no reason.    And I completely support that.    I would only suggest that there may be things that could be done, tinkering around the edges, to raise that "B" to a "B+" or an "A-".

Here are a few:[LIST=1]

• Add "retying" a Soul Strand as a quest reward that GMs are allowed to offer - specifically something the non-violent Churches like Aeridin and Az'atta can do.  This isn't something done every day, but I see no reason why if magicians have learned a secret "Soul Mother defense", the Gods themselves should not be able to reknit a Soul Strand for mortals they're particularly happy about (knit one, perl two).
• Make sure quests offering such rewards are not tilted towards the ultra powerful PCs - to the Gods, purity of service to them, would likely be more important than PC power. (Note: this reward need not be advertised either.)
• Add an additional XP "bite" that PCs are subject to, as an entirely different roll on death. (Soul Mother - yum.)   The strength of this bite is dependent on your level and how many Soul Strands you have left (i.e. your soul is chewed on a percentage basis, and very few strands makes your soul very easy to chew).
• Make it so that XP of this bite can be healed (the XP returned) by a Raise Dead (say, 100,000 XP) or Resurrection (maybe 200,000 XP) spell if cast within a specific time limit (tick tick tick - your soul is bleeding - tick tick tick), so long as the PC has not respawned.  Maybe make it so that closer the alignment, the more the XP returned is (with full XP restoration being possible by being Resurrected by the cleric of your own God).
  
• Add potential alignment alteration penalties for clerics/paladins for resurrecting people of significantly different alignments, to make this not something that happens automatically.
• Give scrolls of Resurrection/Raise Dead alignments.  "Raise Dead - Good", "Raise Dead - Neutral", etc.
• Let logged-in GMs check out a SS-loss undo wand for any of their registered quests.  Misclicks or server overloads on popular quests seem to simply happen too often to keep bothering the DB team with.

Steve Maurer

[jrizz]

Good stuff Steve! I hope it can be considered holistically and not picked at around the edges.

riz

[Dorganath]

Interesting analysis.  

And to address your points...

Here are a few:[LIST=1]

• Add "retying" a Soul Strand as a quest reward that GMs are allowed to offer - specifically something the non-violent Churches like Aeridin and Az'atta can do.  This isn't something done every day, but I see no reason why if magicians have learned a secret "Soul Mother defense", the Gods themselves should not be able to reknit a Soul Strand for mortals they're particularly happy about (knit one, perl two).
• Make sure quests offering such rewards are not tilted towards the ultra powerful PCs - to the Gods, purity of service to them, would likely be more important than PC power. (Note: this reward need not be advertised either.)
• Add an additional XP "bite" that PCs are subject to, as an entirely different roll on death. (Soul Mother - yum.)   The strength of this bite is dependent on your level and how many Soul Strands you have left (i.e. your soul is chewed on a percentage basis, and very few strands makes your soul very easy to chew).
• Make it so that XP of this bite can be healed (the XP returned) by a Raise Dead (say, 100,000 XP) or Resurrection (maybe 200,000 XP) spell if cast within a specific time limit (tick tick tick - your soul is bleeding - tick tick tick), so long as the PC has not respawned.  Maybe make it so that closer the alignment, the more the XP returned is (with full XP restoration being possible by being Resurrected by the cleric of your own God).
  
• Add potential alignment alteration penalties for clerics/paladins for resurrecting people of significantly different alignments, to make this not something that happens automatically.
• Give scrolls of Resurrection/Raise Dead alignments.  "Raise Dead - Good", "Raise Dead - Neutral", etc.
• Let logged-in GMs check out a SS-loss undo wand for any of their registered quests.  Misclicks or server overloads on popular quests seem to simply happen too often to keep bothering the DB team with.

Steve Maurer

1. There's actually another sort of system in mind for this, and at one point I was going to code it up, but I ran out of time and the balance of the whole thing became too much for the time.  The weighting of the current system of returning from perming or rather...erasing the loss of the last Soul Strand is sort of a half-way implementation of this concept, one based firmly within the (yes, somewhat secret) lore regarding the Soul Mother, death, Soul Strands and the whole mess.  There is a more complete and fully in-game method of reattaching Soul Strands planned for the MMO, but at this time, it is not fully designed and as such I'll not give it any more comment except to say it'll be different.

The concept regarding clergy of Az'atta or Aeridin touches on something that bleeds into #2, so...

2. From a lore perspective, and even looking into the old lore (i.e. the v2 Handbook that's largely out-of-date now), there's all sorts of speculation about the Soul Mother and the gods.  Some say there's a bargain between them, some say the gods fear the Soul Mother but no one knows why. These are just two possible reasons of potentially many for why the gods do not directly intervene in such matters.  They are allowed to claim souls once dead, but they do not typically override this very basic and fundamental "law" of life and death. Perhaps they are unable.  Perhaps they are prevented due to some binding contract.  Who knows? It's a good, if potentially exclusive, thought, but consider that there may be actual good reasons unknown to mortals as to why the gods to not prolong life in this way.

3. It used to be more heavy on the XP penalty several years ago. I myself "bounced" off of level 10 more times than I care to admit, personally.  Other long-time players have similar stories of how much XP they lost in a single day due to the death system's penalties.  They were very harsh.  Now, perhaps there is some other balance between "then" and "now" but working out that balance and then determining if it's the right one takes time, testing and a very patient player base.  The last doesn't concern me because most of our players are pretty good about such things. Regardless of whether we tweak our current penalty-on-death system or not, the whole thing is being re-done for the MMO anyway, as we don't really have XP in the way that NWN does.

4. Hmm...not quite sure what reasoning behind that is.  As it stands now, both in lore and in mechanics, the hardship of death is in the dying, not the return to life.  If you look at our documentation Raise Dead and Resurrection already reduce the penalties when returning to life over simple respawning, making the reflection time and the attribute penalties related to returning to life.

5. As far as our deities are concerned, it is less about what alignment a person is but rather the relationship between the deity of the raised versus that of the raiser. We have plenty of clerics who refuse to raise followers of unfriendly or enemy deities.  It hits them with an XP penalty.  I'm sure you've ready this already, but the death system information outlines all this.  There's another point too, but it bleeds into #6...

6. Isn't this sort of like alignment metagaming?  Doesn't it sort of increase the burden on a healer?  Consider a LN priest of Rofirein.  Would he really care if someone was fallen and of Lawful Evil alignment? First off, he wouldn't even know the deceased was LE. He would care if the fallen was a devout of Corath or Baraeon Ca'Duz, however, and likely not wish to raise that particular person.  Same would be if the fallen was CN.  The alignment is of lesser importance.  In another example, a priest of Az'atta would raise pretty much anyone regardless of alignment or religious affiliation, because in such an act is a chance to redeem that person.

In another example, how many people adventure in mixed alignment groups?  Plenty, but let's stick with a group of Good and Neutral characters.  It's pretty common for characters over a certain level to start carrying around Raise Dead scrolls in case there's no cleric or if the cleric ends up dead. Having alignment-specific Raise Dead scrolls means people have to carry twice as many scrolls to cover the possibilities.

7. As the guy who usually handles the Soul Strand returns, I can honestly say that when I wait and do them in batches, each one takes me maybe 15 seconds. On another administrative note, there have been times where a GM needs time to consider the circumstances of the event and resulting loss before being able to state confidently one way or the other. Lastly, on a somewhat cynical note, I'd much rather spend a few seconds reattaching Soul Strands than hours of wasted time answering accusations of favoritism against a GM and allegations of him/her using such a tool to freely refund Soul Strands to his/her friends.

[SteveMaurer]

Interesting analysis.

Thank you.

First off, if there is some secret bargain between the Gods and the Soul Mother, and this is important to the world, then nothing should trump that.    Speaking only for myself, however, not only have I learned not to try to "read between the lines" in reading LORE, I don't even try to merely "read the lines" themselves!  The stuff changes too fast, and gets too out of date for me to depend on.   So I try to always ask, even if that end up sounding pedantic at times.

The reason why I suggest the potential for XP loss is to make up for my suggestion that Soul Strands can be occasionally regained.   (Lower one danger - raise another.)   But to raise the dramatic tension, I make the XP loss something that isn't necessarily permanent, and the timer just raises the pressure, which makes players sweat.

Actually, thinking about it further, I'm still missing some dramatic elements, especially around the person who died.   Hmmm.....  maybe if the Death Void wasn't actually a void, but some mysterious ghostly ruins filled with danger.  You might find what you lost there - pieces of yourself - or lose more.... maybe working the soul stone into it, if you find your way to the person trying to resurrect you, you don't lose the XP.

Ahh...  not going to happen.

I completely agree about the alignment scrolls.  I merely suggested the Good/Neutral/Evil resurrection spells as a compromise for what I'd really want - deity specific Raise Dead/Resurrects.   But NwN doesn't have room for 26 new items (52 if you included both flavors).