Would you play a game with only 1 life (ie. New Cap City)

[Haltherrion]

I think MMOs make death far too easy and some RPGs make it too easy as well. My group has often (although not lately) played with house rules that prevent resurrects or at least make it very, very hard. But never being able to get back on the server? that seems a little dorky to me. I could see wanting to move the value of death back several pegs but that is over kill. I would not invest any time in such a game.

There seem to be many, friendly alternatives. For one, you day, you roll a new character as many groups require. Or in MMO terms, you select a "death sensistivity" and you get perks. You accept a character that is gone if it ever dies, you get better stats or other starting perks or xp advancement or whatever. You want to survive a few deaths, you come you get lesser perks. You want no real death penalty a la WoW and you have the slowest XP advancement.

 

[vic20]

I think this would be a cool mechanic for a convention event, but I wouldn't ever run a game where unlucky dice could take one of my gaming friends out of the picture "for good". Life's way too short.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Life's way too short.

Given the subject matter of the thread, that's BRILLIANT!

 

[Sorrowdusk]

No. Why would I throw a friend out just because his character died? But I would like a game where every time your pc died you started another at level one.

Horrible for party balance. You have two lvl 12's go down in a near TPK, they head to town and whats the best they can find? Two lvl 1's that used to be farmers.

The lvl 1's cant help the 12's in a fight, and going by the XP chart in the DMG the lvl 1's probably dont get any XP if the 12's win the fight.

 

[wingsandsword]

I've played in tabletop campaigns that once you were out, that was it, you're gone.

One was a single session of a long-running campaign where the GM announced that, as this was going to be a big key plot session and he wanted to raise the stakes. My PC was killed off in a very arbitrary fashion and left me thinking that the GM was throwing my out of the campaign in a backhanded way.

The other was a game with a huge waiting list to get into, lots of people wanted into this game, so to let lots of people try it, if you died you were out of the game and to the bottom of the waiting list.

In my experience, a rule like that in a tabletop game strongly discourages heroic behavior. players tend to get very fanatical about staying alive when they get thrown out of the campaign if their character dies.

Now, as for using it in an MMORPG, in the very beginning in Star Wars Galaxies they treated Force Sensitive characters (once you unlocked being able to have one) like that. To account for latency and such you had a small number of resurrections ever, but your character could easily permanently die. The only consolation you ccould get was if you became a Jedi Master before you permanently died you could reappear as a blue glowing force ghost. This entire system for Force-using characters was one of the first things changed after the game released, however (not a popular idea with the players).