How to deal with permadeath!

[Nofew]

After explaining a sane system for sleep, I now present how to deal with permadeath! Echo! Echo, echo..

 

 

Er, right. Anyway! I'm totally making this up as I go. So, permadeath! The biggest fear of all multiplayer games! There's so many things that it can mess up that there are a number of people who simply refuse to play multiplayer games that implement this, especially if the games run longer than an hour.

 

We all know how long Don't Starve runs!

 

 

So, how do you keep players from becoming wildly bored when they're six feet under? There's plenty of ways, but one of the most important points is to make sure that the game is still the Don't Starve we all know and love. In other words, death needs to hurt. Death is what normally ends the game. Forever. Obviously multiplayer games need a way to end like single-player games, so the kind of changes need to keep things sane. Well, as sane as Don't Starve usually is, anyway.

 

 

First, we need to identify how exactly death, and the fear of death, affects gameplay in single-player.

 

1. The game ends. Forever.
2. Your world is deleted. Forever.
3. Aside from cheating, there is no hope of going back and trying again. Forever.

​

Now, we need to identify what'll tick the average player off so much that they'll never want to play multiplayer again.

 

1. One player's interaction is removed.
2. Although the entire world does not end, one player can no longer see what's going on and how other players are using their now-liberated resources and base.
3. One player will never get answers to questions like "how did this person survive through Winter so easily while I starved?"
4. Often, for the remaining players, the game is still over now that one of their friends can't play with them anymore.

 

So, what needs to happen is the first section still has to remain in effect as much as possible, while the second needs to stay out as much as possible. These things sounds mutually exclusive, but there's actually more wiggle room than there first appears to be!

 

Before I go on, I feel that I must stress how the above points MUST be taken into account for all considerations! If not, there will be a constant flood of ideas that don't work well together because they're all tugging the game in different directions. I believe the above seven points to be the core of making permadeath scary enough for players to take it into strong consideration, while keeping games where someone dies still interesting for all players.

 

 

 

So, here's how I imagine a game of Don't Starve with a sane version of permadeath implemented; it's long, but I feel that I need to show why this is exciting rather than just explaining it!

 

 

Let's say it's day 25. There is a group of three friends playing; Alice, Bob and Chuck. They're all on the same team, but none of them have ever made it to Winter before. Multiplayer didn't make the game any easier; resources were not increased, thus everyone had to keep splitting up and foraging on their own to find food while meeting back at the Fire Pit every night to occasionally trade excess resources to their friends. As a result of this, they were always alone whenever they ran into a fight.

 

Chuck has been running down a long dirt road to a forest to find twigs and berries for the past five days. There's a spider den nearby just barely off-screen, but it's only been a level one since he found it. As Winter sets into full stroke, he starts to freeze to death. He can't make it back to camp, so he builds a new Fire Pit and settles in for the night.

 

Unbeknownst to Chuck, the Spider Den grows to level two during the night. A spider wanders over. In the past, Chuck has delt with three spiders without an issue. He smacks it with a spear in hopes of getting silk for a coat. This time though, he gets swarmed with far more spiders than he can handle.

 

The poor guy never stood a chance.

 

There is no announcement the next day saying Chuck died. Nobody is aware of what has happened.

 

Three days pass. On the first day, they assume Chuck is holding his own camp away from base. They know the place he forages at is particularly far. On day two they begin to get a little nervous and decide to look for him starting next Sunrise. Come the third day, both people pack every resource they can and head south towards where they think Chuck might be.

 

Night hits. Both players light a torch and keep looking. Halfway through the night they find Chuck's Fire Pit. Bob dumps four logs into it, and the new light reveals a skeleton on the ground a short distance away, on its knees, crying out into the air in distress with a spear sitting next to it.. And no silk. Rotten luck.

 

Alice constructs a chest, and Bob starts picking Chuck's belongings up. The spiders ate all the meat, but there's a sizable portion of half-rotted berries that can be salvaged. While picking things up, Bob happens to take Chuck's skull. Almost instantly, a ghost spawns!.. Then doesn't attack. Instead, it stands there. Eventually it begins to move around on its own, but it can't speak, nor can it move more than a screenlength from its skull.

 

Chuck, in this form, seems absolutely great at first! He doesn't get hungry, he can't go insane, and he provides help during fights with attacks similar to Abagil's area-of-effect magic. Although Chuck can't speak, Bob has invented a system to communicate with him by asking Chuck questions, to which Chuck replies "yes" by moving closer to Bob and "no" by moving further.

 

Eventually, Bob gets himself into a huge fight with another tier two Spider Den. He's nearly killed since he only has the resources to make a grass suit. Chuck tries to help defend, but finds that he cannot fight as effectively since he has to stay close to Bob. Bob tries to drop the skull so he can run off while Chuck deals with the rest of the spiders, but as soon as he lets go, Chuck disappears!

 

Bob makes a Campfire a safe distance away and waits for the next Sunrise. Afterwords, he picks Chuck's skull back up. Fortunately, Chuck comes back! Pshew..

 

It is at that point that Chuck starts to appear less useful than before. He can't help harvest resources for Bob, and using him in a fight requires Bob to stay in harm's way. Despite this, Bob continues to carry Chuck's skull around in search of a way to help him come back to life.

 

Five days later, all three find themselves in a graveyard. As they pick some stray gold up, Chuck starts glowing faintly. Alice and Bob are confused at first, but Bob gets an idea to read some of the headstones. They eventually find one with Chuck's name written on it. Alice fashions a shovel and hands it to Bob, who then uses it to bury Chuck's skull. A bolt of lightning strikes and Chuck climbs out of the ground, good as new!.. And downright starving, but that's to be expected after not eating for a week.

 

There's a large celebratory (and mandatory) feast! After filling Chuck back up, the three head slightly north.. And right into a swamp. They figure they'll be fine while they look for reeds, but the tentacles prove too much for Alice. Quickly, Bob picks her skull up so she can help fend off the tentacles. It seems like a solid idea considering that Chuck didn't seem to ever take damage.

 

After a few firm hits, Alice changes color. After a few more, she shifts hue again. Fearing the worst, she starts running away. The tentacles can't give chase, obviously, which is a good thing since Alice can barely move, and Bob's moving pretty slowly, too! The team decides to leave the swamp and make a new Fire Pit to recover.

 

After the night, Alice's color shifts back to its injured tone and both players speed back up a little. Suddenly, there's the great roar of the Deerclops! Could there be any worse timing?!

 

Unfortunately, never having been in Winter long enough to hear such a sound, none of the players react accordingly. Before anyone knows what's happening the Deerclops is upon them! None understand how to fight it and Alice is slowing Bob down. Just before Bob can drop Alice's skull, Alice gets the Deerclops' attention. After two hits, she disappears and takes her skull with her. As tragic as it is, the finality of her death causes the Deerclops to fall asleep! Bob and Chuck take the opportunity to run.

 

The whole episode from Chuck dying to the players escaping the Deerclops has taken nearly two weeks. Winter is thawing out, but neither player feels safe; they've lost Alice for real, Bob feels terrible about it happening, and he'll be scarred for life that he somehow managed to destroy Alice's soul..

 

 

On the flipside, Alice is alive!.. Sort of. She's running around in the same world but she can't see herself, and every object appears as a shadow. She's trapped in Maxwell's clutches, unable to communicate, unable to tell who her friends are, and unable to understand quite what's going on.

 

After a few days of watching, Maxwell appears from the ground like he usually does and offers her a deal -- The next time one of her friends goes insane and draws close enough to the shadows, she can kill them and exchange their life for her's. Maxwell's made it clear that she'll come back as a human, not a ghost, and that she won't be bound by any means. He's also told her that he'll send whoever she kills far away to ensure that they don't trade places right back.

 

Maxwell's obviously a sick freak, but Alice takes his words under consideration. She keeps following her friends. Secretly, she'd take that deal. She'd feel bad about it and hopes the opportunity won't present its self, but she'd do it.

 

A few days later, Bob accidentally eats raw monster meat. He had it in his inventory right next to some cooked meat and right-clicked the wrong one. It could happen to anybody, but it's just enough of an opening for Alice! Bob begins to see moving shadows and can vaguely make out a human figure. From Alice's perspective, some contrast begins to form in Bob's shadow.

 

Alice runs up and, since she has no weapons, punches Bob. It does only one damage, but knocks off five sanity. Bob's too confused to fight back at first, giving Alice a few free hits. As Bob's sanity drops lower, a spear appears in Alice's inventory. She begins to attack with that, dropping Bob's health faster as well as his sanity.

 

Before Bob dies, he goes insane a second time. Both players can now see each other; Bob sees Alice of as dark a shadow as any other shadow creature, and Alice sees Bob in full contrast.. But no color. She presses on with her attack as a Batbat spawns in her inventory.

 

Three more hits kills Bob. His inventory drops and a skeleton appears like before, but after a few seconds, lightning hits. The skeleton reforms to Alice, but also lights the surrounding objects on fire!

 

Chuck saw the whole thing. He asks how Alice came back and where Bob is, but she keeps telling him not to worry about it. Chuck's wary and keeps an eye on her, despite her being truly unbound and a totally normal player.

 

A few days later, the cycle starts again -- Bob happens to find Maxwell (or Maxwell finds Bob after four days -- He'll never tell!), and the same deal is offered.

 

 

Near the end of Spring, Bob kills Chuck. They trade places again. A few days later, they happen to find a touchstone. Maxwell appears to Chuck and tells him not to go near the now-active stone, as its energies will destroy his shadow. Chuck heeds the warning at first, but after a few more days, decides that it's better he be completely destroyed than continue the vicious cycle.

 

Chuck runs up to the stone, touches it, and comes back to the Overworld! Bob and Alice aren't aware that Chuck has been resurrected. Luckily, it's daytime; Chuck hasn't been given any special supplies other than some marble and nightmare fuel. He's forced to start anew, without knowing where his friends are.

 

 

A week later, Chuck is doing okay. He's on his own, has a fire pit, chest, and some other things. Far away, however, Alice and Bob are fighting a tier 3 Spider Den together. They thought that they'd be okay since they activated a touchstone. Alice dies. Bob runs, too afraid to try and pick up her stuff while there are so many spiders around. Unbeknownst to him, her skull lays on the ground buried under her belongings, waiting for someone to find it.

 

Bob runs back to the Touchstone to find Alice, but finds Chuck instead, along with the broken Touchstone! His first assumption is that Chuck killed Alice after she was resurrected and low on sanity. Chuck tries to explain, but Bob's sick of the killing cycle. He attacks Chuck, eventually ending up dead himself since he's still wounded from the spiders.

 

Chuck, at this point, is now being hunted by two shadows that used to be his friends. He knows it. He's determined not to go insane. He musn't go insane, or his "friends" will murder him.

 

Spring rain hits. A very soggy Chuck finds himself alone in a forest. There's a lot of trees, but the rain's coming down hard. Eventually he starts to see the tell-tail signs of insanity coming on. He starts picking flowers, but night comes fast. He can't find enough flowers through the light of his torch. With such a small light radius, Chuck can't see their attacks coming.

 

He barely survives to morning, and the attack is still going strong. Bob is making most of the attacks, but he's also taking the most damage. By pure luck, Chuck happens to hit Bob with a spear just enough to cause him to break apart. Bob reforms in another part of the world, far, far away, next to a Lureplant. He's still a shadow, but he's definitely out of the fight.

 

Alice makes the killing blow and swaps places. In Chuck's panic, he's made his way far into a desert. Alice doesn't have any supplies and it's close to summer, so heat's already an issue. She's deep inside and decides to head further in, figuring that she'll find the other end faster than she'd be able to turn around and run back.

 

Unfortunately, poor Alice runs right into a den of wolves. She's killed fast. Having taken all three of their shadows "naturally", Maxwell tells the trio that their game is finally over. Their fate is.. Rather uncertain.

 

 

And then the Main Menu music starts playing.

 

 

 

 

So! I think this solves all the issues of permadeath becoming "boring" and how to balance it. Let me recap and clarify a few things:

 

• Permadeath is actually permanent. While dead players can "switch" places with the living, they cannot become "fully alive" without using a Touchstone.
• Players who are dead still have something to do no matter "how dead" they are.
• Players who are ghosts can help their friends to an extent. It's not enough to unbalance the game (I imagine that they're slightly weaker than Abagail, but not so weak that the game suddenly becomes impossible if there are more dangers than usual), but it's enough to make the ghosts feel like they have some use.
• Players who are dead-dead start an entirely new game by first having to seek out Maxwell (Or simply waiting a few days for Maxwell to find them), and then being given the opportunity to kill a living player to trade places with them. Dead-dead players can attack living players by punching and causing them to go insane more quickly once their sanity drops below a certain threshold.
• If a player already knows they can attack living, insane players, they can skip finding Maxwell.
• If a living player is skilled enough to play the game without going insane, they won't have to worry as much about being killed by their "friends". The threshold for being attacked by slain players is far higher than that for Terrorbeaks. I imagine it to be somewhere around 80-85% of total sanity for dead-dead players to punch, and somehwere between 50-60% gives them a spear.
• The game only ends when all players have died of natural deaths.
• Touchstones and such still operate in the same vein like they did before.
• Cloak-and-dagger becomes a big thing since dead-dead players can "steal" (in a sense) activated Touchstones. It also makes it feel like Maxwell plays a bigger part in the game. At first this looks like a bug, but it's really a feature as long as it's done in a fun way!

 

The end result of this system is real, legit, permadeath in the form of total playercount steadily decreasing, while all players, even dead ones, always have something to do!

 

 

Now, think about this system hard for a minute. Did you notice that, at no point do players ever get kicked? The game ends, for all players, at the same time! Nobody is forced to leave and stop playing sooner than the rest. Everyone is always part of the game until the very end, at which point it's over for all players at the same time! This completely eliminates the group of negatives to permadeaths!

 

At the same time, death is still really scary -- As soon as the first death occurs, the entire game changes. That creates far more fear for the first death. Later deaths are still terrifying in that a player's progress will be interrupted and, after taking the typical 4-14 days to swap places, the entire world may feel different due to all the changes other players have made around your previous base.

 

 

This definitely changes the multiplayer experience and makes it feel quite different from a single-player game, but it's definitely still Don't Starve. I want to avoid this feeling like a "gimmick", and I feel that this approach does that. Everything feels almost fully balanced, too; someone has to carry dead players' skulls for their ghosts to appear, and their use is limited anyway since they only have low damage-per-second output over an area-of-effect. This makes them virtually useless against bosses, and as a result, players will not be as encouraged to kill everyone just to enslave their spirits and take over the world.

 

 

Some other things to consider..

 

• In the event of a "malevolent" player who hoards everyone's skulls, there needs to be a way for ghosts to kill themselves regardless of their state. Maybe skulls should be an expirable item that looses freshness while not being held in someone's inventory and cannot be put into chests and such, but stops loosing freshness (or maybe even regains it!) when held by a player. In addition, if ghosts venture too far from their skull, they should take damage. This means that, regardless of where the skull is held, the ghost will eventually die and take on a shadow form at some point.
• Ghosts should maybe get healed by making kills rather than having natural regeneration. That way, there's more of a chance for them to die or to kill the player they're with.
• Perhaps the ghost's health can be linked to and indicated by the skull's freshness.
• The skulls exist as a way to bring players back without using a Touchstone or other vastly non-renewable resources. Gravestones are far more common, and I figure that there'll be five or six with a Ghost's name upon a player's death to make finding one easier. This is the main point of a Skull -- Fighting as a Ghost is just a way to keep the dead player entertained while the living ones find their headstone.
• Maxwell should always be in the same place. This provides a place for dead-dead players to spawn if there aren't any Lureplants.
• Dead-dead players should not be able to fight each other! It's important that the goal of a dead-dead player is as simple and straight forward as the main game. The main game's goal is "Don't Starve". Dead-dead's goal should be "Kill your friends". If this is changed, it makes it feel like being dead-dead is another level to the game; it's not. It's the same game with different goals, and it ruins the ability to ensure that every player in every game ends the game at the same time, regardless of the circumstances.
• Seriously, no dead-dead fighting.
• Seriously.

 

Finally, to make things a little more interesting, I've tossed the idea around of having Ghost players get other less-circumstantial objectives. (Note: The more I type, the more I realize that this is how it should be. I realllllllly don't feel like going back and rewriting half my post, though, so there. <.<) Ghosts might have natural health loss and as a result require constant kills to sustain themselves. The final blow does not need to be delivered by the Ghost; it simply has to happen somewhere within view for it to replenish health, similar to the way summoning Abagail works. Dead-dead players don't need as much of an obvious "motivator" since there's already one present: Find their friends, then punch them until they go insane and start fighting. If the Overworld player wins, the Dead-dead player is just teleported to a random distant location and allowed to try again, perhaps with a spear to start off with right away this time. If they win, they swap places.

 

The natural health drain on Ghosts will probably need some balancing, but I think a good number to start with is around twice as fast as a typical hunger drain. It should be pressing enough that a Ghost'll need almost-daily kills, but if it's full enough it can go a day without killing anything. I believe this is enough to keep the Skull-holding player moving to try and find their headstone rather than taking their time and possibly boring the dead player to death. ...Er, excuse the pun.

 

To be extra-clear, it's important that Ghost players spend as little time in their Ghostly form as reasonably possible, and that that time should be extremely stressful due to the health drain. There's not a whole lot to do so there needs to be a way to make it unboring, and if the players are left as Ghosts too long, the Skulls become an easy-to-abuse drop-in replacement for Touchstones. The end result should appear that Skulls provide an easy means of resurrection, but the reality is that it'll happen about as rarely as finding a Touchstone in the first place. Ideally, the number of graves with a player's name on them should equal to the total amount of Touchstones in the world.

 

 

So, longpost is long! I think it explains in detail exactly why permadeath should be implemented in this manner. Like my previous post about Sleep, almost every mechanic is already implemented somehow in the game. It should be possible for one person who is familiar with the codebase to implement every mechanic I've mentioned here in about two weeks, thus trying this system out will not jeopardize any deadlines.

[Snob]

First, congrats on completing this post. This is literally the longest post I've seen in the forums.

 

Secondly, I really like your idea. It fits well with the Don't Starve universe, and the stressful/hectic nature of the idea seems wonderfully "masochistic" (It's a forum joke).

 

However, I see two glaring issues [SPOILERS];

• It is possible to free Maxwell through adventure mode. Waxwell meeting his chained self doesn't make any sense. As you may or may not know, Don't Starve's story is extremely important as it ties with the game itself.
• What if the players know what to expect? I mean, if the players know that it's not worth spending hours searching for living players in order to restart the killing cycle, wouldn't they simply log off to another game?

P.S. Chuck is an idiot.

[Nofew]

Thank you! The .gif made me all happy! Seriously, I'm very easily amused by simple stuff. Typing, for instance!
 
Yes, I thought it should be masochistic. It just keeps feeding more pain into its self while giving you constant false hope. I was hoping it came across that way, and I'm glad it did!

 

 

Spoiler below! Ctrl-A to view. (I couldn't figure out how to do the expandy thing. <w<)

So! First spoiler: Good catch! I didn't think about Maxwell meeting Maxwell.. Okay, then how about when a player is playing as Maxwell, the encounter it skipped for that person and Maxwell simply mutters it to himself? Something along those lines, anyway. If you're playing with someone playing as Maxwell, the spoiler's already there anyway.
 
Second bit: I covered that in the dead-dead phase with Maxwell appearing to tell them what to do. He may need to appear sooner (perhaps upon death), but still. Ghosts are another issue. I forgot about those. Lesse..

 

Okay, the best way I can think of is having Maxwell come and say something. If the player is playing as Maxwell, maybe just don't say anything -- It's probably safe to assume that the player is fairly experienced in the game if they're playing Maxwell. While it sounds like a good idea to have Maxwell mumble to himself juuuust before or after dying about waiting for someone to pick his skull up, that may require more reprogramming than rearranging.

 

 

Speaking of players leaving early, maybe the ghost time is still too long. Waiting a full day where one can't interact with anything unless someone happens upon their skull is a bit much to ask.. Oh!

 

Oh oh oh oh oh! OH O_O!!

 

When freshly dropped, the ghost still stays by the skull and is fully spawned. They have a full day where they can wander only a screenlength away their skull. They can glow and make noises and such to try and draw attention to themselves. Glowing and making noise both drain hunger faster, thus allowing players to kill themselves more easily. "Using the battery" (so to speak) to call for help and feeling like they have to call would make it even more stressy.

 

When dropped by a player, despawning happens and they're killed rather instantly. Maybe there should be a five-second delay and a sort of warning that it's happening, maybe not. Regardless, this means that the skull can't be safely dropped. Remember that I suggested not being able to put it in chests -- This essentially "bonds" the skull to whoever picked it up first, and requires minimal changes to code to implement.

 

 

I didn't include this in my earlier post, but I thought about penalizing a player holding a skull if the Ghost dies. I thought that there should be a -5 per second applied to Sanity for five minutes or so, as if the living character feels terrible that they got someone else's spirit killed, but I felt like that opened up too much of a door for dead-dead players to take advantage of. Making it slower would help, perhaps about as big as being waterlogged with stuff equipped, but I don't know how long it should last. Maybe just a full in-game day or until it's "slept off"..

 

 

PS: Nobody in the group made it through Winter before, so maybe they never saw a desert before either.. Besides! You've probably ran into an unfamiliar area when being chased by a giant mob of scary stuff before! D:

[Malan-Tai]

I like this idea, but, as you can bet, it can make friends hate each other. Maybe you can craft meat effigies for your dead friend ?

[Nofew]

Oh, right, those.. I feel like those need to be handled specially or death won't hurt enough.

 

There should be some sort of penalty for being resurrected with one of those. Maybe it should be configurable somehow.. Regardless, the first thing to come to mind is a permanent decrease in health from whoever built the meaty thingy.

 

Oh! Oh oh oh oh OH O_O!! (Yep, again..)

 

Meat thingies only work on full moons! They don't even show up as shadows until full moons. That way they're still viable, but it doesn't completely nuke the whole "constant war with shadows" bit. Bam. There. Touchstones are still insanely valuable, and Overworld players have a way to guarantee that their resurrection can't be stolen unless it's during or just after a full moon. That way, there's a constant cycle of when death's downright scary to when it's "easily fixed", making it possible to cater to both casual and hardcore players in the same game.

 

(Catering to both in the same game was another focus of my original design, by the way. I think I managed to do it fairly well, but I didn't want to say this up front.)

 

 

While remotely on the topic, I feel I should mention that having permadeath as "optional" is not the way to go here. It'll make multiplayer feel waaaaaaaaaay too casual. No hardcore player would trust pick-up groups; they'd only want to play with pre-arranged people. With my system, I think it's perfectly possible for hardcore and softcore players to mix in a randomly-assorted game without issue.

 

 

 

EDIT: Heh! I just ran past a headstone. Webber commented, "Hey that's my name!". Even this is already mostly-implemented!