Death on Sundren

[Dune]

Well if you really want to bitch about that we could have just made it perma-death.

Now that would be much better
Also, please try not to do that with the subdual thing -_-

[Peridan]

*raises hands in surrender* Wasn't bitching I swear, I just wanted to express a viewpoint, promise. Please don't cowkill me! =(

[Dark presence]

As far as I see it, it is worse than permadeath currently, because there is absolutely no way to afford the cost of raising the dead without mindless hours and hours of grinding low level areas, and clerics are powerless to change it. Can you afford the 20000 gold for a temple raise? I sure as hell can't and likely never will be able to....without dull, monotonous grinding, and probably solo grinding in low level areas since there is little choice or option. The 13000 and 10000 or so for PC cleric raising/resing is little better, and no more affordable.

I played a new level 3 and ran around the Shaharan Hills. Half the people I met weren't interested in partying. So after a short while in a small party, I managed to solo well enough too, at least until a high level went through and spawned the high level spawns without killing anything, at which point my character promptly died and had to use a signus by virtue of being totally overwhelmed and unable to even run straight to the area transition.

Party up! Sure, great, I did that with Serena, and what happens? The half orc gets confused and kills the cleric in one hit in an area where no one was getting XP anyways.

So, I have to say, encounters and the XP system in general are not designed towards this death system. They are all a real pain in the ass to deal with past the mossclaws, party or not, because of the low magic on the server. There are very few parties I have been in that have not had someone die. Will anyone bother with the Veritas area anymore? The necropolis is bad enough, and its very very rare I've gone through that place without someone dying. Those hungry zombie hordes are guaranteed to kill someone, it happens every single time I see them spawned.

People WILL die. It is totally unavoidable, whether you party up, solo, whatever. What I detest about this is that such death is totally meaningless. Sure its realistic, but who wants their character, they put months of work into, disappearing just because some confused half orc hit them with a critical hit, or they got trapped by a zombie horde spawned by someone running around invisibly?

And again, the economy can't handle this. So they will be added to loot drops and such. Well considering how rare it is to get anything worth anything out of loot drops, I'm not holding my breath. I also can't understand why the prices are so ridiculously high. Its way beyond PNP costs for something that happens a hell of a lot more than in PNP, yet without the gold influx to handle it. I also have no idea why the temple costs 50% more than PC raising.


So I'm griping. I don't believe this system is aimed at me for how I play my characters. I just sit around the campfire most of the time anyways, and always try to party up when I go out adventuring. Now its not really an option to do otherwise. Even when the things get put into the loot tables, I don't see it changing the desire to adventure unless they drop so commonly that it makes it all moot. I avoided NWN1 HCR servers like the plague exactly for this kind of thing. Death is all too common here and in NWN in general, with far too small of a reward (in terms of gold and especially XP) for survival to make it so ridiculously harsh.

Sure, DMs can mitigate this with signus items or simply intervention, but considering how rare I get XP from DMs for normal RP, I won't exactly hold my breath for signus items.

[Saulus]

As far as I see it, it is worse than permadeath currently,

I'm not even going to address the rest of the post.

So by your statement, dying and never being able to play that character again is worse than the ability to be resurrected, brought to a temple, or brought back to life using a signus.

You're saying that if you died and your character was done that you would be more content? If you want I can just delete your character if that's how you feel.

Your words, not mine.

I also read a lot of assumptions people make about the economy and a lot of other things when you don't see the log data that we do, and have pretty much next to no clue about how half the systems are working with each other.

Alas I guess everyone is an expert.

[Vekin]

I think Dark Presence makes some very vaild points.

Maybe the Shaharan Hills will once again be the place to go as high level players farm it for gold and items to fund their diamonds!

[Saulus]

I'm a little tired reading everyone whining in this thread and trying to be an "expert" on the situation.

Subsequent threads on this subject will be locked.

As a closing note there was an original feature in these death changes we ommitted that I already previously decided will be introduced after all. Players under level 9 (as in, starting level 9+ this will no longer occur) that are in a party while in a dungeon will only be able to be knocked unconscious (unless hit with a death spell), just as per the campaign they will get up after a short period of intermission solong as the party survives.

This will not function in towns, only dungeons. This means once you hit the level 9 barrier things will get more difficult. It's assumed by the time you reach the higher levels like 9 you will be quite familiar with Sundren's mechanics, it's difficultly level, and not to mention be well known enough and wealthy enough to understand and live with the consequences of death. You should also have a few signuses saved up by this point.

So really at this point the only valid complaint that can be made is that it's not easy enough... Well I'm sorry to disappoint some but Sundren is engineered to provide some challenges. It's not hardcore, it's not easy. It's a line inbetween, and this obviously won't appeal to everyone, as with the case with every game and playstyle out there. We've taken plenty of user feedback before to put a number of things between our intentions and what our community wants, and this is one of those situations where there will be a degree of give, but don't expect this system to just suddenly disappear.

Believe it or not we actually see a lot more that happens than players do, we have to observe our changes firsthand before we make decisions, there's a million half-baked suggestions along with some "okay" ones that we get, but after a big change like this there will always be some minor growing pains until we get it where we want it. Again "Sorry" for putting you through standard beta practises, I know how unexpected things like this in a BETA can be.

Remember the keyword: beta, beta, beta. Good. You've said it several times.

If you can't solo? Tough. If you can't find a party? That's unfortunate, I do understand some players play on timezones where we don't have a lot of players... This is always a concern for us as we don't intentionally alienate players faced with these circumstances, however we do have other things like quests and RP XP that will alleviate the fact that you can't solo dungeons. It's not going to happen overnight but there will always be other options in Sundren.

I also find it interesting that people seem to think they know what other players are going to do. High levels are going to start farming low level areas.... so why is everyone so worried about this? That's for us to worry about, that's a DM problem if it even occurs. It's not something for you to concern yourself with.