alessiodoomboy
Radio Bob Approved
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2022
- Messages
- 370
- Thread Author
- #1
From a Design perspective, the 2% risk upon going down is meant to make people more considerate and to play less aggressively moving forwards into TLM. By making downs more punishing, it reasonably follows that less people will go down during combat as they have more to lose on the character and therefore try harder to avoid it. There's one main issue with this:
Going down is rarely an issue of players moving aggressively
There are two common ways people generally go down. The GM's hand oftentimes intervenes, throwing threats the player's way in the form of NPCs, artillery, or event characters. Snipers have been a fairly common sight, and there was the time the entire retinue of the White Dove was hit by directly by a shell whilst scheming as @RedHotGinger and @Kappatalist wil remember. Recently, a sniper downed around 5 people, all of whom retreated to the bunker for injury RP. When you consider that each of those 5 people had a 2% chance of being permanently killed from the interaction, there was a roughly 9.6% chance that one of those characters would be gone right now.
The issue here is that the player's knowledge of a situation is nearly always not as good as a GM's. The GM will often have their own ways devised that a player can overcome a situation that might not even have any risk, or a way that the player can beat the scenario freely. However, the player is unaware of the method most of the time. It is foolish to think you can predict what your players will do in a roleplay setting. However, unlike in something like D&D, where unpredictability often leads a small party of 6 to go down some crazy, untrodden path that is improvised in the moment, the structure of a GMod roleplay is more limited. What is more likely to happen, is that the players are punished in the form of a down / general injury and made to try again and move on, especially using an S2K ruleset rather than S2RP.
This is normal, and will be common in any roleplay that puts it's characters in danger. In a server with 20~ people and a fixed map that needs propping before it can be explored and a limited range of where players can be, the D&D improv style doesn't work, an dplayers need to be kept on track. However, the 2% PK chance means that this interaction will always be potentially lethal, even when the GM doesn't intend it to be. The player here, as aforementioned, can't reasonably be expected to avoid the down without being unreasonably careful and knowledgeable to how the GM has set up the situation, and so is made to eat this chance without being able to fairly prevent it.
Another way people generally go down is in combat, normally with Overwatch. The issue here is the stat mismatch. Combat has been balanced around your character not "dying" unless their entire support structure is wiped. Overwatch have around 150 HP and 100 armour last I checked, whereas the most a player can achieve is around 100 health and 75 armour (though most rebels can expect to get 100 health and 50 armour). Additionally, the Pulse rifle does far more damage than a normal assault rifle.
In a 1v1 interaction, the rebel always loses, because the TTK in Willard is not high enough that the rebel can overcome this divide unless they specifically get the drop on the Combine player. Ideally, two rebels are needed to gun down any Overwatch soldier peaking the corner. This means in combat, it's expected for the rebels to go down quite frequently. Essentially, you have to "trade" with the Overwatch, giving away one life for another with the knowledge that there are far less Overwatch than the rebels. Two rebels peak out, Overwatch down 1, the second rebel downs the Overwatch. It's obviously not so linear, and this doesn't account for positioning and grenades, etc etc. But the general point is there. One cannot reasonably avoid being downed in combat unless they specifically go in with an advantage.
This works (kinda. It's not very well designed to begin with just because of how unfun it makes fighting Overwatch) because the rebels that go down don't actually die. They can be picked up later and so aren't punished too harshly for the trade. OTA were given such ridiculously high stats in the first place because they were so often outnumbered in combat, and could not have any impact without a total wipe, since whoever they'd down would be revived a few seconds later. The balance is designed around downs being inconsequential. However with a 2% chance to get PK'd, this all becomes unreasonable. It is bad design.
In conclusion for this segment, essentially the 2% chance of death does not achieve it's goals of minimising aggressive behaviour and stopping downs, as well as fairly sorting out which characters should progress and which should die, namely because aggressive behaviour is not the cause of most downs, and most downs in the game are not handed out in a fair way.
From a roleplay perspective this is worse. The 2% chance is meant to solve the "injury" problem. It is admittedly immersion breaking to have your character shot several times and come out fine over and over, healing from their injuries in hours. However, as I just went over, the system does not minimise downs and therefore it doesn't minimise these problems.
It also means that the injuries taken will eventually get repetitive, especially with how specific the text often is. It takes away your agency to be creative with the injuries and means that multiple people are likely to come out with the same injury, which can be a bit silly.
Death is also not additive. Presumably, the goal of TLM is meant to give sastisfactory endings to the final characters in Willard V2, some of whom might be incredibly old. An end will never be sastisfactory on the knowledge it was caused by RNG, even if you entertain the hypothetical that every down is caused fairly. You will essentially always remember the character as, "if only I didn't roll poorly, I would've lived", and this thought will come up whenever you reflect on the character, and for some, whenever you reflect on Willard RP as a whole.
If players must really be filtered from the end (to which, I don't really see a point to begin with), you could simply give the players choices. The most sastisfactory endings will be the ones the players have agency over, so giving them OOC knowledge that a side event will be an impact suicide run, or even giving them oppurunities to abandon ship and live happily in the forest for the rest of their characters lives will be more impactful. Essentially, let players PK themselves. Obviously, less will die because of this, and in order to do this effectively you will have to weight your deaths towards the end of the event, because players will not enjoy PKing themselves knowing they're missing a lot, but I've found this an effective method that people have volunteered for in many of my events.
Going down is rarely an issue of players moving aggressively
There are two common ways people generally go down. The GM's hand oftentimes intervenes, throwing threats the player's way in the form of NPCs, artillery, or event characters. Snipers have been a fairly common sight, and there was the time the entire retinue of the White Dove was hit by directly by a shell whilst scheming as @RedHotGinger and @Kappatalist wil remember. Recently, a sniper downed around 5 people, all of whom retreated to the bunker for injury RP. When you consider that each of those 5 people had a 2% chance of being permanently killed from the interaction, there was a roughly 9.6% chance that one of those characters would be gone right now.
The issue here is that the player's knowledge of a situation is nearly always not as good as a GM's. The GM will often have their own ways devised that a player can overcome a situation that might not even have any risk, or a way that the player can beat the scenario freely. However, the player is unaware of the method most of the time. It is foolish to think you can predict what your players will do in a roleplay setting. However, unlike in something like D&D, where unpredictability often leads a small party of 6 to go down some crazy, untrodden path that is improvised in the moment, the structure of a GMod roleplay is more limited. What is more likely to happen, is that the players are punished in the form of a down / general injury and made to try again and move on, especially using an S2K ruleset rather than S2RP.
This is normal, and will be common in any roleplay that puts it's characters in danger. In a server with 20~ people and a fixed map that needs propping before it can be explored and a limited range of where players can be, the D&D improv style doesn't work, an dplayers need to be kept on track. However, the 2% PK chance means that this interaction will always be potentially lethal, even when the GM doesn't intend it to be. The player here, as aforementioned, can't reasonably be expected to avoid the down without being unreasonably careful and knowledgeable to how the GM has set up the situation, and so is made to eat this chance without being able to fairly prevent it.
Another way people generally go down is in combat, normally with Overwatch. The issue here is the stat mismatch. Combat has been balanced around your character not "dying" unless their entire support structure is wiped. Overwatch have around 150 HP and 100 armour last I checked, whereas the most a player can achieve is around 100 health and 75 armour (though most rebels can expect to get 100 health and 50 armour). Additionally, the Pulse rifle does far more damage than a normal assault rifle.
In a 1v1 interaction, the rebel always loses, because the TTK in Willard is not high enough that the rebel can overcome this divide unless they specifically get the drop on the Combine player. Ideally, two rebels are needed to gun down any Overwatch soldier peaking the corner. This means in combat, it's expected for the rebels to go down quite frequently. Essentially, you have to "trade" with the Overwatch, giving away one life for another with the knowledge that there are far less Overwatch than the rebels. Two rebels peak out, Overwatch down 1, the second rebel downs the Overwatch. It's obviously not so linear, and this doesn't account for positioning and grenades, etc etc. But the general point is there. One cannot reasonably avoid being downed in combat unless they specifically go in with an advantage.
This works (kinda. It's not very well designed to begin with just because of how unfun it makes fighting Overwatch) because the rebels that go down don't actually die. They can be picked up later and so aren't punished too harshly for the trade. OTA were given such ridiculously high stats in the first place because they were so often outnumbered in combat, and could not have any impact without a total wipe, since whoever they'd down would be revived a few seconds later. The balance is designed around downs being inconsequential. However with a 2% chance to get PK'd, this all becomes unreasonable. It is bad design.
In conclusion for this segment, essentially the 2% chance of death does not achieve it's goals of minimising aggressive behaviour and stopping downs, as well as fairly sorting out which characters should progress and which should die, namely because aggressive behaviour is not the cause of most downs, and most downs in the game are not handed out in a fair way.
From a roleplay perspective this is worse. The 2% chance is meant to solve the "injury" problem. It is admittedly immersion breaking to have your character shot several times and come out fine over and over, healing from their injuries in hours. However, as I just went over, the system does not minimise downs and therefore it doesn't minimise these problems.
It also means that the injuries taken will eventually get repetitive, especially with how specific the text often is. It takes away your agency to be creative with the injuries and means that multiple people are likely to come out with the same injury, which can be a bit silly.
Death is also not additive. Presumably, the goal of TLM is meant to give sastisfactory endings to the final characters in Willard V2, some of whom might be incredibly old. An end will never be sastisfactory on the knowledge it was caused by RNG, even if you entertain the hypothetical that every down is caused fairly. You will essentially always remember the character as, "if only I didn't roll poorly, I would've lived", and this thought will come up whenever you reflect on the character, and for some, whenever you reflect on Willard RP as a whole.
If players must really be filtered from the end (to which, I don't really see a point to begin with), you could simply give the players choices. The most sastisfactory endings will be the ones the players have agency over, so giving them OOC knowledge that a side event will be an impact suicide run, or even giving them oppurunities to abandon ship and live happily in the forest for the rest of their characters lives will be more impactful. Essentially, let players PK themselves. Obviously, less will die because of this, and in order to do this effectively you will have to weight your deaths towards the end of the event, because players will not enjoy PKing themselves knowing they're missing a lot, but I've found this an effective method that people have volunteered for in many of my events.
