Idea for permanent death (in any game)

Killed by a grid bug!

Instead of only choosing your characters first name, you choose their surname, then their first name (or use the random option)

What happens is you have two records of your level - current level, and top level gained. Top level gained only goes up when your current level exceeds the top level.

When you die your back to first level! And the first name is gone - that guy is dead! Your 'character' is known by his surname, because your playing a family heritage, not one guy.

However, by paying money and using certain items (that can only be used X number of times per RL day), you can boost your level back up to your top level gained. The smaller the gap between current level and top level, the less you have to pay. Also paying only lasts for awhile, so although it's alot like most traditional mmorpg, it's not always that way and by default, if you don't have the money and items, your back at level one.

Indeed I think ages ago I heard of some game that used a family system along with perma death, but I can't remember it.

Your Runes of Magic character motivations!

Are you on Siochain OR Macantacht server? If so, what's your Runes of Magic character motivation? Even if it's light hearted and a single sentence, that's fine! Even if your guys just a fighting guy, that counts!

Your characters motivation is important! So I'm paying 3k gold each!!! That's for 50 motivations total (I've only got so much gold!).

Leave your character name in your post (AND which server they are from), so I can mail you the gold. Or you can send me in game mail and point out which post was yours (send to 'Dreambroken', with a capital 'D'). You can post anonymously for this, that's fine. Only one entry per character per day.

I look forward to hearing your character motives!

Oh, and if motivations get a bit overly serious I might delete them here (but I'll send the gold anyway if it seemed a serious entry). There's one below that's a bit overly serious.

"Solo players don’t have a ghost of a chance here"

http://www.runesofmagic.com/en/news,id1414,patch_212_storming_acropolis.html

Solo players don’t have a ghost of a chance here; only well-equipped groups
will ultimately get to step up against the leader of the Naga army: King
‘Sharleedah’ will provide a tough battle for adventurers and can only be toppled
by the mobilising of every force.

Once again the lack of human resource management in a mmorpg astounds me!

But I'll give an example of some human resource management - public quests from warhammer online. These would funnel people together and help them form groups. Or even battle grounds from world of warcraft - click to join a BG que, wait, go in, your with a group (some dumb groups, but hey, even if you lose you get a token and it'll only last for X number of minutes).

Okay, so what do we have here? Sweet FA human resource management. You'll need a group - how you get one, entirely up to you. Hey, this isn't like a game where we could code stuff to help you - we leave this vital component (assuming you want to see this new content weve paid money to develop) up to you and that's considered normal.

MMORPG's, stop doing this!!!

The psychology of gamism

In a game where there are multiple hurdles to overcome, and its supposed to be a gamey gamist play to win sort of game (primarily - secondarily it might have emotional issues or some grand setting), it needs a double dipping reward system, I think.

Ie, you don't just get past the hurdle. You also get some other reward on top of that - even if that second reward is merely some text that pats you on the back and says hey, well done on managing to get past that (or alternatively you could have text from the main villain cursing you for getting past it, which can be a sort of in character satisfying second reward).

Otherwise it's just a hurdle - a thing in your way. You don't think of doing the vacuuming as some big deal - simply because it's a hurdle. Actually that reminds me of chore wars, which went a way to doing that. I should have playtested that with other people - it had little treasure drops and such you could set up, but if you set it up yourself - it felt alot like giving yourself a pat on the back.

A smidge of Rifts

We actually played Rifts the other day. Rifts Australia, to be exact!

One thing I did that was quite different was that the mission that was lined up, was very very short - it got completed in a short time. After that, I simply left the impression of the mysterious Australian bushlands and towns and the players started poking around. Also I was handing out XP for pretty much any character expression that happened - it was coming up naturally at first, but I think giving out XP helped bring out more of it. Keep in mind this was a reward not for whether it was 'cool' roleplay, it was XP for showing the character at all - it's the showing that matters, not the skill in delivery. Skill comes with practice, anyway! :)

I've got this idea for the rifts australia body armour - as it's supposed to have an AR. Which means instant death if an MD weapon hits over it's AR. What I've already done, which is kind of nifty, is to have scrap MDC. This is pieces and shards of broken MDC stuff, that's just tied together with SDC leather and SDC wire. Impacts from SDC attacks, like bullets swords and clubs can still tear apart those leather/wire bindings (the MDC shards then fall off). But if an actual MDC attack occurs, the MDC is worn down. This scrap MDC covers where the armours normal AR leaves off - leaving the character fully MDC protected, but still vulnerable to SDC weapons to a degree! Thus enabling both MDC and SDC combat!

But that's not the nifty idea, just yet. More latter...