Jack, in a game where say if you beat the monsters they just get hurt and run off back to their lairs without their treasure then totally I agree with players only ever getting hurt and running off back to town without some of their treasure.
To me the setting calls for it if you can kill the enemy - because it just seems kinda BS to me that you can kill them, but they can't kill you. Really to me, in such a situation, the ones who can't die are more like actual bad guys. To me the parity of both sides being able to kill each other gives some legitimacy to one side thinking of themselves as good.
I know alot of people are used to 'I can kill them, they can only inconvenience me' design - but to me that's not a reason to design that way, it's just feeding a habit they have formed. I could support it, but I choose not to (to my short term detriment no doubt, in terms of player numbers, but to my short and long term benefit of building a game based on what I care about)
I'm playing that
kingdoms game at the moment and I find the characters dying (which kind of makes the party as an entityt die as well) adding real grit and a sense of real contact with the world, for me.
I'll grant when I've played fallout3, I haven't exactly let a character die when they died, I've reloaded. Maybe I should have that - there's a subtle element of psychology in the reload, because it's the player deciding 'I want to keep going'. Where if the game reloads you, it's the game deciding for the player, which is entirely different as sometimes, as a player, you might want to decide that's it for that character. Note: Reloading doesn't have to be the whole world, just reloading the characters prior state.
anyway, long post...!
