Favorite Death Penalty Systems?

I think harsh death penaltys are quite plausible sure in a regular MMO people might mind but a VRMMO wouldent be like a normal MMO sure IRL when a normal person thinks of there death they dont think thell come back the same sure there are religious ideas of comeing back but its never as the same person or in the same place i think if you had a really immersive MMO people would want harsh penaltys in fact i could see people being upset if there werent harsh penaltys

 

I think death penalties are extremely situational and dependent on social factors... if a large number of people play a game for a long time, as is the setting of most litrpgs, then hefty death penalties are favorable as they are more conducive to extending the game and allowing a more dynamic balanced world to play out. It allows for large groups to eliminate higher levelled player threats, and might lead to a less assholish community as every player knows firsthand what the consequence of getting killed means...

 

Until the first person who dies in game and gets PTSD IRL, and then the lawsuits start and that game goes out of business.

 

And that's why you put it in the User Agreement.

 

Which is why you make it mechanically punishing, but non-traumatic. Oh, and to try to encourage non-suicidal tendencies in the game, since people tend to be careless about death in most video games. That'd also be a reason to make it subtly obvious whether you're in VR or not. I can see concerns about frequent in-game deaths damaging your IRL fear-of-death and fear-response leading to lots of VR games having penalties for dying to minimize the odds of people testing it.

[as an aside, does anyone else get lots of books on the death penalty below because of this thread?]

 

For me, death has to make sense within the setting. If it's a commercial VR game meant for the masses, I find it difficult to believe that people would be willing to suffer any amount of pain. If you've been in an accident, you'll realize that your body remembers what it feels like to get hurt and you almost instinctively shy away from anything that will put you in that situation again. To echo what other posters have said, harsh penalties for dying wouldn't go down very well in this setting. So, if it's "just a game", lock-out time, gear loss, XP loss is the maximum you can go.

If it's a world that happens to run on RPG mechanics, then I don't mind. That said, personally I'm not a fan of perma-death, since I think GameLit is a good excuse for you to play around with the concept of death in a way you can't do with real life or normal fantasy. Dying strategically is always interesting. I also like how you can, well, sacrifice yourself more than once...

Favorite system: death should matter and the penalty should be enough to make people want to avoid dying, but low-stakes enough that players can consider death as a viable part of their strategy.

 

I think this is something not considered enough but when your at the point where you can make a fully immersive VR wold cureing PTSD would be a snap especialy if the world uses a direct connection with your brain rather then alot of illusions

Also im not sure if people would get PTSD from Virtual death i dont think its some obvous fact that they would its like assuming violent video games make people feel less gulty about killing

 

I think that if the VR is fully immersive and there's nothing distinguishing it from reality, you'd definitely either have people getting PTSD, or triggering flashbacks. Maybe the lack of real-world stakes wouldn't trigger it, but note that there's an entire wikipedia page about PTSD among athletes, I don't see why this would be different, even if actual war PTSD didn't happen.

It'd be worse if it were fully immersive, though.

 

Something i find quite annoying is the idea that all LitRPG books are about games why cant it be a reality simulator that behaves like a game seems like just changing that small detail makes so many things in alot of LitRPG books more plausible death for instance would be expected in a reality simulator NPCs would be considered more real in a reality simulator people would want to live in a reality sim ect.

The idea that LitRPG must be about games is absurd just because something isnt thought of as a game dosent mean it cant behave a bit like a game im assuming the draw of most VRMMOs would be to live in a fantasy world VR dosent just make all games better why an immersive RTS or moba the point of an RTS or moba isnt to be immersive its to be challenging

Im not saying change much just the idea that a fully immersive world being considered a game is strange either its realistic and immersive there for better called a simulator or its not immersive and made to be a fun as possible

 

The reason people tend to come to LitRPG is because they like games and game mechanics in storytelling. I don't see a distinguishing line between "game" and "reality simulator running on game rules", either, really, except whether the goal is to make it fun. I mean, you could argue that "The gam3" (free web serial I used to read)'s setting is a "reality simulator running on game rules". Death is less punishing so that war is more affordable, but that's probably the only reason, and it's still 1-death-per-war during wartime. (And apparently everything a character can do in the game, it's possible to do in the setting's IRL with the right genetic engineering.) But the fact that there are game rules means that it's not better called a simulator, even if game isn't apt either. It doesn't accurately model reality, even if it's not supposed to be fun.

Also, why would you want to live in a reality sim if you can still die? I mean, really. You'd need to completely restructure the plot if death is "you die", very few would have the level of violence and war most MMOs do. If no-death is viable for a reality sim, everyone would design theirs accordingly. The unreality is what makes it fun, and what allows for the progression that makes things interesting. I'd argue any reality sim worth writing a story about is probably going to have enough unreality to make it better called a game anyways.

 

Why not? Like, you say this, but you never give an actual reason. If people don't even want to put up with the mild inconvenience of a significant death penalty in regular MMOs, why would a VR MMO, one already prone to causing more psychological problems just by its very nature, be any different? Why would someone say "I don't want death penalty when all it does is wipe out an hour of XP gain, but I do want death penalty when it could traumatize me?"

 

Just FYI I intentionaly didnt state the reason as it was quite long.

So my basic reasoning for this is that a VRMMO would be infinitely more immersive then a normal mmo in an mmo the penalty for dieing is sitting in front of your computer and pressing buttons or wating a bunch not verry entertaining in a VRMMO however the penalty in and of itself would allow for extended game intrest and make them need to play longer to complete your game. The other reason is moral objections imagine the outcry from the public if games allowed people to simulate death but never feel pain imaging the psychological impact of dyeing a bunch but never getting a negative sure if your in VR all the time thats not a big problem but when you step into the world and kill yourself because you want to respawn at home and then die for life because your not in a video game.

 

It was one paragraph.

The same is true in regular MMOs. But they don't do it, because the amount of time required to complete a game is only a feature if people care about the game enough to actually finish it, and any kind of significant death penalty has been found to severely reduce the amount of people interested in playing any video game long term.

There wouldn't be any. There is absolutely no reason this would be a thing. People are not actually stupid enough to step in front of a bus and expect that to work the same in the real world as it does in a video game. People claimed that regular video games would somehow turn their players into violent killing machines, and the reason that was dumb is not because the graphics weren't good enough, it's because people fundamentally do not work that way.

 

The Milgram Experiment proved that a large number of people would engage in clearly immoral acts when pressured to do so by authority figures. What does that have to do with the current conversation?

 

They could be pushed by an authority figure or a video game, in the sense that one of those two things could plausibly convince a significant fraction of people to do something they would normally consider wrong. It's not the video game.

 

Video games are not authority figures any more than most* books or movies are. Or any other sort of mass media entertainment.

The Milgram Experiment doesn’t apply, since it was designed to test how people react to authority figures. If there is no authority figure that we’re told to trust (uniformed police officers, doctors or people in lab coats, tv news anchors, etc) or authority figures we trust without being told (bosses, parents, etc), then it doesn’t influence our behavior.

It may INFORM our behavior, but there’s a vast difference between informed behavior and influenced behavior. Take, for instance, the Aaron Sorkin TV series “The Newsroom”. Just the opening scene informed its audience of facts about the US. Acting on that information would be informed behavior. Then take something like the discredited daytime television show, Dr. Oz. He peddles modern day snake oil that has no verifiable medical benefits and, in some cases, has a body of anecdotal evidence showing that the products cause serious harm. Buying one of those products after a Dr. Oz endorsement would be an example of influenced behavior.

Video games simply do not have the ingrained authority to provoke influenced behavior.

TL;DR: the media we consume only influences us if it was produced by a person or thing that we see as an authority figure, for the specific purposes of influencing behavior.

*this is obviously excluding propaganda and other media specifically designed to inform, educate, or persuade its audience such as a presidential address to the nation, recorded college lecture, or news media. Entertainment media isn’t typically designed by authority figures and thus does not carry the implicit authority of any given person.

 

If anything, I think extremely immersive VR would make people hesitate to do things like slay dragons in-game, assuming people aren't being plunged into a virtual environment from birth. Even if I "know" something is a game, I can't say it would be easy to step in front of a moving bus if the world feels real. Just like you go to a theme park and you might know a ride is perfectly safe, even a simulation, but that won't stop you from the adrenal rush of falling off a building. Heck, people can get scared playing horror games, while sitting in their living rooms with the lights on. Humans are hardwired for survival, after all, and the more immersive VR is, the less likely I see people charging into danger without a definite marker of "this is the game, and the game won't hurt you".