two years ago, players can enjoy losing almost as much as they enjoy winning, under the right circumstances. Rajava found that interactive failure (where failure led to continued gameplay) was pleasurable, while passive failure (where failure was outside player control or ended his play) was unpleasant.
The better solution, then, is to return death to its rightful place as an infrequent punishment and to reintroduce the host of other sanctions once familiar to roleplayers. Indeed, the unglamorous Rogue-like subgenre of cRPGs, although featuring frequent deaths, includes a wide array of non-lethal punishments, ranging from destroyed items to mutations. The fun of Rogue-likes is recovering from these setbacks and - as the D&D manual suggests - finding the gameplay opportunities within them.
Promising independent RPGs, such as Mount & Blade and Age of Decadence, are making significant steps in this direction. Losing in battle means being robbed or perhaps taken captive, but does not end the game.
Here are five basic principles to help fix the save-load dilemma:
1. The player should never be expected to save except when ending his play session.
2. The player should receive significant long-lasting penalties much more frequently than he should die. Small permanent penalties should be frequent and essentially unavoidable (but seldom imposed due to pure chance), to accustom the player to weathering setbacks rather than undoing them.
3. The player should never die (or receive another substantial penalty) for anything other than an elected risk. That means it should be possible for a player to see when he is getting in over his head, there should almost always be a way to get out of a potentially deadly situation, and random chance should have little influence in dying.
4. Accordingly, it should be possible for combat to end some way other than every enemy or every party member dying. Retreat should be reintroduced as a viable strategic option with more upside than reloading. Furthermore, the player (and the enemy) should be able to negotiate or surrender when doing so is plausible.
5. Failure should create possibilities rather than merely foreclose them.
Implementing these suggestions is, of course, vastly more difficult than merely declaring them. After all, it has taken Rogue-like games decades to achieve their present complexity. But as sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto and The Sims thrive, and mainstream RPGs like Bioware's promise increasingly responsive environments, rethinking the save-kill paradigm not only makes sense in terms of story and gameplay, it also serves the bottom line. For perhaps the first time ever, RPGs have the technology, budgets and experienced designers capable of capturing the thrill, adventure, setbacks and reversals of classic fantasy stories. That is the fun of fantasy. Carpe diem. After all, no one ever dreamed of quicksaving.
Marty O'Hale has written stories for a number of computer and videogames, primarily roleplaying and strategy games. He has also published a number of works of fiction. Currently, Marty's career is in the law.
