I have to admit however great the game it is now, the replay value of the SP Campaign is more or less limted to the 1st play-thorough. A well implemented Premadeath will change that. This is what I've in mind: 1. Party member's death is permanent. When a member dies, his equipment retain to the pool 2. There is only 1 permadeath party in this SP Permadeath campaign mode at any one time, to improve the RPG feel. 3. New party members can be recruited in shops, as long as not all members are KIA 4. Permadeath inventory is separate from the inventory pool we already have. Loot cannot be transported outside of this special PD mode. 5. Uses the same SP dungeons. 6. You are given a few hundreds gp to buy party members/equipment at the level1 shop. 7. A new max PM Score achieved will be shown to along side to the MP ranking. You get highest score if you finish all dungeons in 1st try, and without any member death at all. 8. Consider the harsh reality of this mode, the drop rate of rare loot doubles. This allows more crazy combo. Maybe a easy mode is where Legendary loot is super easy to get, but the Score is harshly penalized. 9. A new memorial area will show the deceased with equipment they wear, how they look, which dungeon they die, along with their party members and their PM Score. 10. Pizza can be used to buy loot, which will stay across all of your PM campaigns.
Permadeath sounds cool, but I would never get into it if I had separate loot for SP/MP and PD. As a matter of fact, I would probably never do MP if I had a separate loot pool. It could be totally awesome though, but: - not being able to play adventures that you haven't yet open with the current permadeath dudes (so people can't skip the difficult ones) - some sort of incentive for playing besides rankings, like getting an item each time a PD character dies with rarity dependant on the character level (so from sheit commons at low levels to prevent abuse, to rare-epic-legendary the higher the level), it's always sad when a permadeath dude dies so getting a decent epic after almost finishing the campaign with PD character would be sweet
I think it is too hardcore, and the game have to change too much to accommodate for it. I could see more of a challenge thing, where you are challenge with a custom campaign, or one big long dungeon (or using existing, replay of few selected maps), but where if a character dies, it is "lock out" for that game (but you might start with a pool or 5 or 6 characters).
We already have 'no deaths' quests, I'm not sure an entire ironman mode would be worth the development time compared to other content additions. You are, of course, welcome recruit a handful of new characters and attempt to run through the campaign in such a manner as a self-enforced optional challenge.
The work required to implement this permadeath should not be too big, unless adding a 2nd Inventory db is. Having a permadeath like this is as RPG-ish as you can get, inline of a group of heroes try saving an kingdom. For me it will add tremendous replayability, which the SP experience is not good enough other than acting as an intro to MP or card collection. I do like piotras' idea that an Epic+ loot is given whenever their is PM death. I do think a separation of PM inventory and Normal inventory is needed. This kind of special deceased loot should retain in the PM inventory even an PM adventure ends, as a special reward, similar to #10 Pizza loot I've mentioned. Am I just dreaming?
I'm not sure that I like the idea of rewarding failure. It could be something like: PD inventory is added to normal inventory upon completion of the PD campaign.
I haven't thought much about the possibilities of permadeath - but I worry that would get a bit frustrating when you inevitably get an unlucky hand which costs you your entire team halfway through the campaign... This reminds me of something that I suggested awhile ago - and that I would still like. (And I think others have suggested it too.) The idea is to have an optional mode where you play through the entire campaign again with an empty stash, just as through you were completely new to the game again. But at the end of the campaign, whatever loot you find is merged with your original stash. The point of that suggestion is to reintroduce the challenge of only having limited equipment to choose from. Because currently, long-time players tend to have a huge stash of equipment which basically makes the whole game a whole lot easier. I think it's a shame that as players get more experienced, the game actually gets easier at the same time due to the larger selection of powerful equipment. (I don't mean during the first playthrough of the campaign. I mean after replaying each adventure a couple of times.) I can think of a few variations on this idea which I think would be cool. One is to use the permadeath idea; essentially the same as the suggestion in the OP, except without the higher drop-rates, and but allowing all the loot to be claimed after the end of the campaign (or when you give up). Another variation is to actually not have access to the stash at all during this special playthough. Players would be allowed to equip whatever they happen to find in the chests at the end of each map, but whatever equipment they don't use from those chests just gets added to their normal stash and they aren't allowed to access that for the entire campaign. ie. Whenever you find an item, you have to make a decision about whether or not you want to use it right now. And if you choose not to use it, then its gone for the rest of the campaign. (You still ultimately get to keep all the items you find, but you just wouldn't be allowed to use them in this special challenge mode.) -- Playing like that is already possible without having to implement any new special games features, so we can try it right now if we wanted to. But if it was officially implemented in the game then it could be combined with special rules for the shop, or special rewards at the end, or whatever other stuff like that. Anyway, I don't know what the coolest challenges would be, but I would like to see some kind of item limited challenge - so that experienced players can once again face the challenge of having to choose from a set of mediocre equipment rather than from a full stash of the best items in the game.
I think there may be potential for a new quest idea here though. I'd get a kick out of a form of permadeath that only lasted as long as the adventure I was in. So if your wizard bites it on map 2, he's out for maps 3, 4, and 5. It's kind of a weird reference, but the game Disgaia's item world comes to mind, where your characters had to survive for at least 10 levels and beat a boss before the opportunity to resurrect anyone was presented, and you got bonuses if you forfeited that right and just kept pushing on with the characters who were still alive. You'd wind up with epic battles that involved your last remaining hero against multiple entire maps of enemies, sometimes. When it was all over and you either won or bit the dust, everyone was back to normal and could try it again.
