Hero death in warband-style games

[Jubal]

An actual design thread :O

So basically there is, I think, a group of what could be termed "warband games", most prominent among which is Mount & Blade but also Heroes of Might & Magic is arguably similar, as is Flash's bounty, Caravaneer, etc. What these games all share is a single core character who collects a group of minions around them - the minions are not fellow heroes, so it's not an adventuring party, and a lot of the game is about managing your party through a mix of combat & quests (and in some cases other things like trading).

Now, one of the common problems in this genre, I think, is what you do with heroes. HOMM and Flash's bounty both have heroes as essentially immortal, or tied to their army - they don't have upkeep or desertion or anything, so that's one way of doing it. Having a killable hero is potentially more fun and gives you an obvious endgame condition, but it's hard to balance that for risk - it can seem very random to just get a game over when a really powerful enemy decides to make a bee-line for your leader and disembowels them without so much as a by your leave. On the other hand, "grievous injury chart" type things can get really dull as heroes keep getting knocked back stat-wise when you want to build them up.

What do you all think the best solutions are to this one? Killable heroes, woundable heroes, or immortal heroes?

[Clockwork]

I mildly disagree on your use of the term 'warband games', those are not particularly defined but usually I've seen that term used to describe games like Mordheim: City of the Damned (PC and TT), Warband (PC), Battle Brothers, Templar Battleforce. Games in which the party and/or encounters of said party are at least mostly randomly generated at some level. This is in contrast with Chroma Squad, JRPGS, Dragon Age which have definite characters even though a fair amount of the combat/encounters can be random.


Having said that - I also don't like the term I use for the type of games you mean: Legion RPGs but I use that because they have a lot more troops than what I call warband games.

With my unnecessary bs out the way: it depends what vibe you're going for. High fantasy usually has heroes only die to plot and in low, anyone with a pitchfork and racism can kill the main character (hey witcher fans).


Would HOMM be better with killable heroes? No. HOMM 4 did that and it's almost exclusively regarded as the worst in the series.
Would Disciples (another prominent Legion RPG, mid fantasy, heroes are randomly named warrior, mage, rogue or merchant) be better if heroes were immortal? Not sure, the facelessness of them means that you aren't as invested in them when they die.


Theme of the game plays another part - if the game is supposed to be hard, heroes dying adds difficulty as it basically removes a 'try again' button.


If other gamers are anything like me then an injury system has to be interesting - lose an arm: no shield/2h/ranged but +1 to attack with single handed and +1 AC etc. without the bonus coming from injury, re-rolling the character just seems like a better option.

[Jubal]

Yeah, fair point on the terminology. I dunno, I've been playing around with this on the game I'm designing and I can't seem to make any of the options feel right, which is probably mainly due to the overall combat system being a pretty hacky autoresolve-style mess, but I don't have the time or energy to build a full tactical "zoomed in" combat system either Killable heroes seems to lead to too many of my heroes being just suddenly disembowelled by monsters, I'm worried injuries would just lead to players wanting to restart the game, and unkillable feels kind of meh and removes my only current Game Over condition. *shrugs*

[Clockwork]

This may or may not be helpful but recent total wars have given the leaders and their bodyguard a ton of melee defence but relatively low attack for the tier they're supposed to be.


I agree that injuries can easily lead to frustration and immortality a)doesn't suit a lot of games and b) yeah not having another game over condition would lower the stakes dramatically.


If you have ration or upkeep mechanics then those could be lose conditions? Or could the hero literally have to be the last piece of the army to die?

[Tusky]

I agree with clock in that it depends on what you are aiming for.


Killing characters you have grown attached to is something that you feel very keenly and that emotional loss can be part of the enjoyment. A game that does this well I think is Xcom or darkest dungeon, but another good example would be GOT. As you say the main trick for this method, and my main problem in Xcom is that you need to give the player enough of a say as to if they die or not. Xcom I found sometimes the death of my beloved squad members to be the result of an unfair/random set of favourable rolls for the enemy. But if you are able to reduce or eliminate this randomness and make the cause of death completely preventable & based on the player's skill or knowledge of the environments you have created then you could create a challenge for the player which isn't frustrating. Darkest dungeon is an example of how you can have both injury and death and have it as a key feature of your gameplay.
Some not exactly applicable examples but I think worth mentioning are the sexy brutale or the last days of summer - where the whole point of the game is to prevent the death of the main characters


Going with immortal & injuries route is obviously better (and probably easier) if you need to guarantee they are alive for some plot.


Injuries knocking you back in terms of progression may be frustrating but at the same time goes back to my previous point, if you make it not be random then it can be an enjoyable part of the challenge.

[Jubal]

So I've gone for a situation in my game where when your character suffers a mortal-level wound, they sit at 1hp and you have ten days of game time to get them healed to above 1hp or they'll die. I think this works reasonably well - it gives a sort of extra last minute mini game in which you have various strategies/options - working out if you can get to a city fast enough, or if you need to search the forests for friendly witches, etc.

[Tusky]

Sounds like a good solution.
Also makes me intrigued as to what you're working on!

[Jubal]

All has now been revealed
https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5574