Duck and Cover

What should happen if you kill a vital character? There are multiple triggers in any game that requires a certain character and/or characters be alive for you to progress. These characters normally can't be killed or the game has certain ways it prevents this. What do you feel the game should do?

I wouldn't say it is unrealistic to keep going but it depends on your story and where you want to go with it. There are a thousand ways to create a story, maybe even more than that! If the goal depends on the NPC then maybe it would be best to end the game but you should give the player a complete understanding of that to begin with and also provide opportunities to prevent it.

I say that would depend largely on the scope of what you're trying to do. If it's just an SP mission, I'd suggest letting the game continue until the PCs are in a position to extricate themselves (end the mission) and they should then be told about the impact of their actions/inactions.

However, if you're looking at even a mini-campaign then I'd say that you should stop the show if there's been a show-stopping event. It's just too hard to keep up with a sea of markovian variables.

That being said, it's probably best to avoid having any event being a show-stopper. For instance, I didn't like that FoT didn't allow the game to go on w/o the "main character". I really would have liked to see a squad-based tactical game focus on a heroic squad rather than a heroic individual. If you lost the Elder in Mission 2 there should have been consequences, but the game should have gone on.

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it...

OTB

I mostly agree with OTB. When failure occurs in real life, one either finds an alternate way of attacking a problem or abandons the whole matter and moves on to something else. In neither case do you get a "game over" message and an opportunity to reload. I think a well thought-out plot, whether in a campaign or an SP mission, will allow for a fairly broad range of player behavior. Linear games that try to force the player to complete a mission in a narrowly defined way usually aren't all that entertaining to anyone except the designer. I tend to view objectives that are designed to make the game "flow smoothly" but have no basis in common sense as a hassle, and as things that serve only to restrain my imagination and remind me I'm "only" playing a game. It's particularly annoying when, as in a few maps I've played, there is some restriction that a certain character must be kept alive but the designer never mentions this ahead of time (in the briefing, for example). Perhaps it's just my own style of playing games, but I always prefer to let things stand as they are (when characters die, for example) and continue on rather than reload in an attempt to have everything be "perfect."

Not that I think my own maps are all that great, but a good relevant example would be in my "What is Honor Amongst Thugs?" map. You can choose to assassinate the renegade BOS scientist, join forces with her, help her somewhat and then go back and kill her later on--you can pretty much decide to do whatever you want to with her. Or in my "BOSCops" map, for example, even though your assignment is to help enforce the law in the town, if you want to you can go to work for the drug lord and wipe out the sheriff and mayor. I think open-ended possibilities like these are the way to go. Although it takes a lot more time and imagination to set up scenarios in this way, the payoff in fun and replay value is more than worth the effort.


Endocore