Permadeath in SRPGs

[halfcourtyeet]

How do we solve this? (May repost this OP on my blog.)

I’ve watched a lot of videos on Fire Emblem and its famous permadeath mechanic, where a dead unit (in most cases) cannot come back, short of a reset game or a reloaded save.

To walk you through the main points:

• Permadeath has been in the series since the very first entry.
• The game compensated for it by having characters get minimal development outside of initial recruit conversations, and giving you many, many units to use if one dies.
• Since Fire Emblem 4, characters (the ones not on the front of the box) began to be much more fleshed out, both in story and in gameplay, which discouraged letting units die. The game was harder (but not impossible) with lost units, and the story was less interesting, and typically units began to have more and more of a merit to being kept alive (needing certain units to unlock hidden chapters, items, or even recruit other characters.)
• This trend continues steadily across the series: Notably with Fire Emblem Awakening and its direct predecessor New Mystery, which introduced the “Casual Mode.” In this mode, units don’t actually die permanently, they return at the battle’s end safe and sound.
• Finally, the recent Fire Emblem: Three Houses puts so much stock into your characters, with so little options to replace them, that the permadeath-embracing “Classic Mode” is all but a formality.
• I don’t know what Engage is doing. Not playing that toothpaste-hair game.

Some of my thoughts, based on conversations I’ve had with other developers about this:

1. I always hated the double standard with enemy versus player units. You can invest in your own, but 99% of enemy units are faceless goons that your characters gladly slaughter in dozens, if not hundreds. It always struck me as dehumanizing.
2. I never really felt like the games embraced the mechanic, despite the series being so known for it. Characters don’t get a bonus from being vengeful at seeing friends and family die. They don’t mourn the units past maybe the moment they expire. They don’t even get to recover the bodies and possessions of the dead unit.
3. I’m interested to see alternative approaches. I heard Dark Deity gives struck-down units a permanent scar/wound that hampers their stats. Maybe some way to protect the characters you care about most? Later FE games introduced basically a turn-by-turn rewind mechanic, which I’ve grown tired of as a band-aid to a deeper problem.

Please let me know what you think! And nice to meet everybody, I’ll type up an intro sometime.

[exodrifter]

Welcome to the community!

I don’t know much about Fire Emblem, having only played one of them. I do remember having one character I was invested in dying and being frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to keep them alive, no matter how often I tried to replay the level. I guess I wasn’t very good.

The game that I feel like gave me the best emotional response is the board game Undaunted: Stalingrad. It’s a legacy board game, so you’re intended to play multiple sessions over time. One person plays as the Germans (well, the, uh, Nazis), and the other plays as the Russians. Every soldier in each player’s deck is a specific person, and between each session they have the ability to become better, but they also have the ability to get worse as they encounter the horrors of war.

When your soldiers die, they’re unceremoniously removed from your deck and are replaced with untrained recruits. This made the game feel awful and terrible as I commanded my soldiers across the battlefield to defend or take small stretches of land, fully knowing the kind of dangers I was putting them in and what might happen to them but at the same time feeling like I was compelled to.

The characters in this game are never given a story and there’s no dialogue like there might be in Fire Emblem, but I felt awful playing it! Which is a funny thing to praise about a game, but it’s appropriate, I think. War is truly terrible.

There’s a great SUSD review of the board game too, if you’re interested in knowing more about the game.

[PGComai]

Hi! I don’t play RPGs but I have an idea for a unit/character death mechanic. Maybe when an ally is about to die, you may choose to sacrifice something to keep them alive. Something like a chunk of your permanent health, or move speed, or a valuable item, so you can’t just save people willy nilly.

[ColdEmber]

I mostly played Fire Emblem from GBA and GameCube and stopped playing at Awakening. So I’m more biased with keeping the death mechanic, but keep in mind that if you can afford to lose unit, missions can play very differently, since you have now more options.

A death needs consequences.

Wizardry and other DRPG makes it very expensive to resurrect bodies, so it could hit you in your economy. Worse, they also have a chance to be lost forever, so even if you’re full of money, you’re still afraid of death.

TTRPG Sword World have you accumulate “Soul Shards” with each death, making your character more sickly each time ( a bit like scars you mentioned). Resurrect too much and your character is lost, becoming a mere zombie.

I do like death in Fire Emblem, it makes the wars/stake of the story more real, unlike Advance Wars for example, where everyone is pretty cheerful because only grunt dies.

[halfcourtyeet]

Thank you for pointing out the recruits system in Undaunted. That is definitely a compelling feature, even if SUSD pointed out the soldiers are still not as “humanized” as you want them to be. I have similar ideas for my game that I’ll get to further down this post.

@ColdEmber I really like you pointing out some other consequences in lieu of permadeath. I feel like the “stat debuff” one is kind of lame, and the economy one is interesting but still with no stakes. I think if anything, permadeath should definitely be leaned into.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

• You choose a certain number of units to fight in your army regularly, your main army. Each unit in that group has a “reserve” unit, just someone else in your army that you can replace them with, that serves a similar purpose. If a game supplied you with at least two of each, then you can expect losses and be okay with them, even if inter-unit support bonuses become compromised.
• If you lose all your reserves, maybe you end up just recruiting randos, which is even more depressing.
• Shorter campaigns would also really help with this issue. When I make my SRPG, I’m planning 8-10 missions tops, not counting tutorial missions. That makes you feel like you won’t be two dozen chapters in, lamenting a unit you lost in the second chapter of the game, a choice you made 30-40 hours ago.
• What always struck me about Fire Emblem and related games (if we’re just talking about SRPGs and mortality now) is none of the units ever seem really afraid to see combat. Like, to kill another human being? You don’t have to have a Vietnam or Afghan/Iraq veteran in your life to know how horrifying that is.
• I feel like the main lord (who must stay alive) would have an increasingly interesting set of branching stories based on how many or how little of their allies die.

If no units die => The lord curses their dumb luck and begins to focus on feeling deep regret for the slaughter of the enemy army. Feels intense survivor’s guilt on behalf of the whole army, and anger at war itself.

If some units die => Wears heavy on the lord’s conscience for the entire game. Plus, not only do you lose the units permanently, but any mid-high level units they forged bonds with, may either be energized by vengeance, swallowed by grief, or desert the army entirely. A minigame between chapters could be funerals and eulogizing for the lost units- the kind of person they were, what they loved, who they loved, how they wanted to be remembered.

If all units you’ve ever recruited die (reserves may or may not count) => The lord is so desensitized to loss that they coldly accept themselves as an avatar of death, becoming a villain in their own right. How could they ever possibly be a hero if they lead all their friends to their doom? Is there hope for their soul? At this point, the lord may become more scary than even the game’s antagonist.

In the game I want to make, it’s the main character going against their own despot queen-mother, so I think having skilled players strategically kill of units to force a certain path or get vengeance buffs for other units- would play well into the theme of asking if the main character is any better than the woman who bore her. Heady stuff!

All this reminds me of Fire Emblem 4’s substitutes. Instead of playing Part 2 of the game as the children of Part 1, you can choose to play as basically random peasants and commonfolk. As evidenced by this Reddit post, it seems to make the game’s story arguably much stronger as a result:

Anyway, thanks for entertaining my ideas, y’all.

[isomorphism]

I really like how XCOM2 handles this. It’s relatively easy to level up new people if you lose someone but it takes a significant amount of resources. There’s an injury system where if someone takes damage at all they can’t go on missions for a while which encourages you to protect people, but there are attacks that’ll one shot people, especially early game. The game encourages aggression but rewards caution simultaneously.

There’s a memorial room for the fallen, you can customize your people, they’ll have Voice actors talk about soldiers that got hurt, it’s all … the balance of it just feels right to me.

Maybe I just really like XCOM2. I kinda want to play a run of War of the Chosen.

[halfcourtyeet]

Thank you so much for getting back with ideas from this game! I deleted my previous post so I could specifically reply to you.

I was gonna play XCOM 2, but didn’t end up getting through Enemy Unknown. After my storied run through Fire Emblem 4, (and EU), I’ll give it a try.

[maidmage]

iso mentioned xcom2 and i wanted to add more, ill avoid spoilers

XCOM 2 is really focused on the overarching narrative, humanity’s fight against the alien forces. The story only really moves forward as * you * move forward in the game’s tech tree, research certain things, encounter certain enemies. that can make the overall story less engaging for a lot of people, there arent really any personal stakes.

i do think that Double Standard youre talking about really works in XCOM’s favor though. Each soldier lacks a handwritten story, you as a player define the story of each character. You can somewhat rest easy knowing the setback hasn’t made you lose content, you dont need to restart your entire run. permadeath here also raises the stakes against the alien threat as this faceless, incalculably large force, making you really feel like an underdog. they will always keep coming, moment after moment. unlike them, the player has to face attrition.

ive played the game with mods that remove permadeath. I think one made dead soldiers instead incapacitated, and they could return to combat after a fairly long recovery, likely 5-10 missions or so. Another mod added cybernetics. Injured soldiers sometimes required a complete replacement of their legs, or even their skull, unable to return to the field until you researched and purchased a new set of prosthetics. These also had cosmetic effects, which made each unit feel more storied, more personal.

A lot of these mods ended up worsening the game in some ways, trivializing combat. XCOM2 is at its best when combat is brutal and unfair. Removing or mitigating permadeath in that game makes it much less interesting to play. But the narrative appeal of scarring your units, giving the player the choice to bring them back from the brink of death, that was really valuable.

But what about a game like XCOM designed to exist without permadeath?
Id like to also briefly talk about Girls’ Frontline 2- an Anime Gacha Game available on desktop/mobile that released at the end of last year that is built to be like XCOM.

That game doesn’t have permadeath, each unit has RPG leveling stats and requires resources (through a mobile-game daily energy system). these units are also required through gacha, so random chance often using paid currency. The end result is something a lot less interesting. Each character gets to have a written story, they even get to have unique moves entirely of their own, but there are no stakes. You can sacrifice the same unit over and over again. You don’t need to protect them because you can always restart, and at the start of the next mission they will always be reset back to full.

The lack of permanent stakes and risk in GFL2 (among other design differences) makes a game where strategy isnt incentivized nearly as much. instead its more about what characters you build, and even more so which ones you spend money on. and i find that causes players to disengage with the game, rather than meeting it on its own terms and fully learning its systems. like most gacha games, you can pay your way out of playing the actual game.

[halfcourtyeet]

Before I continue the discussion I just wanna add a note here for my notes:

Just played a chapter of Path of Radiance where at the end, one unit chastises another for picking up weapons off a dead enemy. The commander shames him but… He literally just gained a javelin and that’s not leaving my inventory so…

[halfcourtyeet]

I love your analyses of both games.
XCOM2 sounds pretty cool. And I see what you mean, even if enemy soldiers are initially anonymous it doesn’t mean you can’t get attached to them.
Even thinking about it now, by the end of the game I was really attached to the anonymous units I recruited in final fantasy tactics, which I had leveled over the course of the game in various different jobs, which I consistently found more interesting than employing any of the actual supporting characters. I can even remember a few of them now. Pascal was the black mage and arithmetician, and I had a girl that was mainly a brawler/samurai, one was a thief and ninja, and one switched regularly between white mage and orator. And I can feel those personalities right now. The tough one, the shy one, the helpful one, the smart one. Even if it’s simple, it felt profound to me.

One of the videos I watched about permadeath pointed out how deeply people in nuzlocke runs of pokémon get attached to their characters. So there you go.

I think it’s worth considering recruited units being captured instead of killed, as a decent solution to otherwise dehumanizing gameplay. But in an SRPG it would be really tricky. Capturing in Fire Emblem 5 is a big mechanic, incentivized well with the promise of new items and gold from the captured enemy, but you basically halve many of your important stats when attempting a capture instead of a kill. I’ll have to think about that more.