permadeath----------------------------------------------------------i love the concept of permadeath where you loose everything including your stats, items and name, that never can be used again - it actually makes you think twice before you kill someone, knowing that as a revenge you can get killed yourself. there just must be some mechanics how you will be able to track the murderer (aka in heaven and hearth) and the murderer can't really be absolutely safe even when he logs out.
also if you defeat somebody in the combat, you should first just knock him off so you're able to give him a nice full loot without killing him. one should be able to kill only somebody who is lying unconscious on the ground by some special move.
in HnH you even have to skill "quite expensive" skill of murder before you actually can kill somebody. it is not realistic, but as a game mechaics i'd say it works a little bit. it would work even better if there would be a skillcap to character and murder would be one of them.
multiaccounting----------------------------------------------------------i'd also strictly be against more characters per account. if there is a possibility to have more characters it in a way kills the aspect you need other people to play with to achieve something bigger (aka run working town). if somebody wants more characters, he should buy the game more times
skillcaps----------------------------------------------------------by the way the best skillcap system i've ever seen in a game was in one ultima roleplaying server.
- there were just 750 skill points to spend
- there were about 40 skills to level up
- if you wanted to master one skill you had to invest 100 points into that (by long long long long long very long grind)
- the difference between 100 points and lets say 85 was very very noticable
- if you wanted 100+ points it was achievable only by items (and you couldn't really get more than 110)
- if you wanted to really specialize in something (smithing, cooking, fighting, casting - you usually had to level like 6 skills to 100 so you really could be great in one thing only)
- you could however play around with stats (dex, int, str) thuss affecting your fighting capabilities quite a lot (you could be good fighter against archers/mages, but bad against other fighters etc..)
- stat cap was 161 (and you could have 159 str, 1dex, 1 int if you wanted)
- the 750 skillcap was applied to all skills (including mining, hiding, fighting skills, fishing, whatever)
- so you couldn't be good smith (or mayor, or trader, or alchymist) and good fighter (or archer and mage) at the same time
- but you could be good fighter and good miner (as for stupid pickaxe you needed 1 skill only) - but then you were selling ore only and not ingots that smiths were able to create (still it was a good source of income)
- you also could be good hunter and archer (as for hunting you needed like 200 skills invested in skinning animals and tracking)
- it was also fun to play craftsman, because it was difficult. there were no public recipes for anything, you had to pass some quests to get to know how to make better weapons, or you had to go to library and read old books to find recipes, or you had to get an escort and go to the dungeon where you could learn recipes engraved in walls etc.. or you just had to experiment (and risking loosing ingredients) to create stuff. older smiths were able to help you, but only to some extent. the best ones never shared unique recipes for the best armor and weapons. now it would maybe be different, as everyone shares everything just via teamspeak. i don't know, but at that time there were only 2 smiths that were really capable to make the top stuff, everybody knew them and nobody dared to touch them, because he knew he'd just get hunted until he would have to delete his char (well except for the drows
). and there were not just smiths, there were people making carpentry, top quality food, wine... (and especially wine-making was the ultimate task, nobody ever learned more than like 50 percents of its possibilities ^^)
these limitations were great, it was a game where everybody really was unique, everybody's character was different. crpg still has some variety in chars, but not really as big as this game had...
