Better Late Than Never

Happy to see you’ve made it to through May. This month, we took a lot of time rolling out infrastructure changes for Prelude, so we didn’t have a lot of time for all the visible changes we normally get to discuss here.
 

 
Still, we didn’t want to leave folks hanging, and we did have one significant change we hope will shake things up in the world of Prelude.
 
So, let’s start off with a simple, lighthearted question:
 

What Happens When We Die?

Fans of Gmod RP will know death has one core tennant in the community. The rule of law is that if you die, it’d be unfair for you to respawn, run all the way back to where you died, and retaliate. Your life, as you knew it, is done. The dreadful phrase: New Life Rule.
 
However, we find NLR to be cheap. It cheapens the experience by putting the law of the game into the player’s hands, rather than systematically allowing them to pick up the pieces where they left off. It means that they know they’ve been wronged, but can’t do anything about it, and have to play the role of an idiot. Plus, it creates this hostile relationship between admins who have to enforce the rules, and players who just want to play the damn game.
 

Admin sits are dumb! So let's kill them and just make a game, not a power fantasy for the admins.

Since our core design philosophy is all about systematically stamping out problems like this with gameplay, rather than the rulebook, we decided to change some things. In order to give death more of a meaning than just a simple setback and respawn, but also avoiding obnoxious 90 second NLR timers, we’ve made it so players now drop partially into a revivable state when they die. Players have to wait 10 seconds to respawn, and during/after that time, they can be revived by anyone on the server, which takes a chunk of time to keep things fair.

 
This gives a reason for players to stick together and to avoid risky situations they aren't prepared for. If a player chooses to skip revival, they’ll be brought to Southside Medical. They’ll lose 10% of their cash on hand, as well as anything stored in their hotbar. Weapons stored on the hotbar will also take a small tax on their durability. However, items stored in the player’s main inventory won’t be lost.
 

Looting a dead player. What goodies will we find?

 
These items are also not lost forever, and can be picked up from their corpse. Players are free to return to the crime scene and loot their corpse, so long as the vultures haven’t taken it for themselves, and retaliation is fair game. After all, you didn’t die, you went to the hospital!

After dying, players walk out of the hospital and lose some cash.

So, players will need to carefully select what they want to keep on their body during a firefight. If they fight with a precious weapon, they could risk losing it, or if they’re not careful, they might wander away from a safe zone with something important in their pocket, and be at risk for a mugging! We think the dynamic elements of this system are an exciting opportunity, and add a level of resource management to every combat interaction.
 

That's It! Wait, You're Still Here? Go Home!

Like I said earlier, this was only meant to be a micro-blog on this one facet we worked on that we thought would be interesting. So, that’s about all we have at the moment! Hope you enjoyed this little update from us. We’ve still got interesting things coming down the pipe for the future, so keep an eye on us.
 

Thanks again, and make sure to always check your pockets before leaving the house. See you next month!!