Party members: locations and deaths leading to endings?

In the planning of some games, I've been thinking about this mechanic for a horror graphic adventure:

Say that you have your main protagonist Pepa. She dies, the game is over, the end. At the start of the story, Pepa teams up with Pancha, Mengana and Fulano as her party members. In the menu screen, all four kids are there blah blah blah. There are no battles, only events in different locations of the map as you wander around the story.

Now let's say that you want to enter a room and Fulano says he doesn't want to for any reason. If you enter the room with him on your party, an event will be triggered and Fulano will permanently die and disappear from the story. However, if you deattach him from your party and leave him outside, enter the room, do stuff inside and then come out and attach Fulano again he'll live and keep going with you.

On the other side, you choose not to take Mengana somewhere so you leave her in a room. You go out and do an event without her, and when you come back to pick her up, she's dead and disappear for the rest of the story. Which party members you have and where exactly you go and what you do affect the scenes and endings you get. If Pancha is dead when you escape, for example, it won't be the same as if she's alive and Fulando dead and so on. 

I'm thinking of it as in those Choose your own adventure novels, visual novels and more indirectly Ao Oni 5.2 and the Siren series. I'm wondering if this would be a possible thing to do with lots of work, or a mechanic that would interest players in finding ways to keep your characters alive at all costs. 

It doesn't even need lots of work (no more than other evented quests), you just have to know how to use switches and variables to control your story branching.


Without a carefully designed switch structure, it can become problematic - so the real question is if you're experienced enough (or learned it in school) to know how to structure your logic.


If yes, this should be no problem for you - if not, I suggest going to tutorials and working with less branching stories until you have that experience.

I think it could work as a game mechanic, but I'd find that level of party member permadeath rather annoying as a player.    If it is a murder mystery, it might make sense.

However, as Andar said, every time the party talks to someone, you would end up needing a LOT of permutations for each bit of dialogue.

If there are, say, 8 potential party members, with only the main PC constant, you could have a gigantic number of permutations.    In your example, you would need dialog combinations for:

- Only main PC is left

- Main PC + Fulano

- Main PC + Megana

- Main PC + Fulano + Megana

So, 2 killable PCs makes 4 permutations of dialog, for every NPC with whom they interact.  And a normal RPG has a lot of dialogue.  

If you add in 2 more PCs who may or may not be in the party, well, the permutations go up very rapidly.

Personally, I change around the party as little as possible, to avoid having a staggering number of dialogue permutations.

My point is you could do it easily, from a purely technical perspective.  But, from a game developer's perspective, it would be a ton of work which most players would never see.