Required Party Members

I'm sorry for the misleading title.

I'm not talking about the game forcing a party member to go with you.  Rather, I'm talking about a game in which any party member can die, but if one or however many die, that means game over.

For context, I'm imagining a game whose story involves a recollection by a party member (rather than the main character).  In this hypothetical game, any party member can die permanently, but if this one particular party member or the player character dies, it means Game Over.

Thoughts?

It is not unusual to have this concept in a game. It is usually reserved for the main protagonist though.

After all, if the main protagonist dies, how will the battle continue?

Are you saying the main character can die but the narrator can't?

Caution: Incoming landmine

In a game designed around the survival of a single party member, multiple skills will need to be put in place to protect that(those) character(s), and by contrast enemies will need to focus on the elimination of said party member(s), or the whole system just screams of an unusual penalty in place, based on randomness of enemy attacks.

Permanent death in RPGs is a big no-no, unless party members are easily replaced, or the game lasts about 30 minutes. Either way you have basically committed yourself to not including any character relevant story. Well you could, but it would be nightmarish to screen-write for. Does Jolene respond to Marks Orphanage story to Jane, Does Amy respond to Jolene. What about Christopher? Just.. yeah.. have fun with that ;)

In a game where if 'any' party member dies, it's game over, unless there is some leniency (like x deaths per mission), you risk arbitrarily lowering the difficulty to prevent frustration. 

What about games where all the characters are all already dead?  Or it's ambiguous if they're all already dead?  :D

Actually, to be honest, I've never been much of a fan of "so and so died, so game over, you can't win, load a checkpoint".  All that has ever made me do as a player is give all the best equipment to that character and use the rest of the characters to play "healer" and "defense" on behalf of those "plot critical" characters.

Or, if the game lets me, I don't bring the "if this person dies, you lose" character with me.

StarCraft 1 and Brood War had that issue.  They would frequently give you fairly strong "Hero" units that were pretty badass and then tell you "If they die, you lose the mission".  So, what did I do with them?  I threw them in the back of the base where they are hardest to get to and promptly forgot they existed.  In missions that required me to haul them to areas to do whatever they wanted, I made sure to clear absolutely everything out and then let them walk there while I did the next segment of mission.

If you have characters that can end the game merely by dying, you're essentially creating one really long and probably annoying "escort mission".

I had a wonderful idea! You could make all enemies have 5% death rate on their regular attacks! And add instant death skills to all mage enemies on the game *u*

Sounds fun! <3

Jokes aside;

Summarized my thoughts on the subject. However I can't see how wouldn't it work if done right! I'd say to go straight for it if it's your cup of tea. Just remember to ask yourself first if it's adding or subtracting to the game. (this is really subjective) and make what you want to! :D

You know, if the players had the same 5% KO and instant kill skills it might work for a really tense and difficult game. Though revival items would have to be really cheap for the player to have any prayer of success.

All kidding aside now, I think it comes down to is the system fair enough that the player feels he or she has a chance to win the game with this system in place? The Persona games and most Shin Megami games did this, where if the main character was KO'd you got a game over, and I felt it worked pretty well due to the fact that usually if the main character did die, it was because you did something dumb in battle, or were over your head, or took an risky chance and it didn't work as you wished (well, except for some of the older Shin Megami games, those were just sadistic).

In fact, Persona 4 did this a little better by letting you earn the ability to have your party members take the hit what would have KO'd you. I felt that really worked well in my opinion.

I've found that it never, ever works out well to introduce permadeath for characters in any kind of remotely story-driven game.  As the creator you end up having to put so much more work in for so little effect that the player can actually see.  If you spend fifteen or twenty years building your game it's entirely possible you could make the whole "literally anyone can die" thing work, I guess.

I'm also personally not a fan of the "need to keep Party Member X alive at all times" thing.  It can add a strategic wrinkle but it also distorts battle priorities too highly, and in a rather unfun, often random way.  A better system might be to have 0 HP equal KO and further turns/damage eventually kill a character, and having any character actually killed would be a Game Over.

If the player character or the narrator die permanently, then that's a game over.

Well if I'm correct, what you're talking about is pretty much the earlier Fire Emblem games. Perma death all round, but if the MC dies (Marth most of the time I believe) it's a Game Over. For a story driven game, it work but for a character drive game-- I don't know how I feel about that.

In games like Fire Emblem, the "perma death" usually just results in players savescumming.  Save, if someone dies, reload.  So, any work put into the game by devs to make "death impactful" really only impacts the game by having players restart the game when they don't get optimal results.

I played Awakening on Newcomer mode but it still frustrated me so much that it would give me a Game Over when I lost Chrom or the main unit, because when I was out training my new units, I'd have Chrom there for backup and he'd end up getting KO'd and it would frustrate me so much. 

I hate permadeath, because I'm not very strategic. 

You make a fantastic point, Mai Tai.

A lot of people savescum at one point or another in RPGs, even in those with save points.

The small problem in using Fire Emblem as a reference is that , you can only have a permanent save before/after a battle. It works exactly like a save point.

If one of your character died during the battle, of which you may have played an hour or two already, you would have to decide if your time is worth restarting that particular battle just to, maybe, prevent that character from getting killed.

Every game has a criteria on what will cause a gameover. If your main character dies, it's gameover. If all your characters die, it's gameover. It depends on how you implement the system.

If everyone followed one set way of creating a game and determining the mechanics, there would be no innovation or variety in games.

This. No matter what mechanic you implement, someone is going to love it and someone is going to hate it. Persona 3 and 4 have it that if the main character dies, game over. Some are fine with it (like me) and others hate it to death.

I think the biggest thing devs do wrong with the "perma death" is that they're trying to make death impactful without realizing a fantastic way to do that:

If death is part of your game, it needs to be unavoidable.  As in, story related, must happen, savescumming won't save the character.  Or, if you don't prefer that method of doing it, then you need to have story events only roll out particular ways if you have dead characters.  No, I don't mean, "so and so is missing, so dialogue is gone or they talk about the death".  I mean, maybe another character isn't able to be recruited if Joe Blow is still alive.  Maybe the death of Joe Blow leads the party to understanding how the big bad's superweapon works.

Basically, it needs to be much more than something that negatively affects the player.  Players might possibly let Joe Blow die if they think the rewards are worth it, or if they want to try out how the game plays without them.  If death is always a punishment or always results in a gameover...  Well...  You're gonna have a metric crapload of savescumming and players utilizing game mechanics to simply mitigate frustration instead of play tactically.

Some mechanics are universally reviled.  Some mechanics would be atrocious if mis-executed.

I'm probably going to implement some way of checking to see if an actor (any character) has a Zero-HP state for too long before declaring a Game Over.  Of course, if all actors have a Zero-HP state simultaneously, I'll declare a game over.

No permadeath.

I had considered the possibility of recruiting "generics," but it raised too many problems on its own.  So, elite hero party only, just like any other RPG.

This reminds me of Valkyrie Profile. In that game, you had 4 party members: 3 einherjar and the Valkyrie. Since the einherjar needed the valkyrie to materialize, it'd be a game over if she's dead for more than 3 turns. It was tense and cool.

The backstory I was thinking of wasn't going to be that complicated:  the narrator of the game is one of your party members.  He's telling his children your (the player character's) story.  Kind of like Dragon Age II, in which Varric is retelling Hawke's (the player character) story.

NAtURAL DOCtRINE played like this.  There was no such thing as reviving the fallen, so if anyone died it would be an automatic game over. However...

I'm not a huge fan of this type of gameplay, though.  I lost quite a few battles because I had one of my squishy units in the wrong spot and they got gunned down, thus giving me an instant game over.

Persona 4 was kind of an odd one.  While it's game over if the main character dies, you're provided with multiple ways to prevent it, such as having other character jump in to defend him or these items that block instant death.  Although, at the same time, why can Yukiko revive my allies but she can't cast it on me?