Roster Management 2

Wizardry V was a game I had on the Super Nintendo when I was a kid. It was a 1st person view dungeon crawl style game where you built a party of 6 adventurers and then explored a dungeon. Every so many steps you'd encounter monsters, kill them, and level up. Pretty standard RPG fare, right?

Well, one of the things with the game was your party wasn't fixed. You rolled up a bunch of characters in the tavern and made a party from 6 of them, but you could always go back and roll a new character and mix/match. Decide you really do need a thief? No need to restart the whole game, just make a level 1 thief and have him tag along for a while. Eventually he'll level up enough to be useful!

One of the quirks of the game is there wasn't really an easy way to resurrect dead characters. One of your 6 guys dies early on? Lug his corpse back to town, visit the tavern, and reroll a new dude to replace him. Alternatively you could pay a bunch of money to the temple and they'd rez him for you. Or at least, they'd cast the rez spell. It had a decent chance of failing. A failed rez didn't just mean your character remained dead. No, it meant he got reduced to ashes. You couldn't cast rez on a pile of ashes, sadly. Clerics (either high level in your own party or in the temple in town) could cast a super rez spell for a ludicrous amount of money to bring someone back from ashes. Hopefully. Sometimes that would fail too, in which case your character was lost forever. Oops.

The 'best' part is what happened when your whole team died in the dungeon. Their corpses and all their stuff just stayed where they died. Want to rez them? Better bring a new team into the dungeon to drag their corpses back to town. Oh, but it's not quite that simple, since corpses occupy party slots still. So you'd need to take five new characters down and drag back the corpse of one of your old party members. Rez him (hopefully!) and sub back down to 5 people to go back for the next guy.

Just to be clear, in order to get your 6 high level characters back you need to roll 5 new characters and level them to the point where they can succeed where your initial 6 failed. Not just to the point where they might succeed but where they will succeed 6 times. Yeah. Oh, and unless you remembered where you died you were screwed. You had to go back to the exact right square and search for their corpses. Rage quit for a week or two and coming back wasn't really feasible. Generally when this happened I just stopped playing.

But eventually I sat down and beat it. I lost my whole party several times on that play through but it turned out after you build a second team to save the first team once it's not so daunting to do it again. I didn't have 6 characters so much as I had 12 and I made sure to be really really careful when doing a corpse run. (Maybe I had more, I don't really remember the specifics. There was a weird aging mechanic too so sometimes you had to cycle out a guy anyway.)

Imagine if the tavern in that setup didn't just have level 1 characters. Imagine if when my team of level 10 guys died I could go pick up 6 new level 8 dudes from town. Spend a little time leveling them up and I can go rescue my level 10 corpses. My adventure gets set back for sure, but the scale isn't nearly as bad. I don't need to invest a full amount of time getting back on top, just 10-20% depending on where my team died. A penalty, but not a crippling one.


Relating to yesterday's topic, my single player World of Warcraft game hates permanently losing a guy because I have to reinvest from scratch to replace him. My multiplayer game hates it, but not as much. The 'tavern' here is full to the brim with vaguely comparable replacements. Personality clashes, strategy training, and the risk they have strafing as a major part of their rotation certainly still exist so there's still a pretty substantial penalty for losing a raider but it's not as crippling as having to start straight from scratch. If you have a good reputation as a guild and have made decent progression then your odds of getting decently skilled and geared recruits goes way up. (Back in TBC we were able to recruit a lot of decent people cross-server because we were fairly decently progressed. Wrath it was a lot harder since most people thought 25 mans were more important than 10 mans. We'll see in Cata if the stigma goes away from that direction or not.)

As such, I think the risk of random deaths is less of a factor than worried about yesterday. Random absences definitely still are and you want to avoid having to cancel raids due to insufficient people but proactive recruiting should mitigate a lot of the risks from having people quit.