Registered Member #279
Joined: 4:17:59 pm GMT 09/25/04
Posts: 5460
I didn't play Champions (nor even Champions Online), but I did play City of Heroes. In that game, death was called "Defeat", and a defeated player would either be helped up by a party member (the spells were like raise or resurrect though) or respawn to the hospital. The lore said you carried a medical teleporter transponder that would whisk you off to the hospital just in time.
The idea caught me though, that there could be more than one way to defeat an enemy apart from reducing their hit points to zero. Conceptually, I thought of there being three pools of points which could be attacked in different ways. For instance, one could be defeated through bodily injury and possibly death, or one could be restrained (common in superhero trope to be caught and tied up, for instance) after being being made unable to fight back through exhaustion, literal capture, or mind-control. And then, one could flee.
In my concept, fleeing would be a group pool of points and represent a critical morale failure leading to panic and retreat; when it got low enough, the morale of the whole team would fail and you'd be forced to run away. It would also be set up such that an enemy could not do this to you unless they intended to allow you to leave. And once leaving the scene, the mission or task at hand would be over; no instant regrouping and trying again. It's not easy to see how all this could work with players, but I could see it as interesting ways to defeat intelligent enemies such as criminal mobs in a superhero MMO.
[ The Island of Thain ]
Defeat Short of Death