In another thread, I mentioned and had a chat to some of you guys about a downed mechanic. So I have decided to write up my ideas and suggestions for you guys to give your opinions and own ideas to. Though with the time and effort I would heavily doubt on ever seeing any implementation.
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Why I think a downed system is important - Downed systems I think to a hero game could bring quite the legendary and heroic event/view to encounters, such a mechanic of seeing your comrades gets thrown and downed. Can both inspire fear and enjoyment.
In addition to helping promote characters that add additional aid powers into their pools and players working with each other.
Being Knocked into the State:
Once a characters active heal pool reaches "0" the character depending on the final ability to down them could be thrown from the battle or fall to its defeaters feet, by being thrown for example say "Lord Recluse slammed one of his arms into you, your health hits "0" and you are possibly thrown backwards and go to the floor, you would be knocked into one of the below states and need to be treated by one of your comrades, by ragdolling/throwing a "dead" player from the fight i would suggest that it adds some "realism" to the final force that hit them and makes it not stupidly hard to revive them.
My System Ideas: The Mechanic could be broken into three different forms of being downed.
Downed - A downed state is a state where the character is still awake but wounded enough to prevent them from getting back on their feet, from this form of the mechanic my idea would be that the character can use abilities and some characters would by having "stim" type abilities be able to get back on their feet themselves, In addition I would suggest you being able to heal people back onto their feet from such a state, In addition I would suggest being in this state that a character could still use some abilities. Being in the downed state long enough would put you into a "KO" state.
Knocked Out - Knocked Out status is a state where the downed character can't perform an action other than self types, The non-passive active abilities remain on in this state and when the character is brought back, No casted actions to get them back on their feet take a shorter time than being "Critical", however things for example like "stim" abilities could be used to get them awake and back on their feet.
Critical - A character that is put in a critical state, is in theory "dead" they would require treatment by a revive type spell or self-revive type spell to get back in the fight other than a player spending a significant amount of type in a interrupt-able channel to get them back on their feet. Being Critical would remove any non-passive abilities and those abilities would have to be activated again upon being "revived".
Other Interactions:
I would suggest the ability to dispatch a character in these states, this would be a channel action similar to reviving someone and could be interrupted. This would mean a player character returning to the hospital or the death of that NPC.
Stim effects would be from abilities like Stimulant from the Medicine power pool, these sub effects could be given as additional side effects from other abilities.
Downed mechanics could be used to allow players to make a decision on if you kill, capture or spare an enemy that could affect your honour/law/violence ratings.
This goes with the idea of options defeating a NPC foe.
The idea that an NPC would cry out "I give up" puts them in the Downed state. Then if your character violent he/she/it could KO them or Critical Kill them.
That is if I'm understanding you correctly your giving the NPC foes the same options Players would have. Capture(Downed), Knockout or Maim (KO), or Kill.
This could also increase the stories. A foe who a trouble maker wouldn't go for a killing move where a Psychopath killer wouldn't be satisfied with just downing or knocking out a foe. For example, Patchwork is a trickster type who would use traps and binds to Down a hero or villain in her way, she wouldn't go for a kill strike. Where Scorpion agents would be more open to all options depending on orders some might want to capture a hero where some operations it kill on sight. The Deadly 7 you are more likely to be Killed rather then downed after all they are the DEADLY 7 for a reason.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
I would like the NPC's to have the same options to dispatch us or not, however I could see that causing AI issues.
For example such a thing would suit my character type that im currently planning, hes a mercenary he completes his contract to the letter, I may want to capture rather than kill or just put a bullet between their eyes.
I agree with your above statements @RottenLuck
GW2 has a downed mechanic much like what is being discussed here, so this idea isn;t totally new or owned by the original poster, as far as I can tell.
Also, to the original poster, I would point out that if you want to allow the devs to even consider using any original ideas you might have posted here in the forums, there's a forum thread specifically for legally granting them permission to use stuff you've come up with. If you do not do that, they'll likely avoid anything you suggest or describe here as "your idea" which might not have been thought of or used elsewhere by now, for fear that it is truly original, yours, and that they'd be subject to legal action by you against them in the event that they do take the idea up and run with it.
The forum thread to grant them that permission is here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/intellectual-property-ip-release-form-volunteers
Anyway, in GW2, much of this is already happening. In that game, when you get defeated, you are knocked prone, can't get up, can't move, the world goes all greyscale to you, you have a small temporary bar of hit points (in red, which pops off the screen given that everything else is in greyscale now), and you have 4 skills that you can use. Those skills are different for different classes. My Elementalist gets a self heal (which I think everyone gets), which is interruptible and thus can be bad if you're still near a monster that will keep attacking you. He also has a ranged attack, which if he manages to defeat a monster with it, he gets back up with like half hit points. He also has a "relocate your corpse to a more convenient place" power, which in his case is "gaseous form", and it's pretty short ranged. At the end of it, you're still down, but in a slightly different place, so you can use it to get out of AoE damage wells and the like. Lastly he get's a power that can briefly immobilize a monster. Also, in GW2, everyone can revive everyone else, if they try to. Whenever you are near the body of a downed (or even "out") player, you may hit "F" to begin reviving them. This is interruptible and takes time, and you can watch their health bare fill back up as you do it When it gets to "full" they get back up with half hit points. It takes longer to revivie a person who is "out" as opposed to just "down", but it can be done. There are still powers that can revive people "better" than that, meaning faster or instant revive with more or full hit points, maybe a buff, etc. Monsters DO NOT get the "downed" mechanic in GW2 and I personally don't think they should in CoT. It's fine to have some bosses, giant monsters, arch-villains, etc that can respawn or regenerate or whatever, but the rank and file mobs (minions, lieutenants, and even run-of-the-mill bosses) should just become corpses when you defeat them, in my opinion. In CoX some of the Freak Tank bosses had a "get back up" ability. It was fun and flavorful for that one type of mob, but I wouldn't give the "downed" thing to literally every mob just to give players a million chances a day at being altruistic and merciful or cruel and vindictive.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I like the idea of giving every class a slightly different set of power they can use while downed. You could even tie those to the primary and secondary power sets and make them somewhat "on theme" for the power set in question. If you take a healing set, you get a self heal that works faster than normal, if you take a debuff set, you get an attack that also debuffs, or maybe a debuff that heals you, etc. Blasty types could get an AoE that does damage to nearby foes by doing pulses of DoT as you get healed and/or doing one big explosion burst for damage when you go from "down" to "out".
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Thanks for the heads up, yes I myself played Guild Wars 2 so i made a few thoughts regarding that but I think adding into the mechanic being ragdolled away and also mixing each different form or type of being downed in how that affects your active powers etc.
Thank you for your contribution, yes I think all enemies it would be a bit crazy to have them all go down but named enemies and bosses etc it could make an interesting dynamic.
EDIT: The reason i want to have it for all creatures/enemies is so someone can play the more pacifist no kill route.
I would suggest that each primary and secondary has a single down type ability and then a number of the pools could have an ability for being downed in them, I guess that ability would tend to be weaker but usuable in the downed state and one going out with a bang ability.
To go with the pacifistic approach thing for a sec, the defeated mobs in CoT were pretty much always considered "knocked out" and not "cut into pieces or burned to vapor", so as such you're really just "defeating" the badguys, not outright "killing" any of them.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
But for example if you use a rocket launcher on a level one pleb minion hes gotta be dead you have to look at it like that, In addition we are going to have both Heroes and Villains and possibly the ability to be sort of a freelancer depending on how these things like morality systems work.
Yeah technically no one got "brutally murdered" in CoH. Instead everyone was simply "arrested" or "knocked out" even if they were vaporized by an atom bomb. It's kind of like the same politically correct language some organized paintball fields like to use - they don't like their customers saying they "killed each other with paintguns" as much as "tagged each other with paint markers" so people don't get too bent out of shape about shooting each other.
This all reminds me of that classic Futurama episode where President Nixon was trying to "fix" an episode of G.I. Zapp to make it less violent:
[youtube]hWFVTIYRf-k[/youtube]
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
What about people who just want to massacre every enemy they meet then, maybe we have to be inclusive ;P
I just want to thank Lothic for linking that G.I. Zapp clip. Funniest thing I've seen in a long time.
If you look, one of the rioters' signs says "Tee Many Cartoonies" LOL!
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising