Retirement

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Characters in Shadowrun Awakened, instead of hitting some arbitrary ceiling of power then being forced to wander around the game world, will be offered a chance to give a positive ending to their experience by retiring.

Game Rules Description

One of unique aspects of the MMO genre is that players can play forever. The convention has always been that the player could play the same character forever; however, the conversion of time in-game into power for the character, it means there must be some limit imposed on the character's progression. In addition, this creates an incentive for the game creators to always increase the power level of the game over time. While it would be possible to arbitrarily cap the amount of karma a Shadowrun character could accrue, the concept of a max level cap is contradictory to the mechanics of Sahdowrun.

The easiest way to short-circuit this tension is to ensure characters do not exist in the game world forever. While death could be considered one solution to eliminating a character, it is definitely a negative consequence. It would be best if there could be a positive consequence that still results in the same turnover of characters. Reflecting on the world of Shadowrun, there is a recurring motif that the individuals who Shadowrun always plan to get out once they have enough money, power, or revenge to last a lifetime. This concept of retiring from the business creates a backdrop for this positive consequence.

The most logical time to offer retirement is at the culmination of a storyline. As the dramatic story arc comes a conclusion, it could offer the character a path out of Shadowrunning and into a better life enjoying the fruits of their labor. For instance, once a lone mercenary has single-handedly saved the Mafia in their war with the Triads, the Mafia could be so thankful the character never needs to solve a problem again. At that point, the character can just walk off into the sunset.

The biggest unknown with this mechanic is exactly what it will take for a player to surrender their character to retirement. It would be best to offer retirement as a choice to the player. It is likely also necessary to create an incentive for the player to retire and disincentives for them to remain in the game once the challenge is gone. Incentives could be a raw increase in starting statistics, a change in initial reputation amongst factions, better initial street cred, and/or access to exclusive abilities or items. Disincentives for staying include diminishing challenge, rewards, and ultimately inability to meaningfully progress (pretty much what happens in most games with a level cap). Since retirement is a choice, it means the player must be offered the choice many times to ensure acceptance, more importantly there must be an escalating reward so each successive offer is more likely to be accepted. If retirement is positively received, then it would make a lot of sense to simply build endings into every storyline, enabling players to have a satisfying conclusions and seamlessly re-enter the world the world in the form of another character.

Technical Implementation

It will be another action applied to a player character that converts the achievements of the current character into advantages for a new character based on a universally applied formula. This formula would need to be easily modified to allow for experimentation and customization.

There will also be a UI element to retirement, whatever mechanism it is that enables players to make choices. This could be easily rolled up into the conversation system, as conversation scripting will have access to myriad capabilities. It could also be presented using a custom UI, perhaps a simple as a popup dialog, that is presented to the user in non-conversational situations.