Yesterday I was trying to convince a friend of mine to include permadeath in his MUD and I told him that most hardcore RP'ers prefer to have permadeath, but I don't really know for sure, so here goes.

Note: I'm not necessarily talking about 1 death and you're out. In fact I personally prefer that there be some type of resurrection spell(s) so that any given death may or may not be permanent. So if you prefer any particular "flavor" of permadeath, post that too.

I voted 'maybe', meaning, 'it depends on the theme of your mud.'
I think most of the pro-permadeathers prefer it because they find it more realistic. On a mud with a realistic theme, it would be silly to meet the person you killed. But, in some fantasy themes, it can be handled well to make sense.
For example, in xyllomer, religion is a big part of the roleplay. Resurrections are just part of the many manifestations of divine power and rewards for faith that you see everyday. (Well, not every day unless you've got some serious issues). So if permadeath were put in, I think that the world would definitely lose something.
In general, I feel that if you can make resurrections make sense ic'ly, you should use them, because permadeath hinders gameplay somewhat. But then, I'm only 80% roleplayer, so the other 20% cares about silly stuff like that.

There is. When a character dies, you force the player to create a new one - but allow the player to carry over their experience points to spend on the new character. Thus the player now has a new character, with a new name, appearance, occupation, etc - but they're at the same level of power as the previous character (although that "power" might now be in a different field). Thus when Bubba the Barbarian is killed in combat, his player is able to create a Boffo the Bard, who's magical and musical abilities are at the equivilent rating as Bubba's fighting skills had been. This is also a good way of restricting advanced character concepts to experienced players only.

Having experienced both, I have to say I much prefer permadeath for a veriety of reasons.

The first, is that it just makes sense. I mean - okay I start my character as being 20 years old...and the world goes through however many game-years while I'm playing...and after a few years of playing, she's now 80 years old and is more powerful than she was when she started? That's just silly. 80 year old people break their hips, they don't go hunting.

The second, is that it promotes roleplay. How many people shrug off death because it's just a hit to their exp, no big deal? How many people start changing their focus from staying alive for RP purposes, to staying alive to avoid an exp drain?

The third, is because it makes me REALLY think hard about my character's behavior and reactions to her environment. She's not gonna just go off to the desert so I can check out her new skills, even though it doesn't make RP sense that she do so - because the moment I leave the gate, it could be the end of my character.

The fourth, is because there's nothing quite as awesome as sitting at your desk and staring incredulously at your screen during an assassination scene, with tears rolling down your eyes while your heart is pounding wildly, thinking two things at the same time: "WOAH - she's dead. I can't believe she's f-ing dead." and "Okay so what character am I gonna try next!"

The main advantage of the typical (RPI) permadeath system - as well as the realism factor - is that it helps avoid stagnation. There is little point in assassinating the king if he's just going to respawn back at the temple and order your execution.

The main disadvantage of the typical (RPI) permadeath system is that most players dislike losing all the time and effort they've put into their character.

Allowing a set number of deaths therefore has the same disadvantages as regular permadeath, but without the advantages; you'll eventually lose all of your hard work, but equally you cannot assassinate your clan leader, king, or whoever, and expect to get away with it.

It's called "internal consistency". A mud should be consistent and believable within its own rules of reality. It might not be "realistic" to throw fireballs at someone in real life, but it is within the themes of many muds. Equally, while it may be realistic within some themes to be instantly and automatically reincarnated every time you die, within most it is not. This is also why it is generally undesirable to have the smurf village, the dwarven daycare centre and Mega-City One areas within a roleplaying mud - they are not internally consistent with each other (nor within the themes of most muds). Now you could well say "If you want realism stop playing games and go live life", but the fact is that most roleplayers would find such inconsistency anathema to an immersive roleplaying environment. As such, they're more likely to just leave your game and go find someone else's, which is not the sort of result most mud owners are aiming for.

IThe following is an opinion. Mine. I do not intend criticism of anyone who feels differently.

I admit, I don't understand the allure of holding on to characters that should be dead. The idea of investing in a pc makes no sense to me. The thought of starting over doesn't bother me. After all, you can't "win" an rpi.

I need perma death. If a mud offers alternatives to a permananet and final end I can't bring myself to play. Or to even consider playing. This, needless to say, severely curtails my options.

You could just delete your character when you die...

It's not the same. I want that immediacy. I don't want a choice. I don't want anyone else to have a choice. I think no death or a choice makes the whole thing feel contrived.

Some intriguing ideas for rolling over xp/skills to new characters after one dies, but I am not sure if it solves the problem.
Is that time and effort invested in a char that people are worried about losing what they spent earning xp and learning skills, or what they spent developing their character socially? We are talking about RPI's here.
For me, when I've tried permadeath muds, I've been frustrated when my character dies, because I had (what I thought) was a good idea, and plans for the character that I hadn't a chance to see to fruition. Or as characters grow older, they get more complex, more interesting. It's really sad to lose them then. The xp and skills are just busy work, or part of what the character does because who she is.

Exactly my point, it is sad to lose them. It's sad to see other people's PC's die. I want to be sad. I want to cry and laugh and sweat and have to make each moment matter. It you can't lose them, what's the point. Might as well just play the sims. If you can't die, what stops it from just being a big chat room?

Well said, and that about sums up the way I feel.

With permadeath, you have to -care-. It's not just the code working, instead you create a -character- with a -life- and -feelings-.

Without it, it's just numbers and words, rushing about killing things. You die, **** it, just get your friends to help you get a new suit. That's not how I want to Roleplay.

The solution here would prevent you losing everything. You'd still lose the social development of your character in terms of interaction with other players - and therefore, death would still be a serious issue. However you would at least salvage some of your work, so players wouldn't feel as if they'd lost everything that they'd spent the last few hundred hours working on. Furthermore, even from a social point of view, as the son or daughter of your previous character you'd have good grounds to retain relationships with those you knew in your previous "life". From a game design point of view, it would encourage players not to simply quit for good when they die.

I'm not sure I see this as a solution to the whole problem though.

First - this could be abused by anyone who is "tired" of their old character.  Don't want to play Bubba the Barbarian, just kill him off and start up Reggie the Ranger.  And since all of us game designers know game balance is very hard to attain - imagine a problem in design where certain levels are easier for different classes because of skills and spells.  Any Industrious player with a brain will abuse it by "changing" his class at the "required" level to be able to level faster.  I know we could code in "safeties" for this ... but it's the principle that lacks I believe.

Second - I don't really think that type of system addresses the issue of permadeath vs. "resurrection" anyways.  Permadeath offers finality in it's most extreme.  The character is done.  The there is no undoing it.  The time you spent on him/her/it, while not "lost" perse (based on what you learned and the fun you gained while playing), is over.  This character can never be used again.  Allowing players to "recreate" based on their last character's level and exp while an inconvenience, doesn't really offer the "loss" that permadeath does.  I think the one post in this thread hit it spot on - permadeath "forces" you to care more about the character than any sort of resurrection system.

Now I agree - that spells and a deity system where resurrection CAN happen, but is not guaranteed, is the best.  This is what I am coding into my Mud.  This allows for a higher caliber of Roleplaying, AND offers a system where dying isn't just an inconvenience.

One last point (in this long ramble), I think it is important to note, that no one system is better than the others.  I feel it comes down to which type of player do you want to attrach.  "You can't please all the people all the time.  But you can please some people most of the time."  Which 'people' do you want to please most of the time?

I believe that one of the biggest advantages of permadeath in a PvP system is the ability of the populace to eliminate jerks who need it. The ability to keep some or all of your skills just obviates the whole point of permadeath.

When having character generations, I would actually suggest that neither parent be the one to play the kid. Rather, let the parents set a total time played or highest level reached, such that any player who dies and is above that level or time can choose to play the kid (except for the parents, who are completely restricted from playing the kid.) That way, you maintain character separation and ensure that the kid will be roleplayed as an individual rather than as puppet of his/her parents. Whether friends with the parents are also friends with the kid or not will depend on how much the kid takes after his parent's likeable characteristics, or on how much the players feel they have a duty to their friends' children.

It really depends on what the problem is from your point of view. In my eyes, the problem solved by regular permadeath is that of character stagnation, while the problem caused by regular permadeath is the fact that you throw away all of the work the player has put into their character (which, by extension, will result in a small playerbase - an issue which goes against the goals of most mud owners).

IMO that's not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, in my implementation I actually provided a "retire" command which allowed people to start as a new character which they wouldn't previously have had access to (much like a remort system). However if it's an issue with you, then you could choose to only give a percentage of exp back to the new character, or prevent them from changing back to a previously selected character concept, or limit them in some other way.

From a conceptual point of view, I don't believe in dismissing an idea on the basis of poor implementation, particularly when the poor implementation applies to other parts of the mud. If your mud has such poorly balanced classes, then that's something you should deal with before trying developing anything else - indeed, it's something you should have worked on in the design phase, before even beginning with the coding.

Well obviously not, as that's the very point it's supposed to address. The real question then becomes "do you want your players to suffer the biggest loss possible?" - and if the answer is yes, then obviously regular permadeath is the solution to your problem. As each mud is different, and each mud owner has a different vision of what they're trying to achieve, there can be no generic solution.

But for many people, the objective isn't to create the greatest sense of loss possible, but instead to create a sense of realism in respect to the exact same character springing back to life after being chopped to pieces several seconds earlier.

I'm not sure where the "I agree" came from - I've never suggested resurrection, and I've certainly never suggested that any system could be the "best" (because there can be no "best" solution to a problem which varies from mud owner to mud owner). Indeed, such a system is completely inappropriate for many themes, including that of the muds I've developed.

How does it allow for a higher caliber of roleplaying? In my opinion, your solution still retains the main disadvantage of permadeath, without the main advantage. I can plot for months to assassinate the king, so that I can put my own puppet ruler on the throne - but as soon as I do, he can just be resurrected, at which point I'm right back where I started. But on the other hand, for most players death will be permanent, and so many of them will quit when they die and not come back.

I absolutely agree. There are many issues to take into consideration when designing any feature, and each individual solution should address these in its own way.

Hardly - the "jerks" are those who are the least likely to be bothered by permadeath, as they care little for their characters. If you want to improve the process of eliminating jerks, you'd be better off screening new players more carefully.

Hmm, in Live Role Play (which is a effectively a huge role play enforced MUD) there is permadeath. One of the unbreakable rules is that dead is dead and gone - you can never be the same again (although you can be raised as unliving that unliving will not be the same person as the living one).

On the other hand though it is hard to die permenantly unless someone is really trying. Virtually everything has some way to heal it and people tend not to wander around alone.

The result is a good balance, you have to be stupid or unlucky to die - but if you do die then you are dead and gone.

Another interesting point is that you gain xp for being there and in character - whether you go out and slay monsters or just hang around in the bards guild and play music.

Actually, the jerks care very much for their characters, at least for their characters' xp and skills. Those are the things that allow them to be jerks and pick on the characters who lack the xp and skills. At least, that's who I think are jerks.  A system that retains the skills and xp accomodates the jerks, and hurts (or helps?) the hardcore roleplayers.

Putting in permadeath for eliminating jerks allows the players to decide who they don't want and police themselves, instead of the administration deciding for them. So it depends on how much control you want over your playerbase.

This is really an interesting discussion, because permadeath can affect so many aspects of the game.

Those would be what Bartle categorises as "Achievers".

Those would be what Bartle categorises as "Killers".

If you have a "hardcore" roleplaying mud, then the chances are that the good roleplayers are the ones able to achieve the most in-game power, as rewards for their roleplaying efforts. The "killers" however are more likely to focus their lesser amounts of exp purely on combat-oriented skills, and concentrate on developing their player skills in fighting rather than roleplaying.

A standard permadeath system would allow the potential for "jerks" to permanently remove the characters of the "real roleplayers", effectively ruling the mud - and it's generally only the "jerks" which have the skill and the incentive to do so. Allowing players to respend all/some of their exp would ensure that killed "real roleplayers" could come back as tougher combat characters than any of the "jerks" could attain.

I think you'll find it's the other way around (except for the so-called "roleplaying muds" which uses HnS character advancement). If you want the players to be able to police themselves, then you have to ensure that the most powerful characters are owned by the most responsible players.

KaVir
Or that inordinately powerful characters don't exist at all. If 10 people get the jerk alone in a dark alley, they should be able to pummel him even if they're court musicians and he's a soldier.

Stilton

Our system (permadeath) simply ensures that a group of cooperating people will always overcome any individual.

The most powerful individuals, therefore, have always been the ones who are able to influence/control large groups of people.

Griefers do not typically have the ability to be inspiring leaders (or, in the case of MUDs, the ability to convincingly pretend to be an inspiring leader), and are therefore rather brutally "regulated" by the rest of the populace should they prove to be sufficiently annoying to a large number of characters.

It's also orders of magnitude more difficult to develop a characters' skills without help from others.

These two characteristics of the system make it largely self-correcting.

Perhaps Jiles, but you neglect the ooc cheating element. It's easily possible for a buncha buddies to help each other's chars get good and then rule the mud with an iron fist, including killing off any newbies who seem to be getting powerful quickly so their power can't be challenged. And in a system like this, lower skilled chars tend to prefer sucking up to the big guns rather than trying to overthrow them.

This is why in the mud I'm helping with, there'll be positions for gods, filled by people trusted not to totally unbalance the mud. So if it gets to a point where some faction of mortals controls the entire mud, a god could easily take action to rebalance it, whether by causing an earthquake, punishing their followers for being such asses, or backing someone else who doesn't like the way things are going. This is the only way I can think of to lessen the benefits of ooc cheating such that people stop doing it, the problem being of course that with gods running around, the mortals will feel powerless even if they happen to be kings. But oh well, we still have a long time left to develop it all to what it should be.

Then how do you prevent the "jerk" and his buddies from systematically and permanently killing each and every character they dislike, one at a time? Indeed, if a group can always beat an individual, then the "jerk" and his buddies could create new characters for each such killing, making it impossible to know when or where they're going to strike next.

I'm not saying that at all. I'm simply saying that attempting to fix a certain class of cheating (OOC communication) is something that cannot be adequately addressed by in-game mechanics.

We log everything just in case we need to verify facts when presented with allegations of cheating. Actually proving that cheating did take place, however, is next to impossible, even with logs.

As for gods being empowered by players, doesn't that simply exacerbate the hypothetical situation of a group of jerks?

A system like you describe is interesting, and might provide a very unique experience, but, in my opinion, it would be folly to attempt to use it as a mechanism to enforce rules. Punishing players for rules violations is almost certain to be undesirable to the said players, making it among the least desirable courses of action for a "god" whose powers stem directly from what amounts to player popularity.

The way I see it, the players need the gods, and the gods need the players, so ideally there'd be enough checks and balances to make sure everything runs smoothly. Of course this is providing the gods don't start cheating themselves, but if they do then the admin of course can can them.

The way I visualize it, the gods wouldn't punish the cheaters so much as try to dissuade them from their course. At this point in the design, we're unwilling to give gods the ability to straight out kill mortals because of their obviously godlike powers. So the gods basically report what they see to the admin, and try to make things uncomfortable enough for the cheaters that they either stop cheating or stop playing, and if all else fails the admin either punishes the cheaters, or gives the gods permission to get rid of them. So most of the time the punishing of cheaters will look like an IC event (King Fred is under a curse, blahblah) and give real incentive to others to not cheat.

Of course none of this may work, but like I said the thing isn't nearly coded enough to be usable yet anyway, and we may end up totally changing it around by then. But our aim is to keep a buncha jerks from cheating and ruling the mud, and this is all we could think of to fix that problem. If you have other ideas that might actually WORK, feel free to share them. (I don't mean to be cynical here but in my experience only the most blatant cheaters ever get punished, and I aim to change that if I can.)

Well, about the only MUDs that I've run across that are meaningfully devoid of cheating are MUSHes, because everything in a MUSH is cooperative as opposed to competitive.

I really hate to say this, but it is absolutely impossible for an enforcement mechanism (OOC or IC) to eliminate all cheating. Until all players connect to your MUD through some type of remotely securable client (basically requires a TCP like Palladium, which I am strongly opposed to for home systems) there is no way to even guarantee that players aren't plotting their eeeevil schemes on an 8-way IM conference. Even if a TCP does gain widespread implementation in the home, those dastardly players could be exchanging email, talking on the phone, chatting over IRC, or even SSH'ing into a common private linux box and using wall.

Attempting to catch all cheating is an exercise in futility. Designing major MUD systems that have widespread effects specifically to do this will guarantee some very painful disappointments (and likely more than a few grey hairs). We only punish the most blatant cheaters because those are the only times we can actually prove with any meaningful certainty that they were, in fact, cheating. If we relaxed our standards in order to punish more probable cheaters we'd also end up punishing many innocents.

Instead of focusing on catching and punishing cheaters, design your game mechanical systems with the operating assumption that at least half of the playerbase will cheat successfully with every trick in the book and you'll end up with a more robust and enjoyable system for everyone.

Back when I actively played a few HnS MUDs quite a few years ago, I ended up running around with a loose group of PKers who tended to stick to total-pk oriented MUDs simply because they got bored everywhere else, but who also liked to cause a little mayhem in rp/achiever MUDs from time to time.

Since they'd known each other for months or years, they all used IM, chat rooms, or other MUDs with sympathetic admin to devise an attack on a MUD. These attacks could take a day, or extend for months at a time, but the basic plan of attack was as follows:

One player logs, gets a general feel for the current society of the MUD, and befriends a few people on the game. He quickly learns the map layout and fun little tricks from the "explorer" class of people on the MUD, and hooks up with the "social" guys to get a feel for how he can start to undermine the current alliances kept together by the "sages" and other nonsense characters PKers have no use for other than fodder.

Then the posse arrives. They've been given constant updates by the scout as to how to powerlevel quickly, or failing that, how to attain enough power fast enough to start gang-banging some high-level guys to get the equipment to powerlevel to dominate the MUD. Usually, the goal is to dig in with a clan, make it exclusive to the kind of people they want (power-hungry pre-pubes who like to wreck everything in sight) and just take over. They sit outside of safe rooms and scream at the "wimps" who won't leave for fear of death, and meanwhile their clannies amass a huge stockpile of weapons and items necessary to maintain their dominance even through a major clan war.

The point of this is that perma-death is only a big deal for the first week. After that (unless your MUD requires months of work to get a decent character off the ground), perma-death is a minor annoyance, but probably even less of a problem than you'd expect; by the time a player is ready to take the risk of death, he's also got 4 or 5 other characters who always log from completely different IP addresses ready to be brought out quickly in the event of a character death.

Perma-death doesn't get rid of PKers you don't like. It's simply another obstacle that a resourceful PKer will learn to welcome as an asset and then use to his advantage to dominate a MUD.

The only way to get rid of PK mongers is to watch the pbase carefully and stay alert for the trends that severe MUD destruction comes from: a sudden influx of players who don't seem to be interacting with the RP side of the game much, who are quickly amassing power, and who seem to bounce around each other, pairing or grouping up to quickly advance. You see that, you watch it. Take action as soon as the massacre starts, and you may stop it before it gets out of control.

The other posters who said that using in-game measures to get rid of malevolent players was futile were basically correct. Until someone develops a highly advanced AI program to skim along the top of a MUD looking for certain abnormalities in your system and fixing them quickly, only humans have the freedom of will to be able to control a pbase that may or may not be getting out of control.

Perma-death is an RP feature. It should be used for RP purposes, and only for RP purposes. All other attempted uses for the feature will end up in either futility (frustration to the admin) or too much success (frustration for the player). Neither, as KaVir would say, is the usual goal of a MUD administrator.

-Visko

I'm agree with Xerihae. Realism is not the aim of the game. It should be a game with it's own rules. To have or not permadeath is a question of particular world without global answer

The more realism a game has, the more entertaining it can become. I have seen all the other fantasy genres, and nowadays if the world feels and acts real, like virtual npcs and many many scripts that go from simple room echoes to advanced npcs whom will actually hunt down PCs. So the more real you make the mud, and the more rules you apply from real life, the easier things can be, and you won't have huge arguements like perma death, you die irl you're dead forever, no one is coming back, so on a hardcore roleplaying mud, you have to have it - and many other things. And if you don't. Well I will never play there.

-Delerak