An old permadeath thread I was able to dig up:

Perma-Death and Continuity

My own personal vision of an MMO featuring permadeath is a flight simulator MMO (ignoring, for the moment, technical limitations) where players control airborne beings. These beings can grow by eating from one of the many food sources available to them (herbivore), but they can grow even faster by eating other beings (carnivore). Death is permanent, but, even though the game aims to create a certain bond between the player and the airborne being he controls, the core of the game is the flight simulation, and death means the player has the opportunity to fly around with a new being, one that may fly faster, or turn quicker, or fly higher, etc.

What if the player was something like an aura? He could then incarnate a character (from a specific species and gender) and as he grew up he could specialize in some profession. But depending on his species, he would get some lifespan. Some species could just last for a month, others 3 months, others 1 year, and so on.

So, there would be 2 kinds of permadeath: natural causes and due to damage.

When the character dies the aura is released and the player could chose another being to incarnate. Yes, the player would lose all his possessions but maybe he could retain some aura-related skills.

This is something along the lines of a famous quote from Gandalf: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

So basically, everyone dies eventually. But when "reborning" the player could just chose a completely diferent character, go live to a whole new part of the world and evolve in a completely diferent way. Or he could just do the same thing all over, although no 2 games would ever be the same.

I think this would be great for the strategy and replayability of a game.

This is just a brainstorming of course... designing a (good) game around this would take months.

Quote:

Tetris. Minesweeper. Snake.

While you do start over in those, each game lasts at most a few minutes.

Quote:

Original post by Daniel Miller While you do start over in those, each game lasts at most a few minutes.

Rogue?

Here are my thoughts...

When a player fights he gets
a) knocked out - revived in a few minutes or by another player

b) die- requires another play to be ressurected, the longer you are dead the more you wrot. Players will be rewarded for resurecting you and will have ways of finding dead people. If your body wrots to much you are resurrected as a skeleton -> A whole different experience, then you die again and are reincarnated.
You loose very little (or nothing) when resurected.
If you do not wish to wait for someone to ressurect you, you can reincarnate yourself back at the nearest town.

When you reincarnate you keep 5% of your stats and your wealth. These stats will then stay with you forever. The next time you reincarnate you get
5% PreviousStats + 5% CurrentStats
next time it is
5% Stats-2 + 5% Stats-1 + 5% stats.
etc. (this is a simplified version which merely illustated the idea)

This way even if you are dying you are still building a character. Its like you have your base character and your current character. The base character is like an combination of all your previous lives.

I think this would be very interesting.

I think permadeath would work very well with this idea: Bloodline System for MMORPGs.

As for the marrige, I believe it was suggested in the Bloodline thread that you would purchase (in a sense) spouses.

-Greven

I think under particular circumstances, permanent death can work in a MMORPG.

Below are some thoughts based on personal experiences, and some assumptions based on somewhat biased opinion. B)

(I should note that I am not as 'hardcore' a roleplayer as those types that might engage in LARPing, however I have always appreciated RPGs for the "realism in roleplay" sense.)

- It's my belief that the current host of MMORPGs currently on the market very likely treat permanent death as a direct hit to product sales; thus any team working on a commercial game, who is at the mercy of their funders' pocketbooks (e.g. all of them!), would stand to veto such a feature, for fear of being overwhelmed by customer support grievances.

- Many players who oppose permadeath may or may not be 'roleplayers', but rather simply 'players in a RPG'. I have been part of online roleplaying communities for years now, and many of the players with whom I closely associated 'roleplaying' in its purest sense (e.g. actors who can hold up a role for the sake of the roleplay environment as opposed to personal gain) supported a balanced perma-death system.



Now, if a perma-death system were implemented, what if the following criteria were in place? Would perma-death be deemed 'fair'?

- Each character race should be assigned an average age span (e.g. humans live to 2d20+60, elves live to 5d4+800, etc).

- Upon character creation, a private variable is stored on each character denoting how many days until he/she dies of old age (based on racial age span). Once this day is reached, the character dies of natural causes, and may not continue to live for any reason. (Perhaps in some game settings, a character could use magic or technology to become immortal, e.g. becoming a lich, cloning oneself, transplanting one's brain to a mechanical body, storing a body in a stasis tube to extend one's lifespan, etc)

- Violent character death in the game comes in three (arguable) forms: death due to accumulated wounds to the body, separation of the spirit from the body (body-snatching? possession?), and utter obliteration of the body (e.g. falling into a live volcano or pool of industrial-strength acid, being slowly digested in a pit of Carkoon, etc).

- A body must be transported through physical means, to a resurrection site (temple, hospital ER, Sick Bay, or whatever), before it can be recovered.

- Each time a resurrection occurs, unless the process is performed by deific means, the resurrection process takes some sort of toll on the user. In the AD&D 2nd edition rules system, a character's Constitution usually ranged from 3-18, resurrection permanently cost 1 Constitution point, and a character could not be resurrected if Constitution drops below 2.

- The resurrection cost is also high. Players who are good may be sequestered to perform tasks on behalf of the resurrecting temple. Evil characters might only be resurrectable at 'evil temples'.

- A reporting system in the game for Griefers who players suspect may be jeopardizing their play because of frequent repeat-kills, unsanctioned PvP, etc. (This is subject to much debate and argument, so I'm going to leave this to the reader's personally-preferred interpretation!)



I think that, with these specifications in place, a perma-death system could become integrated into a MMORPG in a fair and logical manner. However, I think that system admins would have integration difficulties if:

- The game server/community is already established. Players don't like change, and this is the mother of all change!

- The player-base is generally immature, or views "realism in roleplay" as a threat to fun.

- The players are not made full aware of all the options that are available to them in terms of resurrection, limited lifespan, etc.



I suspect that, with this sort of system, many RPG mooks will pick the longest-lived race out of the desire to get the most out of their characters, however if the races are balanced properly, it should even out over time.


Any comments?

If permadeath were a feature in an MMORPG, in my opinion player killing should not be a trigger for it. Talk about exploitation. In the end I think it all boils down to this: Most players don't want their level 47 character that they've worked on day and night for three months to suddenly die.

This is such a great topic. I do think that perma-death would work great in an MMO if done properly.

The main thing is that the game shouldn't require the sheer amount of time that current MMOs require when leveling characters. Leveling in a PD game would need to be much faster. Of course the problem arises about how to keep your subscribers interested to keep paying those monthly fees.

As far as PKers go, you would definitely have to implement a different detriment from being killed by or killing another player. This could be done by limiting certain zones, level ranges, etc. One of my favorites was in Ultima Online where you could 'donate' coin for a reward for killing the PKer. Some sort of level range would need to be implemented to stop griefing. Also, I think it should be possible for a level 1 character to get a 'lucky shot' in and be able to kill a top level player. Unfortunately, that isn't conducive to making players happy if they have to watch out for some low level thief ready to backstab them when they go into town to sell.

Even perma-death needn't be permanent. Perhaps when you die you go to the Afterlife where you will receive a 'resurrection quest' that must be completed in a certain amount of time. There is numerous ways of cheating death that can be implemented and all of them should be difficult and time consuming. This would also be a great way to get people together for a group.

Like what has been said, some very serious thought and designing would need to be done to pull of PD effectively without ruining the player's experience and keep them paying that monthly fee.

Also, the 'game world' needs ALOT of work. I'm tired of the typical world where X monster spawns in Y location or that bandit camp that's been bothering travelers never seems to move.

Happy Coding

Death is too much of a common outcome to postulated solutions. If someone tries something and it turns out to be a stupid idea, they're dead and they don't get their character back (as someone had stated before).

I thought I ranking structure might do better than just levels, but then again you are really doing the same thing.

See, instead of just saying "well he's level 30" you would say instead "He fought at that one battle when so and so decided to open the gate to hell on that little town" and "Remember when the orcs were transformed into death knights? He was part of the party that killed them"

this would really create an awesome world in that a lot would have to be going on, but it's a thought.