I just had an Idea. What if when you die your caracter is gone forever but it can serve as a AI guardian for a new character you make. Kinda like a guardian angel with the same stats and skills as it had before it died. Mabey you can summon it or it can help you at random. Just a thought.

No. MMORPG is a game, not a real life. People play a game for various reasons, and one of them is to be able to repeat things.

If a player wants a legendary status and a permadeath, they can always terminate their character, and for a small fee, get their name on the Legendary Characters book or something.

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Original post by Bezben Focusing just on the in game ones, say two players have a kid, which gets to inherit that kid if their player dies?

They could (a) toss a coin, (b) make two babies.

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I think the game would end up with players making babies almost constantly, or as near as the game would allow.

Restrictions could be imposed. Perhaps you can only have 10 kids at any one time. Or perhaps you can only create a kid when you level up.

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If you do allow perma-death I think you'd really need to come down hard on pkers.

Methinks that if a design needs to come down hard on player killers, that design would be better off without PvP combat.

Well here is my two cents...(exceprts for a MUD GDD I'm putting together)
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Short Summary:
Permadeath is good as long it falls under the category of 'optional'. And, all characters will eventually die permanetly after a certain period of time.

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A character will have a lifespan of 365 days.

A character will take ~150 days at 'Normal' to reach the maximum skill level.
Carebear - ~300 Days
Hardcore - ~60 Days
Permadeath - ~30 Days


* Setting #1 – Carebear
o Ages
o Free Resurrections (except for lost items)
o Skill Gain Rate: 50% of Normal
o Luck Cap - 0
o Divine Favor Cap. 0
o Cannot hold Noble Title
o Cannot Murder

* Setting #2 - Normal
o Ages
o Normal (-2.5% All Skills) Resurrections
o Skill Gain Rate: 100% of Normal
o Luck - 50 (+1 Tier, 25% of the Time)
o Divine Favor Cap. 0
o Can Murder

* Setting #3 - Hardcore
o Ages
o 5 Free Resurrections, then perm-death
o Skill Gain Rate: 250% of Normal
o Luck - 200 (+1 Tier, 100% of the Time)
o Divine Favor Cap. None
o Initial Divine Favor: 25
o Can Murder

* Setting #4 - Permadeath
o Ages
o No Free Resurrections, then perm-death.
o Skill Gain Rate: 500% of Normal
o Luck - 400 (+2 Tiers, 100% of the Time)
o Divine Favor Cap. None
o Initial Divine Favor: 50
o Can Murder

There are two types of player versus player combat, the national level which is covered above, and the personal. Personal combat is battles between groups of players; no matter how heroic your character is there is no way they can fight off a 500+ NPC archers that would be with an army. Personal combat can be legal or illegal and is handled just as any NPC vs. PC fight. Legal Reasons:

* Large Negative Law Score (Equal to 1 Murder)
* Warring Kingdoms
* Warring Guilds
* Consensual

Illegal killing = Murder (A massive Negative Law score penalty, sufficent that ALL NPCs will aggro, except those of the same faction with large negative law scores.)

Each account represents a ‘family’ of characters which all have the same last name. All characters can access each other’s bank accounts, owned property, etc. A family’s last name, once chosen, cannot be changed. For the sake of variety there are various ways to ‘add’ your last name.

* Way #1 – Normal
o <Character Name> (Family Name)
* Way #2 - Attached
o <Character Name>’(Family Name)
* Way #3 – ‘Formal’?
o <Character Name> of (Family Name)

There will be ways to ‘hide’ your identity through a skill and/or Illusion magic.

Characters which can suffer permanent death can have family heirloom(s), up to one per char slot dedicated to Setting #3 or #4 characters. Heirlooms are lost if that character slot is changed to a Setting #1 or #2 character. On the first character’s creation the player receives 1 major power (if Setting #4) and 3 minor powers. Heirlooms are considered as ‘Unique’ items for purposes of magical enchantment. These items also may have a custom name attached to it. The same minor power may not be applied twice.

Divine Favor is granted by the god(s) you believe in (in-game or out of game, who cares?) for their most valued servants. Every (real) day that your character is alive you receive +5 Divine Favor Points. Every time you kill an opposite aligned (pos karma vs. neg karma and/or pos law vs. neg law) player you receive Divine Favor Points. For each axis that you and your victims alignments oppose you receive 5 Divine Favor Points. Your Divine Favor gain is TRIPLED if your opponent gets unlimited resurrects (Setting #1, #2) for that character.

Free Resurrect (at nearest shrine) – 100 Divine Favor Full Heal – 65 Divine Favor

Players can marry each other for some basic gains…

* Both Characters are considered on the same account/family for access purposes. (Ownership/access of property)
* Both Characters can access either’s bank account
* Both Characters know the other’s (precise) location at all times

Fame
* Gained through noble titles, killing PCs/NPCs/Mobs and crafting unique items.
* Lost through death.
Karma
* Gained through healing (magical or not) and killing beings with negative Karma.
* Lost through killing beings with positive Karma.
Law
* Gained through paying your taxes, gradually over time, and killing murderers.
* Lost through failing to pay your taxes, murder, and theft.
* A decent percentage (10%?) of negative law penalties will transfer to other characters in the family. 'Guilt by association'

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Original post by acid2 Expanding on the concept of legends, something that could be cool, would be resurrection by followers. The idea is, you play your character and achieve rank/fame and so on. There needs to be someway of having followers, and if you are following a legend, you gain some type of stat boost - for example, you are a follower of a great warrior - so your sword skills are boosted by 5% or something. Now, with enough followers, you could somehow resurrect the great legend - perhaps into something greater than before. Maybe, your followers all meet at an elter of some sort, and offer money, gold and perhaps blood (animals and/or low-level characters). With enough contributions the legend is reborn into something greater, perhaps a dragon or angel or something? Now the main problem here is making sure the legend (who is dead) hasn't left the game for good. Maybe if legends could somehow roam the world as a ghost? Thoughts on that?

that would be cool, or when you want too resurect a hero, you need "the one"(a hidden follower) so everybody of his followers have to seek the guy that randomly was chosen as "the one"

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Fame * Gained through noble titles, killing PCs/NPCs/Mobs and crafting unique items. * Lost through death. Karma * Gained through healing (magical or not) and killing beings with negative Karma. * Lost through killing beings with positive Karma. Law * Gained through paying your taxes, gradually over time, and killing murderers. * Lost through failing to pay your taxes, murder, and theft. * A decent percentage (10%?) of negative law penalties will transfer to other characters in the family. 'Guilt by association'

i really like this idea, but the percentage of guilt by association should be higher, that way the parents should force their offspring to be "good", as in social control of eachother (social pressure)

[Edited by - Wolfblade12 on December 28, 2005 1:43:28 PM]

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Original post by Silvermyst Quote: Original post by T1Oracle I think permadeath should not be a factor in PKing. That could easily lead to abuse. What kind of abuse do you fear it will introduce?

High level players killing low level players, or different equiptment advantages allowing for the permadeath pk, or both parties accepted stipulations and one side cheated. All of these can easily result in heated overly passionate debates. It's best to avoid the drama and keep PKing separate from permadeath. PK deaths should have much smaller consequences.

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Original post by DuFaceTheBass The family idea is good. Once a character suffers permadeath, there could be an option for the player to create a new character as an offspring instead of starting from scratch. The offspring could be given a certain percentage of the overall stats of the parent character, relieving the need to do the newbie quests all over again.

I think that is a wonderful idea.

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would make creating offspring an integral part of the game. This would make the sex of the characters actually matter. "Level 10 male wizard looking for level 10 female warrior." The two would get together, mate, and create two level 1 characters...

No.. Just, no.. I see far to many people grinding eachother and acting all sluty as it is in MMO's, actually allowing mating ingame would be a nightmare. I could easily see people come up and just constantly follow or cornering others asking for sex, or talk of sex just completely dominating area's.

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#2) What to do with high level characters.

This had come up sometime ago in a Shadowrun thread, the idea was that once a player reached the level cap, he could "Transcend". Now using the shadowrun example, lets say you have a 1337 hacker, after a certain point he's really good at hacking into the next. The player than has a choice, keep his body or Upload his concious mind into the net and become an Artificial Intelligence. If he were an AI, he would become more powerful (since he wouldn't have a body and thus couldn't be unpluged or shot), and travel virtually anywhere in the net using his awsome skills. However, he would also be capable of being killed permanently, while he's hard to corner in the next, if they trap him in a system and shut it off or format the harddrive the players AI character would be permanently lost.

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Original post by Gyrthok I see far to many people grinding eachother and acting all sluty as it is in MMO's, actually allowing mating ingame would be a nightmare. I could easily see people come up and just constantly follow or cornering others asking for sex, or talk of sex just completely dominating area's.

The mating itself wouldn't have to be visualized, and with permanent death in place, I think players would figure out a way to deal with stalkers.

We discussed permadeath a LOT when working on warhammer. I think it's pretty safe to say that every MMORPG design phase has many such discussions. I know of no commercial MMORPGs with permadeath as standard. This in itself says a lot about the difficulties surrounding it.

The background (of Warhammer) almost demanded it - the world was supposed to be a dark, dangerous place. Part of the brief was to impress that on players.

However, the fact remains that if someone has devoted many hours building up a character, to have it permanently removed from the game for dying (which could be due to network lag or some other technical fault rather than just poor decisions on the part of the player) was thought to have the risk of frustration - and therefore cancelled subscriptions, many complaints to customer services etc. etc.

The best solution suggested to include permadeath was to retire the character 'name' - and respawn a new (slightly diminished) 'heir' in its place - this is similar to the suggestions in this thread. However, when you examine it - this is not really that different from simply respawning the character itself - only without the annoyance of a player having to contact all their friends (or have the system contact them) informing them that 'Harry is dead - I am now Bertie', or whatever. We did not have procreation for all the reasons explored in this thread.

Starting from scratch only really works well in fast-paced, linear, done-it-before situations (like Diablo) where the objectives of the game are well known and the game can be entered at any point. An RPG (I would not call Diablo an RPG, rather an action-adventure) denies this - quest states, reputations etc are not 'naturally' persistant across character death - and a player would not appreciate being put back at square one. Then one must also consider player-group memberships - is rank in a player-group lost?

Truly original situations for each 'life' of a player are a possibility to make this more bearable, but one set of newbie quests will always be broadly similar to another - fetch, kill something weak etc.

The OP's point on high level 'end-game' characters is a good one - many games simply don't seem to care (and I'm thinking SWG here) about their long-term veterans. PvP is the only content really available in many contexts but it's so haphazardly done that it often boils down to nothing but arbitrary duels. Better mechanisms that players can use to interact with each other (tracking, bounty hunting, smuggling, policing) are the order of the day here in my opinion. Dinky veteran reward items are all well and good, but the novelty wears off pretty damn quick.

For my own game, I won't be using permadeath, but I am using a brutal combat system. Even very experienced characters can be taken down by force of numbers. Death is frequent, and can cause skill loss (and therefore is something to be avoided) but doesn't wipe out your character totally. Regaining lost skills is relatively easy. The design therefore has a 'rolling boil' of characters, with the careful ones getting to the top. All seems good on paper - we'll see how it goes once it's live. :-)

Just my opinions.

What about perma-death that only kicks in when you reach a high level, 90 or something.