[MUD-Dev] Permadeath or Not?

[Jeff Freeman]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>
> Thanks for the pointer.  It's always interesting to see a debate over
> permadeath.
>
> Are we allowed to rehash the rehash of a rehashed discussion here?  ;)

We have permanent death on Ackadia.  It works like this:

When the player dies, his corpse plops onto the ground.  For the next 15
minutes or so, if someone can get to him, then the character can be
resurrected.

If someone destroys his corpse or if it decays (when the 15 minutes or up),
then he's dead.

There are 8 shrines that ghosts can visit, one time each.  So even if the
corpse decays or is destroyed, the player can still walk (as a ghost) to a
shrine that he hasn't visited before, and be retored to life.

Eventually though, the character dies, the corpse decays, and all the
shrines have been visited.

The player's next character inherits all of his previous character's
possessions - bankbox, houses, loot hoarded in the house, etc.

We have a pay-for-training skillgain system, so usually by the time the
character suffers permanent death, he has a large stockpile of gold.
Recovering his skills then isn't such a pain.

Stats (strength, dex and intelligence) rise slowly over time, so the new
character is considerably weaker for a couple of weeks, even if the player
dumps a bunch enough gold into training to recover all his lost skills.

So, permanent death is very rare, really.  When it does happen, it
represents a large loss of gold and a temporary loss of stats (since those
eventually do come back).  And a forced name change, since names can only be
used once, ever.

It hasn't been a huge issue, really.  Some players are even contemplating
killing themselves deliberately (or just deleting their character) so that
they can start over and play a different character - not as harsh as it
sounds, since they wouldn't be starting *completely* fresh with no money, no
skill, no house, and so on.

It has added a lot of "tension" to the world though - people really sweat it
out during that 15 minutes of hoping someone can get to their corpse in time
(without being killed by whatever killed them).

If they did lose all their possessions and money when they died, then I
imagine they'd just quit rather than start over.


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