[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[z032383 at students.niu.edu]

At 05:10 PM 5/29/2001 -0700, Trump wrote:

> I was spurred to write this by the discussion of perma death on
> MUD-Dev a while back, but forgot to actually post it....

> Fake death is a fiction breaker.  The most important reason to want
> to have perma death is to keep the all important fiction alive (We
> are talking about RPGs here right?)  I guess you really need to
> decide early on how important RP is to your game.  Most games which
> profess to be RPGs are really just adventure games(AG) in a fantasy
> setting.

Overall a good post but I would just like to respond to this. As a
force of habit it seems, creators of muds and other games feel the
need to have physical laws almost exactly similar to those of our
own. Why can't death be something that can be recovered from? Players
will willingly accept any detailed descriptions of why they are
revived after they die. Give reasons like each god protects his
followers from eternal death until he feels the time is right (old
age). Make strict punshiments on dying, however. Make the character
lose experience and temporarily lose stats like most muds do, but also
make them WAIT to come alive again. Gods are busy, and rebuilding a
dead body can take time. Maybe long enough to keep the player on the
mud in spirit form without leaving due to boredom.

This does bring up the question about the player's equipment being
taken by someone else (unless you're going to prevent that, now I call
that breaking the fiction), that I do not have an answer for. ;)

Another suggestion is to just allow the character to be reborn;
perhaps with a new name or whatever. You may want to make death hard
to come by if you go this route.

--Ryan P.
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