[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Matt Mihaly]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2001, Madman Across the Water wrote:
> Christopher Kohnert wrote:
  
>>   Permadeath: <noun> from Permanent and death, meaning dead for
>>   ever.
  
>> I would argue that permadeath means you die, plain and
>> simple. You get nothing, your stuff does not carry over to other
>> characters,
 
> Why not? That doesn't seem to me to ruin the word "permadeath." 
> Tying some things to, for example, your family rather than an
> individual character doesn't bother me, and it's still a blow to
> have the character die forever. I think you're tying too much into
> permadeath. Granted, I agree that "temporary permadeath" is a
> contradiction, but I think permadeath is very simple- your
> character dies and is gone forever.  Everything else is details.

I agree with Chris. Using your meaning, permadeath means
nothing. What is a character for instance? If my long-time character
Bob dies and the game forces a name change to Bill, is that a new
character? What if it also changes his location in the database? Is
that permadeath? If so, then the word as you are using it is pretty
meaningless and you may as well just call it suffering a
namechange. If your "family" gets stuff from your character, and you
can play those characters, then I don't see how it's any different
fundamentally from Bob's forced namechange to Bill. It's just a
matter of how much stuff carries over from Bob's character.

So given the above, exactly what are you saying? What is the
requirement for permadeath? Is it just a trivial name change? Is it
just a trivial name change accompanied by the loss of a piece of
equipment (so that the characters are not _exactly_ the same as
before). Why bother with the name change then? Perhaps I should
claim Achaea has permadeath, because when you die you get
reincarnated into an infinite series of identical twins and all your
stuff gets transferred over.

--matt

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