[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 14:40:38 -0700, "Freeman, Jeff"
<jfreeman at verant.com> wrote:

> Permadeath is impossible to implement because the players next
> character might inherit something that his previous character
> owned.

No it isn't.

You could kill the player when his character dies.

Hey, I didn't say it was a good idea. But you have to admit it would
work, given a reliable remote-delivery system for lethal response.

The real technology-driven people will now be thinking about exactly
how to design such a system. Find a need and fill it, that's my
motto. ;)

> So when someone says permadeath is a really bad idea, we should
> all just say there's no such thing as permadeath anyway, so it
> doesn't really matter whether it is a bad idea or not.

I think there's a difference between "implements" and "enforces"
permadeath.

I've always seen "implements" as meaning "if your character dies,
you must make a new character just as though that character had
never existed". In other words, the new character inherits *nothing*
from the old character, and the fact that it belongs to the same
player is irrelevant. The game does not care, and in fact may not
even know.

You seem to want "enforces", but that creates a problem.

Alex gives a bunch of money to Bob and says "give this back to me if
I get killed and have to start a new character, I'll use the
password SWORDFISH."

Alex goes and gets killed, so he starts a new character named
Alan. He walks up to Bob and says "Hey, Bob, SWORDFISH." Bob hands
him the money.

Is that permadeath? Obviously not. So how do we stop it? Simple! We
fix it so Alan can't talk to Bob, or anyone else he knows, somehow.

Now Alan comes back and says "Hey, Bob, SWORDFISH." Bob doesn't hear
him, and the game says "Naughty naughty" or something like that.

Chuck, on the other hand, also knows both players. Chuck dies, makes
a new character, and comes out to see Bob hanging out in the square
and Alan standing there like an idiot trying to figure out why he's
naughty.  Chuck says "Oh, good morrow, fellow travelers! I have just
arrived in this city, where might I find a decent tavern?" -- and
the game says "Naughty naughty".

Meanwhile, Alan fires up ICQ and messages Bob, saying "The game
won't let me talk to you, my new name's Alan, give me the money." 
And Bob gives him the money.

But we're smart, and we set things up so Bob can't give Alan the
money because people Alex knew can't give him things either. So Bob
messages Alan and says "it doesn't work!" -- Chuck, meanwhile, is
wasting the staff's time with why he can't talk in the town square
and the game doesn't like him to say he wants to go to a tavern and
what's wrong with a little drink now and then anyway you people are
all holier-than-thou buttwads.

So Bob puts the money in a sack, and drops it. Alan can then walk
over to pick it up, but hey -- we're way too smart for this, right? 
We won't let that happen either. Chuck figures out what's going on
and starts bitching at staff about the real problem.

Then Dave, who doesn't know any of them, wanders in. Bob says "Hey,
Dave, could you give that sack to Alan? The game has a bug or
something." So Dave picks up the sack and gives it to Alan. But we
stopped that too, because Alan used to know Bob who used to own the
sack.

In other news, Chuck makes several not at all nice remarks about the
staff member's dietary habits vis-a-vis human excrement, the marital
status of his parents, and his idea of proper behavior with farm
animals. The staff member, of course, immediately sitebans Chuck and
good riddance to bad rubbish.

So Dave goes into the local grocery store, buys a sack, and puts a
matching amount of his own money in it. He walks back and drops a
brand new sack Bob has never touched, which Alan picks up. Since the
gold has also never belonged to Bob, Alan has no trouble taking it
out of the sack.

Problem solved; Alan gets his money, and not a damn thing we did
could prevent it. We just made a brand new game: "give an old friend
some starting capital". And we made it kind of difficult, too.

But in the end, NOTHING we did has accomplished ANYTHING except
making a whole lot of stuff a big pain in the ass.

Me, I say "implements" is fine, and "enforces" is the holy grail of
all permadeath zealots. Most people entertain at least a fleeting
fantasy of finding it, but only a very few not-quite-sane
individuals spend their lives questing for it.

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