[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Ian Collyer]

> Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Madman Across the Water wrote:
>> Ian Collyer wrote:
   
>>> If my character is dead and the natural laws of the MUD offer no
>>> further chance of resurrection then that is effective
>>> permadeath.
  
>> Nail, hammer, bang. IMO. :> I was thinking about this discussion
>> today and decided that while there is no way to force a player to
>> not circumvent the permadeath, we can call it "permadeath" if the
>> system of the MUD does not permit the character to come back to
>> life.
  
>> Permadeath, as a term, may have varied meaning from MUD to
>> MUD. And why not? Death has varied meaning. In UO, it means you
>> are a ghost, and your corpse is left behind. On Hidden Worlds,
>> the MUD that caused a few of my friends to fail out of college,
>> it meant you were back in the Temple with 0 hp, and your corpse
>> and stuff was elsewhere. The term permadeath continues to be
>> useful- on Ackadia, if you die and come back, it's death. If you
>> die and don't come back, it's permadeath.  It's useful even if
>> it's just to distinguish between the two concepts.

> You guys keep throwing around concepts like "If you die and don't
> come back it's permadeath." Define 'you' first, otherwise the
> statement is pretty meaningless. Permadeath revolves around the
> definition of a character, and so far, I haven't heard any
> persuasive argument that a character is held exclusively in a
> database.

I was struggling to find a way to clearly state my definition of a
character when this simile came to mind...

To me the relationship between my mental picture of the persona I am
playing, the MUD's database entries and my 'character' is very
similar to the relationship between a class, an object's variables
and the object itself in OO programming.

The object's variables (character stats, level, skills, etc.) define
it's current state.

The class definition (my mental picture of the characters
personality) defines the behaviour.

The object itself (the 'character') is a combination of these two.

So while I may have a vivid mental image of the persona, it doesn't
become a character until it has been instantiated into the MUD and
given database entries that can represent it's current state.

Similarly, once those database entries are deleted by a permadeath
the character ceases to exist and becomes once again merely the idea
of a character which resides solely in my mind.

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