[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[shren]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Matt Mihaly wrote:

> 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'm formally coining the phrase, "Absolute Death", or ADeath, for
situations where:

  A) The character database entry is unusable (closed).

  B) The close came from a game feature and not a game bug.

  C) The close is always irreversable.

  D) Should the conditions that cause this close come about, the
  character always becomes closed.

  E) The player may, through interaction within the mud, build a new
  character, and this character may be both technically and
  behaviorally identical to the old one.

A is simple - the character is dead, databasewise.

B is simple - the death came about because the game intentionally
made the character dead - say, he ran out of hit points.

C is simple - there is no resurrection.

D is a bit complicated.  I wanted systems where you could resurrect
a number of times to not be ADeath, to retain the purity of the
phrase.  If running out of hit points kills you, but you can be
resurrected 3 times, it's not ADeath.  It's "ADeath, except you can
be resurrected 3 times."

E addresses that the players, using the MUD and playtime, can build
up the exact same character again in the same way he built the dead
one.  This faces the issue that Matt brought up - that you can make
the same character again.

So, for Ackadia, you could say that Ackadia is "ADeath, except that
you can be resurrected an unlimited number of times by comrades
before your corpse decays, and after corpse decay you can resurrect
at each shrine once.  (8 shrines for 8 resurrections)."

Absolute Death, as a term, means "as dead as you can get within the
system database", in the same way that absolute zero means "as cold
as you can get".  (Please don't bring up quantum mechanics - I know
that things can get colder than absolute zero in limited ways.)

Is there anything else that needs to be added to the definition to
make it completely clear?  Is there any way that a character,
database-wise, can be deader?

--
  shren at io.com

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