[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

shren wrote:
> 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."

Your definition doesn't accomplish this, though -- after all, the
"conditions that cause this close" could be "you reach zero hit
points and you've died three times before."  You'd have to restrict
what the conditions can be to accomplish this.

> 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.

Why should you *have* to be able to, though?  People have proposed
muds here where each character contains one or more random seeds
that are used for doing things like skill checks.  In such a mud, it
may not be practically possible for a player to create a character
who is technically identical to their old one.  (Theoretically
possible, yes, but actually doing it might require building a few
million or billion characters before you luck into getting one with
the same random seeds again.)

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
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