[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Nixon]

From: "Caliban Tiresias Darklock" <caliban at darklock.com>
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001 16:45:41 +0000 (GMT), Matt Mihaly

>> Yep, that's the definition of permadeath I've been pushing. It
>> recognizes that a MUD has no control over when a character dies.

> Shouldn't that be "a MUD has no control over when a character
> *lives*"?

> The MUD can certainly tell the player "your character is dead and
> you can't play it anymore", but it can't very well say "you must
> log in and play your character".

No, and I think this is the point Matt's trying to make:

You can't, in fact, tell the player "your character is dead and you
can't play it anymore", because all they have to do is create
another character with the same name, the same skills, and the same
behavior, and for all practical intents and purposes, their
character is NOT dead, and they can play it any time they want.

Even if you don't allow them the same name, they can still play the
same character.  They just have to play that the character chose to
change its name.  They might also have to come up with some
backstory about why they're not as good at swordfighting as they
used to be (I nearly lost my life in that last battle, in fact,
everybody thought I was dead, yada, yada, yada, rehabilitation from
those nasty injuries, etc etc), and they might have to come up with
some backstory about what happened to all their posessions (When
everybody thought I was dead, my Evil Uncle Bubba plundered me for
all I was worth and then ran off around the riverbend, yada, yada,
yada).

Now the flipside here is that even if you don't have a more
traditional form of "permadeath", the player still has the power to
say the character is dead.  This happens quite frequently, I'm sure.
Somebody's quitting a game, or wants to retire a character and start
afresh, and so their character "dies", whether your game supports it
or not.  But the original point is, of course, that until the player
says the character is dead, it's not dead.  All the MUD can tell
them is that they can't play "The character that had database index
0x597283".  That's it.

You can't keep people from playing characters they want to play.
Well, unless you start banning them for not playing how you want
them to.

I mean, people played orcs in UO for gods' sake.  :)

Have I mentioned yet that you can't keep people from playing how
they want to?  :)

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