[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 13:54:12 -0600 
Travis Nixon <tnixon at avalanchesoftware.com> wrote:

> 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).

Agreeing with you: There are two sides to "death" in a MUD, and
they're distinct:

  1) Identity

  2) In-game capability

Identity is a soft concept is firmly rooted in the players control
with the MUD only having indirect control over it.  Bubba can "die"
and resurrect himself in an instant by telling everyone that he's
now "Boffo" and playing "Boffo" identically to the way he played
"Bubba".  From a server perspective there is no way of either
controlling or significantly affecting this other than kicking a
player off and not letting them log back on for an extended period
upon character death.

In-game capability is entirely in the MUD's control.  Bubba dies and
loses all his possessions, all stat gains, location of character in
world (presuming that login location is the same as logout location
or similar/related), all political and social positions, etc.  The
data network which centered on the DB entry/node "Bubba" is now
deleted and presumed unrecoverable.  This is effectively as close as
you can get to permadeath from an implementation standpoint.  There
are near infinite possible variations on the theme.

> 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.

Yup.  Identity versus capability.

> 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?  :)

Well, Bubba was a dwarf and the game won't let me play dwarves for a
while 'coz Bubba died.  Well, Bubba is now Boffo and he's a troll.
Really.  He had surgery you see.  He was a troll born in a dwarven
body so he had an operation.  Very painful.  Want to see the scars?

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows
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