[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Matt Mihaly wrote:

> No. As has already been established, a MUD does not have control
> over a character. I can play Lancelot on any MUD that advertises
> permadeath, and there isn't a damn thing they can do to kill the
> character of Lancelot. They could kill the avatar, but never
> irreversibly, which is why "permadeath" or "absolute death" seems
> fuzzy to me. They rely on being 100% certain of the intentions of
> every designer who will ever contribute to the world in the
> future.

They can obviously kill more than the avatar, also the character
attributes or more generally "nontransferable in-game formalised
resources". Whether Lancelot depends on those resources in order to
establish his reportoire or not is basically the issue.

Anyway, it is somewhat funny that debates tends to arise around
permadeath or not. It basically suggest that death in most systems
tends to converge towards taking away a very limited amount of the
resources, becauset here should be a continuum ranging from 0-100%,
from a-padded-cell to severe loss to near deletion to deletion.  I
wonder where most MUDs place themselves for higher level players?

Still there is also the purely psychological effect that comes with
the formalised character deletion, the feeling of being
rejected. Then the ritual of creating a new character, symbolising
the struggle to get back in...?

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/
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