[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Gaffney]

> Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital wrote:
>> On 27 February 2001 13:27, Richard A. Bartle wrote:

>>> You've made the penalty for screwing up so great you can't really
>>> use it.  Its like having no jail in the real world, just the death
>>> sentence.
  	
>> There is nothing about PD that says you either die permanently or
>> you walk away from an encounter without a scratch on you.
 
> I thought the whole point of perm death was that you died
> permanently?

If you read that as: "Having permadeath in your game does not mean
that there cannot be other negative impacts from 'losing' an average
encounter" I think you may be closer to Richard's intent.

> Otherwise we are just messing around with penalties.

Permadeath is a penalty, of course - it's just a penalty applied
directly to the user as opposed indirectly through lowering the
avatar's stats (unless you believe in an afterlife for deleted bits,
at least:) In a sense, it punishes people in proportion to their
attachment to a given avatar, and secondarily punishes by requiring (a
strong word, but assuming addiction) the re-expense of time to create
the character.  So one could argue that permadeath
hurts/disincentivizes roleplayers from playing and encourages players
who form minimal attachment to a given character and are efficiency
experts at regaining levels - powergamers.  Which is interesting given
how often permadeath is stated as being a roleplaying-driven desire.

Of course, it is perhaps impossible to make a system which won't be
dominated by powergamers (especially if you define powergamers as 'the
people who try to dominate every system':) At best, perhaps, you can
channel them into behaviors acceptable to roleplayers by incentivizing
roleplaying-like behavior with your systems.  It's difficult to
determine whether incentivizing "heroic" behavior in games is for the
benefit of roleplaying-biased designers, or because "heroic" behavior
is actually more fun (to swing over to the "'Doing' a dungeon"
thread:) - I could see arguments either way.

Of course, I don't mean to imply that roleplaying and powergaming players
are necessarily discreet sets, other than for purposes of brevity.

-jg
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