[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard A. Bartle <richard at mud.co.uk>
>On 1st March, 2001, Jeremy Gaffney wrote:

>> So one could argue that permadeath hurts/disincentivizes
>> roleplayers from playing

> This is where separating it off into a badlands area would help.
> People who only want to role-play don't have to go anywhere near
> where they could suffer PD. If they do want to go there, then it
> would have to be because their character wanted to, even though
> their character would "know" the possible consequences. If it didn't
> work out and the character died, well yes, that would be very
> annoying for the player but it's "what the character would have
> wanted".


Okay, bear with me, because in reading some of the discussions about
DAoC's death penalties, as compared to those of EQ, it occurred to me
that EQ *has* a very close approximation of PermaDeath: Corpse Loss.

At least half of an EQ character's functionality is tied up in his
items, and since your visible equipment is the *only* way to
differentiate your character from the other 10,000 human males with
face #4, a sizable chunk of your identity as well.  Items are forever
in EQ, once you have them, you basicly don't lose them, with one
really *big* exception: If you die, and cannot recover your corpse
before the decay timer runs out, those items are *gone*.  Poof, back
to the bit-bucket from whence they came.  It's normally not that
difficult to recover a corpse, it becomes a real issue only in certain
high-risk, high-gain areas and zones.

And the response of players to a potential corpse loss?  Blind,
screaming panic.  For a long time, Solusek A and B were the least used
dungeons in the game, because it was rather easy to run into lava and
die (just go LD while pointed in that direction).  And once a corpse
dropped into lava, it was effectively *gone*, the only within the
rules solution for recovering corpses from lava involved large numbers
of Clerics organized into pyramids, casting "Divine Aura" for
temporary immunity from damage (and required that the corpse be only a
10-15 second swim from solid ground).  Eventually, additional
realism-breaking mechanics had to be put in (making corpses float in
lava) before people would routinely risk Solusek.

This is the linchpin in the dominance of "Uberguilds" in EQ's
high-level game, as well.  It doesn't take a 60+ member guild to raid
Fear or Veeshan's Peak, it takes that many to do so with a
near-certainty of being able to recover everyone's corpse if anything
goes wrong.  The "calendars" used to apportion who gets to go after
which major mobs when are enforced through the threat of "FFA",
declaring a Free For All situation where people may expect to lose
corpses.

So, my expectation of the reaction to PD zones as you describe them is
that either they would be skipped, if the reward isn't high enough to
draw people in, or they will be ruthlessly powergamed with
militaristic precision by players who get in, get the benefits as fast
as possible, and get out, all on a strict timetable.  Roleplaying?
Unless the background makes the PD areas a "Rite of Passage" on your
road to immortality, not a chance (and that's just an extended case of
fitting RP to the design).

--Dave Rickey

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