[MUD-Dev] Alternatives to Permadeath

[Casbaria]

On March 27, Jon Leonard wrote:

> It seems to me that it'd be possible to have other ways of
> limiting high advancement to players of greater skill.  The first
> method that came to mind was having a scheme with exponentially
> decaying unspent experince.

Permadeath is more than simply making the game tougher to play. It
makes failure mean something more than "gosh, I guess I'll run back
and kill that monster while it is half dead once I get healed up by
my buddy".


On March 28, Mike/Szii wrote:

> 2) Stat loss for death.  The most fun MUD I ever played on had
> "buyable" stats.  100plat for 1-18, per point.  500plat for 19-25,
> per point.  That was a lot of cash for the world, and of course
> people WILL cap out.  However, when you die you took a 50% chance
> to lose 1 point of out of 1 stat, or 1 point out of 2 stats.

I'm afraid I'm going to take this onto a slight tangent and just
talk about death as a tool within game design.  As Mike shows, maybe
death has some other feature beyond slowing players down...

There are two ways to look at death, I think.  You can either look
at it as a means of slowing down the player through poor planning. (
You must start over. You lose experience. You lose ______.) Or you
can look at it as a way to create "danger" or "excitement" within
the game.

Losing experience is a pretty mundane loss and as a player, I can
live with that kind of loss. Same goes with losing a strength point
or some permanent hitpoint loss.  Permadeath, on the other hand,
adds a definite cloud of danger to a game.  The downside, of course,
is that it is severe.  As a developer, a major consideration is that
it may be a major turn-off for those who do not like repeating the
same game over and over through dying.  You would limit your game's
attraction.

I think that permadeath is a good choice, however, if you support it
with ways that people can prevent permadeath if they try.  Give them
"get out of jail free" cards, or something similiar. Give them death
tokens every level or via contests/quests or for money. Give them a
way out if they are willing to save themselves.  By doing this you
create a more dangerous atmosphere with death while allowing players
a way to avoid it through an occasional bad choice.

- Adam Casbarian

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