[MUD-Dev] Alternatives to Permadeath

[Mordengaard]

From: "Casbaria" <casbaria at pacbell.net>

> 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.

The principle of "lives" in computer games is pretty well
established, but has pretty much disappeared in modern gaming.  Here
at Yhared, I decided to implement permadeath, but have it so that it
was avoidable (to a point).  Every new character starts play with
three "lives".  When a character dies, their "soul" is transported
to another region of the mud called the Realm of Death.  Here they
are made to wait in line with any other characters who have died
recently for a hearing with the Mistress of Death.  Once they reach
the head of the queue (this can take time if there are a lot of
characters getting killed, in a war for example) they are given a
choice - make a sacrifice, do a quest, or be accepted into the Realm
permanently.  More advanced players get a fourth option,
reincarnation, which allows them to play different races.

Making a sacrifice involves losing a fair few points from one or
more stat (enough to seriously hamper the character) or if the
character has any left, they lose one of their "lives".  Also lumped
into the sacrifice option is the possibility of developing an
insanity of one form or another, to represent the trauma of dying.

The quest is a non-trivial randomly generated romp around the Realm
in spirit form - dying on a quest or failing it results in an
automatic sacrifice.  Choosing to die permanently or reincarnate
allows the player to start over, albeit with some "experience"
carried over into the next life.  Although this may seem like a more
attractive option than the above, I hope that the possibility of
failure combined with the time taken (see the next paragraph) will
make it less so.

While the character is in the Realm of Death, their corpse is
probably (a) being looted, (b) being eaten, (c) rotting away, (d)
all of the above and more besides.  If the character does decide to
return to their body, they are returned to life.  In some
circumstances, the character's corpse may rot away or be destroyed
entirely - in this case, the character returns to play as a spirit,
and has to go through a lengthy and dangerous process to get a new
body.  When/if they do finally achieve this (I anticipate some will
find playing a ghost to be rather enjoyable, especially since ghosts
can interact with the "physical" world to a degree) they are
effectively reincarnated (i.e. they restart a new character with
some of their experience intact, but lose all their previous rank/eq
etc).

On a side note, somebody in this thread mentioned that they felt
that degradation of skills and/or abilities/stats was a bad thing.
I decided to implement skill degradation a few months back, using
the simple premise that you can get "rusty" if you go long periods
without using a skill.  This particularly applies to highly-trained
skills, but the subsequent loss is capped so that the player will
never entirely lose a skill (or indeed, will never drop from being
good in a skill to being average).

Mordengaard - Yhared MUD

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