[MUD-Dev] Thought Experiment: Permanent Monster Death

[Edward Glowacki]

On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 17:03, Brent P. Newhall wrote:

> After reading the massive -- and fascinating -- thread on
> entertainment, spawning, etc. in games, I had the following
> thought.  Would love to know what you all think.
 
>   What would a game look like, if monsters stayed dead?  E.g.,
>   monsters can only be added to the game if the admins explicitly
>   add them.
 
> Might this not create a game in which individual monsters are much
> more powerful -- thus requiring a lot of team co-operation to kill
> -- but less common?
 
> How might this affect the "levelling treadmill?"

First, if monsters get perma-death, then the same should probably be
true for the players in order to maintain the consistency of the
universe.  Also, if fighting monsters is going to be an epic and
somewhat rare thing, you'd probably want to implement some form of
persistent damage on them, i.e. the last group that came in sliced
off an arm, so until it dies, the creature is missing an arm...

I would imagine that after a while, anything that can be killed
would be killed, and you'd be left with a few remaining
Godzilla-class creatures that all the little swords and axes won't
really hurt.  The players could probably mount an epic assault and
kill it, but then you'd be left with no monsters.  When the admins
add new ones, then how do you fit them into the story?  "Yet another
large scaly beast emerges from the ocean, covered in seaweed and
hungry for destruction!"

My guess is that without a really good universe set up to handle
this kind of perma-death, you'll eventually (probably very quickly)
be stuck with mostly a PvP game.

-ED

--
Edward Glowacki			glowack2 at msu.edu
A PBS mind in an MTV world. 
	-- Author unknown
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