09 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 81st comment:
Votes: 0
Yes, it is indeed no longer permadeath; it wasn't meant to be permadeath. I don't really think that real, actual, honest-to-god permadeath is something people actually want anyhow, given how much effort is being expended on avoiding it once it's been put in place.

Tonitrus said:
I also don't see how a permadeath system is particularly different from, say, a Smaug mud, where you level to X and then don't get any new skills or anything, and if you want new skills you're forced to level a different character. People don't seem to get as upset about that version, for some reason.

Err. The two are so completely different that I'm going to have to assume you're making a second-degree statement of some sort here.
09 Nov, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 82nd comment:
Votes: 0
Situation 1:

You level a thief to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a warrior to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a mage to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.

If multi is allowed, you can pool resources between them. If it isn't, you can't, really.

Situation 2:

You level a thief to, say, 34 levels. He dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a warrior to level 48. He dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a mage to level 50, he dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.

You could possibly pool resources if multi is allowed.

To me, Achievement in a game is important. However, having achieved is of very little importance to me.

Consequently, they strike me as rather similar.

I'd rather be blocked from further advancement because I'm dead than some arbitrary level cap.
09 Nov, 2009, Runter wrote in the 83rd comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
Situation 1:

You level a thief to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a warrior to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a mage to 50 levels. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.

If multi is allowed, you can pool resources between them. If it isn't, you can't, really.

Situation 2:

You level a thief to, say, 34 levels. He dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a warrior to level 48. He dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.
You level a mage to level 50, he dies. Advancement stops. To continue advancement, start a new character.

You could possibly pool resources if multi is allowed.

To me, Achievement in a game is important. However, having achieved is of very little importance to me.

Consequently, they strike me as rather similar.

I'd rather be blocked from further advancement because I'm dead than some arbitrary level cap.


Unfortunately this is like comparing owning a complete collection of baseball cards as a collector and losing a complete collection of baseball cards in a fire as the same thing. I guess it really depends on how much you have to put in your character on said mud.

But I think David was right.
09 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 84th comment:
Votes: 0
OK, they're similar in that advancement stops. Except that not all advancement stops, merely gaining levels. For instance, you can still gain equipment, rack up kills, or do whatever the game lets you do.) Even according to your definition, it's quite possible to continue "achieving" after having reached a level cap (e.g., by continuing to beat opponents). In short, I don't think it's quite correct to say that a level cap is anything at all like permadeath. We can start with the very obvious difference that you can still play your level-capped character and do things, whereas your perma-death character is, well, gone. Content that might only be relevant to high-level characters will no longer be available to you until you get there again.

You might argue that to you personally you only care about gaining levels, and I suppose that's fair, but it's also fair to say that your preference might be somewhat unusual, and that preference aside there are tons of differences between level caps and permadeath other than not being able to gain skills anymore. As Runter said, it's as simple as the difference between not being able to grow your card collection because you've completed it, versus losing the entire thing.
09 Nov, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 85th comment:
Votes: 0
said:
I'd rather be blocked from further advancement because I'm dead than some arbitrary level cap.


I'd rather have my car break down as I park, having got to where I was going…
rather than halfway there. That doesn't mean the breakdown is welcome
in either case.

The problem you propose is solvable in ways less unpleasant than permadeath.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
09 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 86th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Yes, it is indeed no longer permadeath; it wasn't meant to be permadeath. I don't really think that real, actual, honest-to-god permadeath is something people actually want anyhow, given how much effort is being expended on avoiding it once it's been put in place.

I think there is definitely an audience for RPI-style permadeath (character completely deleted when you die), judging by games like Armageddon, Harshlands, etc. However it seems to be a pretty niche market.

The goal of the solution I implemented in the past (which could be more or less summed up as "IC persona lost, OOC effort kept") wasn't to create high stakes, but rather to remove character stagnation, and allow characters to permanently kill their rivals. It meant that you didn't get stuck with the same clan leader forever, because every so often he'd get killed and replaced by someone else. Many players didn't actually mind dying, because it gave them the chance to try something new (but of comparable power to their previous character). I never considered it true permadeath, but it did incorporate elements of permadeath.
09 Nov, 2009, Tyche wrote in the 87th comment:
Votes: 0
Impacatus said:
I have seen that phenomenon too, but I don't think that's what's going on here. I think there's some middle ground between "lose the entire account at death" permadeath and the more typical "respawn with minor penalties at worst", and some systems could be said to be closer to the former than the latter, and therefore carry some of the advantages that are associated with permadeath systems.

I guess it depends on how narrow a definition you have of permadeath.

And for the record, I never said my idea was permadeath.


I wouldn't require the user to recreate their online account because they can have multiple characters tied to the same account.
But yes I actually favor the permadeath idea myself. As in Bubba's dead, well "game over".
I think there's plenty of room for goals for achievers in such a game like attaining the highest score, the highest level character, longest living character, etc.
09 Nov, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 88th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
The goal of the solution I implemented in the past (which could be more or less summed up as "IC persona lost, OOC effort kept") wasn't to create high stakes, but rather to remove character stagnation, and allow characters to permanently kill their rivals. It meant that you didn't get stuck with the same clan leader forever, because every so often he'd get killed and replaced by someone else. Many players didn't actually mind dying, because it gave them the chance to try something new (but of comparable power to their previous character). I never considered it true permadeath, but it did incorporate elements of permadeath.

I still like your system, even with it keeping of OOC effort, except for one "problem". It has a few advantages over even a lossy XP carryover, such as encouraging people to try new things, since they won't be gimped for trying a class/race/skillset they suck at. On the other hand, if the carryover isn't at least somewhat lossy, what prevents people from just hoarding massive amounts of XP?

From a player perspective, it's perfect, you never lose anything xp-wise. From a design perspective, though, it's a nightmare. You could end up with a situation where newer players have, say, 100xp worth of skills, while older players have 10,000,000,000,000xp worth of skills, and there would be no real way for the newer players to bridge the gap. Likewise, mobs tailored for old players would destroy new players, and mobs tailored for new players would have no chance against old players.

Given what I've seen of your designs, I assume you had some sort of clever way of preventing that, and I'm very curious to know what it was.
09 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 89th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
Given what I've seen of your designs, I assume you had some sort of clever way of preventing that, and I'm very curious to know what it was.

Put simply, players never earned a great deal of exp.

You could earn 100 total exp for killing mobs (at 1 exp each), but after that you no longer received any exp for killing, even if you died and recreated. You could also earn 5 exp for…ehem…sexual achievements. But once again that was a one-off bonus.

Other than that you earned 1 "login exp" the first time you logged on each day, and also earned "playing exp" after your first hour of play each day (if you didn't play the full hour, that time you played counted toward your playing exp the next day). This "playing exp" was 5 the first 10 times it was awarded, 4 the next 10 times, etc, down to a minimum of 1.

Whenever you earned exp you also earned the same number of "soul points". When you died, your new character's exp was determined from your soul points as I explained earlier.

Thus someone who played for a month (30 days) could have up to 255 soul points (234 exp when they created a new character). Someone who played for two months could have up to 325 soul points (287 exp), someone who played for three months could have up to 385 soul points (329 exp), etc.

Even a brand new character could hold their own if they were designed for combat, while non-combat characters often had abilities that allowed them to avoid being attacked (concealment, scary aura, superfast autododge, etc). The players were vampires, so accidental death was pretty uncommon - plus you lost humanity for killing, which had various drawbacks (such as entering uncontrollable violent rages which often resulted in losing even more humanity). If you ran out of humanity you were forced to create a new character.
09 Nov, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 90th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Other than that you earned 1 "login exp" the first time you logged on each day, and also earned "playing exp" after your first hour of play each day (if you didn't play the full hour, that time you played counted toward your playing exp the next day). This "playing exp" was 5 the first 10 times it was awarded, 4 the next 10 times, etc, down to a minimum of 1.

So you replaced the normal permadeath concept with something that has much slower advancement that carries through deaths. I'd considered having a similar XP system (except for the one-off bonuses and diminishing playtime xp, which never occurred to me) based on logins and playing time, but I couldn't figure out how to have it adequately distinguish play time from idling, and I figured it would upset Achievers (even more than standard permadeath).

Unrelatedly, I don't suppose this game you're describing is up somewhere, it sounds like something I'd be interested in. Assuming it is RP-oriented anyway, but I don't know how you'd have any semblance of permadeath without some form of RP.

Tyche said:
I think there's plenty of room for goals for achievers in such a game like attaining the highest score, the highest level character, longest living character, etc.

I would think these kinds of goals as coded achievements would be more appealing to Achievers than simple numerical level or stat accumulation, but I don't see them discussed often. Do you know of muds where such things have been implemented, and, if so, how they were received? I know of a mud that has pk rankings, but I don't know to the extend players view those rankings as "goals".
09 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 91st comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
Assuming it is RP-oriented anyway, but I don't know how you'd have any semblance of permadeath without some form of RP.

Why can any semblance of permadeath only exist with some form of RP? Why can't you simply say… yup, you died, that's that?
09 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 92nd comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
I'd considered having a similar XP system (except for the one-off bonuses and diminishing playtime xp, which never occurred to me) based on logins and playing time, but I couldn't figure out how to have it adequately distinguish play time from idling, and I figured it would upset Achievers (even more than standard permadeath).

Well my mud wasn't aimed at that sort of player anyway. I'd originally planned to have some sort of RP exp, but couldn't think of a fair way to handle it. So in the end I decided just to reward people for logging on for a bit - if they wanted to go around killing things, or go exploring, or even sit around idling, I decided that at the end of the day it didn't really matter. But quite a few of the players did roleplay, and I don't remember any excessive idling.

Quite frequently you'd get players logging on for their daily exp, and then getting drawn into some discussion or RP event with other players who had done the same thing.

Tonitrus said:
Unrelatedly, I don't suppose this game you're describing is up somewhere, it sounds like something I'd be interested in.

No, I shut it down in 2001 (although I'd given up on it many months before that).

Tonitrus said:
Assuming it is RP-oriented anyway, but I don't know how you'd have any semblance of permadeath without some form of RP.

It was RP encouraged, with a fairly distinct separation of IC and OOC (you had separate IC and OOC names, and the latter was used for the 'who' list, 'chat', 'tell', etc).

I agree with David though, I don't think you need RP for permadeath.
09 Nov, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 93rd comment:
Votes: 0
When I pked, there was no rp involved, and we all tended to maintain different characters. Certain characters were more useful with different levels of equipment, so people would maintain different characters for when they had various levels of eq, not to mention when they got sick of X character and switched. So people just referred to one another by real name or whatever nickname they happened to assign. I'd think without RP permadeath would ultimately end up the same way.

who
custom_rank X (Leader of Such-and-such)

You chat 'Who is X?'
Y chats 'Oh, that's Bob.'
You chat 'Oh, he died again?'
Z chats 'Yeah, Fred killed him for control of Clan Blah.'

I guess if people don't mind that sort of thing, it doesn't matter, but if you're going to track people by OOC identities, permadeath seems a bit cosmetic. You do change characters, but it seems like the old friendships/enmities would remain the same. I suppose you don't really need one to have the other, but it seems weird to me, personally.
09 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 94th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
if you're going to track people by OOC identities, permadeath seems a bit cosmetic.

Well, other than losing all the advancement with that character and details like that, but eh…
(Unless, of course, by "permadeath" you don't actually mean permadeath)

There's no reason why you couldn't permanently kill off the character just to make one with the same name, you know. Whether or not death permanently destroys a particular character and whether or not people role-play their characters are really quite separate concepts.
09 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 95th comment:
Votes: 0
The 'who', 'chat' and 'tell' commands in my implementation displayed OOC names, so you wouldn't even know that Bob had died - you just wouldn't encounter him again. The players did socialise OOC, but often didn't know each others IC identities. There was also a recognition system, so you might not even know Bob as "Bob" - to you he might just be "Mr Smith".

But all that aside, even if the players knew who each other were, permadeath would still provide a way to avoid stagnation. If you think Bob is a bad clan leader, you can kill him, and you can take his place. I could see that being an advantage even for a non-RP mud.
10 Nov, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 96th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
But all that aside, even if the players knew who each other were, permadeath would still provide a way to avoid stagnation. If you think Bob is a bad clan leader, you can kill him, and you can take his place. I could see that being an advantage even for a non-RP mud.

I imagine one problem on a non-RP MUD would be Bob recreating as JimBob and trying to take back Bob's clan leadership position or otherwise attempting to wreak havoc on Bob's murderers. I know the standard argument from the RPI crowd is that they are all accomplished role-players who would never behave in such a twinkish fashion but I don't know if the same could be said on a non-RP MUD (or even for many RPI players, but I guess that's another story…).
10 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 97th comment:
Votes: 0
Orrin said:
I imagine one problem on a non-RP MUD would be Bob recreating as JimBob and trying to take back Bob's clan leadership position or otherwise attempting to wreak havoc on Bob's murderers.

Sure, but that's easier said than done. First he'd have to get invited into the clan, then he'd have to work his way up the ladder, eliminating anyone who had a better shot at leadership than he did.

He could just try to kill all of his former character's murderers, but first he'd need to work out who they were (I used an introduction/recognition system).

Such revenge would take time and planning, and IMO could actually add to the gameplay - knowing that if you kill someone, there's a fair chance they may have a friend or relative who'll one day come looking for revenge.
80.0/97