25 Feb, 2008, shasarak wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
drrck said:
In your opinion, where is the line drawn between "real" and "too real" when it comes to MUD features?

It's too real when it ceases to be fun.

drrck said:
Should players be required to do tedious, menial things, simply because it makes a certain system more true-to-life?

No.

drrck said:
Should the entire focus of a game be on fun with no regard to reality whatsoever?

Yes; but, as has been discussed already, fun and realism are notmutually exclusive.

I find discussions like this are often based on false assumptions. That's an example: the assumption that making something realistic automatically prevents it from being fun. Actually the fact that something is realistic can makeit fun.

But, to answer your question, it's the fun that drives the realism: if making something realistic makes it more fun, you should do it; if not, you shouldn't. Fun should alwaysbe the ultimategoal of every single design decision on a MUD. No exceptions. Ever.

Very stupid people sometimes imagine that this means you should always give players what they want. (Another wrong assumption). Of course you shouldn't: if you tried to please everyone all the time, the game would end up being a shapeless mishmash of conflicting, inconsistent ideas with no balance. And that wouldn'tbe fun. So you don't always give players what they ask for becausethe ultimate goal is for the game to be fun.

Yet another wrong assumption is that people often think there is some fundamental necessity for food and sleep systems to be boring. This is probably because most actual food and sleep systems are implemented stupidly. But they don't have to be. Suppose, for example, your choice of diet has a significant effect on your abilities and the way they develop. Perhaps strength training requires the player to have a high-protein diet to build muscle, combined with a fair amount of carbohydrate for explosive training. At the same time a player who is more interested in endurance training might be easing back on the protein and eating more fat to provide fuel for his slow-twitch muscles. Or perhaps eating sugar gives you a short-term energy boost, but regularly eating sugar leads to obesity or even diabetes. Now you have a system which is not simply "repeat this meanial task to avoid a penalty"; instead, it's a system where eating actually becomes a series of tactical or strategic choices. That, potentially, is fun.

Similarly with sleep. If sleep simply involves remaining motionless with no text output for several minutes, that's boring as hell. But suppose sleeping players can have dreams. Suppose there are dream monsters that can stalk players in their sleep. Suppose players who try to stay awake to avoid them begin to experience hallucinations. Suppose certain players can actually master the ability to interfere with other players' dreams and mentally attack them in their sleep. Suppose that in the MUD universe dreams actually have a kind of localised reality, where the dreaming mind shapes the unformed matter of the universe into temporary forms; what if, in certain places, the real and dream worlds overlap with one another, so that a player can switch between sleeping and waking, perceiving the same objects in different ways, depending on which state he is in (e.g. a branching corridor in the real world becomes the fork of a river in the dream world). Suppose dream creatures can sometimes be tamed and brought back into the real world. Now, all of a sudden, sleep is anything but boring.

So, it's not that realism is boring, it's that any game system that is implemented in a stupid and unimaginative way is boring. :biggrin:

Personally I'm quite a fan of realism because I find it adds immersion; and, done properly, it adds tactical and strategic depth. If someone is locked inside a house I want the game to be sophisticated enough for me to set light to an arrow, fire it into the thatched roof, and burn the house down around him. If I have access to to explosives, I want to be able to blow a hole through a tunnel roof and create a brand new entrance on the ground above. I want to be able to blackmail NPCs by kidnapping their loved ones. I want to be able to build my own three-deck merchant ships and watch my sailors fending off the tentacles of an attacking kraken. I want to be able to pour holy water on myself and then damage a vampire by hugging it. And I want "summon lightning" spells to do more damage when it's raining and less when the sun is shining. All of this is fun. :smirk:
25 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
For starters I think Shasarak made some very nice points, in particular the main one that fun is the ultimate goal, but that doesn't mean doing whatever the players want.

drrck said:
My purpose for adding it would be to have more of a consequence for death. As-is, I think a lot of games promote dying as just another facet of playing, going so far as to even have a lot of content only available to those who are in the "after life" or whatever. While I don't want to make the game too hard, so to speak, I definitely don't want players throwing caution to the wind and being careless with their characters either.

Well, you can do that without permdeath. There are all kinds of penalties that can be imposed on players for dying that don't involve permanently destroying their character (and hence all of their work). Equipment can be severely damaged, forcing incurred repair costs. Some equipment can even be lost, although that is dangerously close to the not-fun category in some cases. Characters can have "resurrection sickness" that gives them a very strong motivation to not die. Characters might have to go through a mini-game of sorts to get back to their character – therefore delaying their return to the "real game". You mentioned that though but in a seemingly rather negative light; why does it have to be such a problem?

Basically if you want them to be careful, give them an incentive to be careful, but do not make that incentive so strong as to make them not want to go adventuring in the first place. It might be worth thinking about just how many games implement permdeath.

There are other ways, though, of making permdeath not-such-a-bad-thing. If there is less worth placed on individual characters, then it is less of a problem to lose them. In RTS games, there is permdeath but you don't care as much about individual units. The problem is when you permanently lose a character in which you have invested hours upon hours of your time. That's just really not fun, especially if your character can be lost in ways that aren't your fault (e.g. pkilling). But if there is less reason to invest time in one character, then losing it is less important. Of course, this is something of a departure from the RPG genre.

One idea I was thinking of was that you wouldn't control individual characters, but a family or clan of some kind. If you lose one member of the clan, you can pick up another and start again. But as you develop members of a clan, the clan as a whole grows stronger (wealthier, wiser, etc.) and so you aren't starting from scratch every time. You therefore have incentives to develop your clan, but you are (hopefully) more attached to the whole clan than you are to individual members, and therefore do not mind as much if members die – but overall you don't want to lose too many members, because that weakens your clan.

I suppose this could be thought of as giving characters a fixed number of "lives" (sort of) but I prefer the clan metaphor since it seems less arbitrary than saying that characters may die 10 times after which it's permanent.

Anyhow, the point is again that it's critical to think of the fun in the game. One observation that I find to be a fairly good one is to think of what single-player games would be like if you couldn't save/load games and only had a "pause" button available. What kind of behavior would this encourage? Especially as you progress in the game, you would no longer experiment; you'd no longer explore beyond the bare minimum; everything would be a conservation game to avoid anything unexpected. But the unexpected is what provides fun. So, in this case, by removing the "safety" of loading saved games, a whole portion of the fun – in fact part of why we find escapism in games in the first place – has been destroyed.
26 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Basically if you want them to be careful, give them an incentive to be careful, but do not make that incentive so strong as to make them not want to go adventuring in the first place. It might be worth thinking about just how many games implement permdeath.


I think you're viewing it in the context of making death permanent on a "normal" MUD, where death isn't a big deal and people die all the time. What if the MUD itself was designed around permanent death so that dying wasn't so common? I think in that case, such a system wouldn't seem like overkill. I don't know that I, personally, want to implement permanent death per se, but I have yet to find a suitable system that penalizes players enough without being a turn-off that drives people away.

DavidHaley said:
One idea I was thinking of was that you wouldn't control individual characters, but a family or clan of some kind. If you lose one member of the clan, you can pick up another and start again. But as you develop members of a clan, the clan as a whole grows stronger (wealthier, wiser, etc.) and so you aren't starting from scratch every time. You therefore have incentives to develop your clan, but you are (hopefully) more attached to the whole clan than you are to individual members, and therefore do not mind as much if members die – but overall you don't want to lose too many members, because that weakens your clan.

I suppose this could be thought of as giving characters a fixed number of "lives" (sort of) but I prefer the clan metaphor since it seems less arbitrary than saying that characters may die 10 times after which it's permanent.


Not necessarily. What if your clan was significant enough in size (and not all related, heh) that they could reproduce? This could be a whole other facet to gameplay… Quite an interesting idea.

DavidHaley said:
Anyhow, the point is again that it's critical to think of the fun in the game. One observation that I find to be a fairly good one is to think of what single-player games would be like if you couldn't save/load games and only had a "pause" button available. What kind of behavior would this encourage? Especially as you progress in the game, you would no longer experiment; you'd no longer explore beyond the bare minimum; everything would be a conservation game to avoid anything unexpected. But the unexpected is what provides fun. So, in this case, by removing the "safety" of loading saved games, a whole portion of the fun – in fact part of why we find escapism in games in the first place – has been destroyed.


I suppose this is a personal opinion more than anything. Quite a lot of people like the idea of removing the safety nets. It inspired a very popular system (Hardcore) in Diablo II, and other games as well. Obviously, if you compare the percentages, these people are not as prolific as their counterparts, but it would be nice to not have to pick between them when designing a game. I don't particularly like Diablo II's system, because it completely separates the two groups, and I don't think MUDs have remotely enough players to be able to do that without severe repercussions.
26 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
drrck said:
What if the MUD itself was designed around permanent death so that dying wasn't so common? I think in that case, such a system wouldn't seem like overkill.

Well, yes, dynamics change depending on several things. That said, being able to take risks is an important component to fun.

Some games I've played have an interesting setup where you only "die" when the whole team dies. As long as one person from a group survives a fight, the whole group survives: they're just "knocked out" until the fight ends. I thought this was pretty interesting, but it's still not necessarily solving the problem.

The problem is that (again, in traditional, single-character-based MUDs) there is a (more or less) strong emotional attachment to a single character, more so than e.g. equipment (there is still attachment to that, of course). So, losing that one character means a lot more than just "oops, I didn't prepare"; you're talking about not only hours of work that is lost, but also an entire persona that's gone.

drrck said:
What if your clan was significant enough in size (and not all related, heh) that they could reproduce? This could be a whole other facet to gameplay… Quite an interesting idea.

Yes, that was another facet I was thinking about. It would be moving the metaphor from "clan" to "village" or somesuch; the basic idea would be the same, except that you'd be growing an entire community (or civilization??) in strength, not just a relatively small group of individuals. The attachment would then, hopefully, be more to the community than to individuals, even though some individuals might be more or less prominent in the history of the group.

drrck said:
Obviously, if you compare the percentages, these people are not as prolific as their counterparts, but it would be nice to not have to pick between them when designing a game.

I think there are some interesting things here. For starters, the difference in popularity says something. Also, the very fact that you can choose between normal and hardcore means that you can still enjoy the game without risking permdeath. In a sense, permdeath becomes an extra, optional component to the game. Yes, your characters are separated in both "versions" of the game, but the game is still available to you however you want it.

Mixing permdeath and non-permdeath sounds like a very, very dangerous thing to me. Could a non-permdeath character just keep beating up on a permdeath character until the other one dies? Talk about unfair stakes. :wink: What purpose are you trying to accomplish, other than not splitting the player base? How would the two groups interact?
26 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
The problem is that (again, in traditional, single-character-based MUDs) there is a (more or less) strong emotional attachment to a single character, more so than e.g. equipment (there is still attachment to that, of course). So, losing that one character means a lot more than just "oops, I didn't prepare"; you're talking about not only hours of work that is lost, but also an entire persona that's gone.


Perhaps something akin to reincarnation then? It would certainly require redefining what exactly it is that you're playing, though. Traditionally you play a "person", but what if it were, instead, a "soul"? Maybe dying on your current incarnated "person" would be permanent, but some aspect of your "soul" is retained (work/time invested) when you reincarnate. Obviously you would lose all equipment and probably at least a portion of your work/time, but at least you keep some of that emotional attachment that you're referring to.

DavidHaley said:
I think there are some interesting things here. For starters, the difference in popularity says something. Also, the very fact that you can choose between normal and hardcore means that you can still enjoy the game without risking permdeath. In a sense, permdeath becomes an extra, optional component to the game. Yes, your characters are separated in both "versions" of the game, but the game is still available to you however you want it.


Yes, but I'm afraid there would be too much work involved in making sure every aspect of the game is still fair and playable for those with permanent death. I really dislike the idea of having two different "versions" of the same game, and would rather find some common ground.

DavidHaley said:
Mixing permdeath and non-permdeath sounds like a very, very dangerous thing to me. Could a non-permdeath character just keep beating up on a permdeath character until the other one dies? Talk about unfair stakes. :wink: What purpose are you trying to accomplish, other than not splitting the player base? How would the two groups interact?


Again, I'm not sure how to mesh the two groups. I agree that it would be wholly unfair for such situations to be possible, and I'd rather not have permanent death be an "option". It should apply to everyone or no one, in my opinion.
26 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
drrck said:
Perhaps something akin to reincarnation then? It would certainly require redefining what exactly it is that you're playing, though. Traditionally you play a "person", but what if it were, instead, a "soul"? Maybe dying on your current incarnated "person" would be permanent, but some aspect of your "soul" is retained (work/time invested) when you reincarnate.

Well, if you're going to go this route, I would make it simpler and not think about reincarnation (except insofar as it might affect the fiction of the world). Now we're talking about not-really-permdeath. What you've proposed is kind of a heavy-duty form of the resurrection sickness I mentioned earlier: you don't lose everything, but you get whacked pretty bad, so you still have an incentive not to die.

The problem here is that as soon as you introduce the permanent loss of something (resurrection sickness as I conceive of it is temporary) you open the door for abuse. Pkillers could seriously mess up somebody's character by just slaughtering that character over and over again. Sure, you can monitor that, but now you've added staff load. In the name of what? Well, in the name of asking people to be more prepared before going adventuring. What a can of worms this issue is… :thinking: Don't get me wrong, in many ways I'm also of a mind that permdeath might be a good thing, it's just that its disadvantages might outweigh its advantages.

drrck said:
Yes, but I'm afraid there would be too much work involved in making sure every aspect of the game is still fair and playable for those with permanent death. I really dislike the idea of having two different "versions" of the same game, and would rather find some common ground.

Yes, that is probably true. I guess I was thinking of the hardcore option as a sort of no-holds-barred type thing where balance is slightly less important because there are fewer people playing it anyhow. But that's not necessarily a good assumption.

I agree that maintaining two completely separate systems would be pretty hard. IIRC, though, that's not what Diablo did; the hardcore version had relatively straightforward benefits to compensate for the permdeath.

drrck said:
It should apply to everyone or no one, in my opinion.

I think that makes sense, yes, for all kinds of reasons.
26 Feb, 2008, Noplex wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
I never enjoyed the idea of having a perma-death character system. We were putting less emphasis on player's equipment and more on their skills and knowledge of their surroundings. The game was a full player-kill system which, when a character was killed, would lose their equipment. Certain items were bound to the character (we called them something along the lines of "soul bound" items). There were banks for players to store their excess money reserves as we treated money as equipment as well (you could put money inside a money pouch to minimize a thief's ability to steal, for example).

I also agree - I don't see how you could mix perma-death characters and non-perma-death characters in a game (unless, of course, a perma-death character could only be killed by another perma-death). If I was ever to make a game with perma-death NPCs wouldn't be able to trigger that death, as well. And I would also put a higher emphasis on incapacitating a player.
26 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Well, if you're going to go this route, I would make it simpler and not think about reincarnation (except insofar as it might affect the fiction of the world). Now we're talking about not-really-permdeath. What you've proposed is kind of a heavy-duty form of the resurrection sickness I mentioned earlier: you don't lose everything, but you get whacked pretty bad, so you still have an incentive not to die.

The problem here is that as soon as you introduce the permanent loss of something (resurrection sickness as I conceive of it is temporary) you open the door for abuse. Pkillers could seriously mess up somebody's character by just slaughtering that character over and over again. Sure, you can monitor that, but now you've added staff load. In the name of what? Well, in the name of asking people to be more prepared before going adventuring. What a can of worms this issue is… :thinking: Don't get me wrong, in many ways I'm also of a mind that permdeath might be a good thing, it's just that its disadvantages might outweigh its advantages.


Well, I have other methods of keeping player-killing in check within my game. It's actually going to be encouraged, and without getting into too much detail, the term "player-killing" is pretty much a misnomer as it applies to my game, as you don't "die" nearly as often as the typical MUD. Upon losing a battle, you aren't necessarily dead, and there are penalties for actually finishing people off.

Regardless, such a reincarnation system wouldn't be permanent death in the traditional sense; but as I said earlier, I'm not dead-set on that kind of a system anyway. I just want something that truly represents what a big deal I think death should be. So yeah, getting whacked pretty hard is sufficient in my book - as long as it's not enough to send players running for the hills.
26 Feb, 2008, shasarak wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
I have the same sort of issues with most death systems as I have with most food/weather/sleep systems: they're just too damn boring. I'd like to have a death system which is sufficiently sophisticated that under certain circumstances there would be a tactical advantage to be gained from dying on purpose.

For example, perhaps a dead player temporarily becomes a disembodied ghost who is able to walk through locked doors but is unable to manipulate physical objects; dying could therefore be a method of scouting out a dangerous area without being threatened by its denizens.

Or perhaps dead souls are transported to some sort of astral plane where they can spend as much or as little time as they want before being reincarnated. The plane could be populated with reserves of astral energy which, if harvested correctly, could actually boost the player's abilities when he returns to the physical realm; but the richer sources of astral energy could be guarded by astral monsters capable of temporarily "killing" the player's soul and thereby preventing him from regaining physical form for a set period of time.

Or perhaps one could have a set-up like Peter Jackson's movie The Frightenersin which powerful ghosts can stalk and kill human beings by squeezing their hearts, and the only way to track down and battle a murderous ghost who is after you is to die yourself and then fight it out, ectoplasm to ectoplasm.

There are all sorts of possibilities.

Permadeath (or not) is a whole topic in its own right. Personally I don't think it works except in a pure-RP environment. There's just no way that losing months of time and effort can ever be fun. (Or, more precisely, any attempt to make it fun - such as reincarnation or the above-mentioned clan idea - actually ends up diluting the permadeath concept so much it no longer makes sense to describe it as "permadeath" any more).
26 Feb, 2008, KaVir wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
drrck said:
Perhaps something akin to reincarnation then? It would certainly require redefining what exactly it is that you're playing, though. Traditionally you play a "person", but what if it were, instead, a "soul"? Maybe dying on your current incarnated "person" would be permanent, but some aspect of your "soul" is retained (work/time invested) when you reincarnate. Obviously you would lose all equipment and probably at least a portion of your work/time, but at least you keep some of that emotional attachment that you're referring to.


I implemented something along those lines in the past, with reasonable success. Each character had an OOC part (name, playing time, creation date, total exp ever earned, etc) and an IC part (first and last name, stats, skills, equipment, etc). When you died, your IC part was deleted and your equipment left behind in your corpse, but your OOC part remained and could create a new character, using a percentage of the total exp you'd earned from all previous lives (so each time you recreated, you were always at least as strong as your previous character had started out). New creation options were unlocked as your total exp reached certain levels, so that death also doubled up as a sort of remort system.

The public channels (chat and tell) used your OOC name, so you could keep in touch with friends you'd made if you wanted to continue roleplaying with them - but your IC name had to be chosen from a highly restricted selection (making it practically impossible to have the same IC name twice, and also ensuring that all IC names were appropriate for the setting - although amusing name combinations were still possible, and actually rather popular).

If I were going to run another roleplaying mud, I'd probably use the same system again.
26 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
I implemented something along those lines in the past, with reasonable success. Each character had an OOC part (name, playing time, creation date, total exp ever earned, etc) and an IC part (first and last name, stats, skills, equipment, etc). When you died, your IC part was deleted and your equipment left behind in your corpse, but your OOC part remained and could create a new character, using a percentage of the total exp you'd earned from all previous lives (so each time you recreated, you were always at least as strong as your previous character had started out). New creation options were unlocked as your total exp reached certain levels, so that death also doubled up as a sort of remort system.

The public channels (chat and tell) used your OOC name, so you could keep in touch with friends you'd made if you wanted to continue roleplaying with them - but your IC name had to be chosen from a highly restricted selection (making it practically impossible to have the same IC name twice, and also ensuring that all IC names were appropriate for the setting - although amusing name combinations were still possible, and actually rather popular).

If I were going to run another roleplaying mud, I'd probably use the same system again.


That's along the lines of what I was thinking of as well, although I don't think it's restricted to RP games. You'd just have to make sure that permanent death of your IC self is not something that would be a normal occurance, regardless of how active you were in PKing (or, actually, PvPing).

I'm currently toying with the idea of a system like this that also incorporates other ideas to keep permanent death in check. Maybe when you die, you become a ghost that wanders the world on a different plane of existence, but can only do so for a short duration (any ideas on how to implement this in a logical way? don't really want to use a bland timer). This would give a window of opportunity for resurrection spells and the like, but still retain the very real chance that you could die permanently.
26 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
I have the same sort of issues with most death systems as I have with most food/weather/sleep systems: they're just too damn boring. I'd like to have a death system which is sufficiently sophisticated that under certain circumstances there would be a tactical advantage to be gained from dying on purpose.

For example, perhaps a dead player temporarily becomes a disembodied ghost who is able to walk through locked doors but is unable to manipulate physical objects; dying could therefore be a method of scouting out a dangerous area without being threatened by its denizens.


This is the kind of thing I want to stay away from. I want death to be 100% "bad". There should be no desire to die, just as there (usually) isn't any in real life.

shasarak said:
Or perhaps dead souls are transported to some sort of astral plane where they can spend as much or as little time as they want before being reincarnated. The plane could be populated with reserves of astral energy which, if harvested correctly, could actually boost the player's abilities when he returns to the physical realm; but the richer sources of astral energy could be guarded by astral monsters capable of temporarily "killing" the player's soul and thereby preventing him from regaining physical form for a set period of time.


This is an interesting idea, although in my game, I would prefer the player him/herself not be responsible for his/her own resurrection. This kind of content only available in the afterlife would also lead to a desire to die in order to experience it - something I definitely don't want.

shasarak said:
Or perhaps one could have a set-up like Peter Jackson's movie The Frightenersin which powerful ghosts can stalk and kill human beings by squeezing their hearts, and the only way to track down and battle a murderous ghost who is after you is to die yourself and then fight it out, ectoplasm to ectoplasm.


Hmmm… ghost vs. ghost combat? I like it. I don't like the idea of intentionally dying in order to do it, but I still like it.
26 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
I also don't really like the idea of death giving you rewards. There has to be some challenge, and a penalty imposed for failure; that doesn't have to be a huge penalty, but it should be a negative penalty (i.e. reward). Furthermore, abilities such as ghost-scouting seem to take away from potential abilities for live characters (e.g. a mage's sight spell is rendered somewhat redundant).

I also quite like the idea of ghost vs. ghost combat, but again not in the context of getting rewards for intentionally hanging out in the land of the dead. I might rephrase it in terms of needing to defeat other ghosts as you claw your way out of the underworld; e.g. you need to gain "experience" in order to escape the underworld and return as a mortal.


Also, it's worth adding that re: my clan idea, the idea wasn't to emulate permanent death; the idea was to reduce the emphasis on individual characters and thereby make it less of a problem for them to be destroyed, permanently damaged, lost, etc.
27 Feb, 2008, shasarak wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
I also don't really like the idea of death giving you rewards. There has to be some challenge, and a penalty imposed for failure; that doesn't have to be a huge penalty, but it should be a negative penalty (i.e. reward).

The problem with swingeing death penalties on many MUDs is that it makes the "grind" or "XP conveyor-belt" approach to advancement even more annoying than it already is. Too many MUDs basically come down to "grind": kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, level, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, level, and so on, and so on, and so on. This is bad enough without engineering a situation where a player has to go back to an earlier level of advancement and repeat challenges he has already overcome just to get back to a point in the game that is interesting.

It's fun to come up against a series of progressively more difficult challenges, where the risk of failiure steadily increases with each one. But, if you fail a particular challenge, you should be allowed to repeat that one challenge until you get it right; what you should not have to do is have to repeat earlier challenges that you have already gone through just in order to get back to trying the so-far-unbeaten challenge again. If you strip equipment, skills, stats, or levels from a slain character then effectively you are forcing them to go back and do over again challenges that they have already defeated in order to regain the equipment, stats, skills, levels, etc. that will allow them to try the new challenge a second time. That's not fun; it's boring.

If you must make death unambiguously non-fun (and I have yet to be convinced that any game feature at all should ever be unambiguously non-fun), then at least find a way of penalising the player that doesn't strip away any of the advancement that he has already completed. For example, if you stick his soul in a dungeon in Hell that he needs to escape from by overcoming demonic guards, that acts as a penalty in its own right: it will take a significant amount of game time to get back into the real world, and if you risk dying then you risk not being able to continue towards your real-world objective for quite some time as a consequence. But, at the very least, once the player gets back to the real world, there shouldn't be any long-term penalties; he should end up back in the same state that he left.

Ideally the process of escaping from Hell should be an enjoyable and interesting challenge in its own right.

DavidHaley said:
Also, it's worth adding that re: my clan idea, the idea wasn't to emulate permanent death; the idea was to reduce the emphasis on individual characters and thereby make it less of a problem for them to be destroyed, permanently damaged, lost, etc.

I'm not accusing you of wanting to emulate permadeath, I'm accusing you of wanting to dilutepermadeath to such an extent that it isn't actually permadeath any more. Under a system like that you effectively don'tdie permanently, you simply have a high penalty for death and have to change your character's name every time it happens. How is that an improvement on keeping your character's name the same and suffering the same penalty in a "non-permadeath" system?

Many other variations on permadeath (e.g. a set number of "lives" or permadeath only happening under certain circumstances) are equally unhappy compromises; if permadeath is a bad thing it should be eliminated from the game entirely, not just made less likely and less common. If it's a good thing, don't dilute it to the point where it changes into something else.



I think the main justification for permadeath is "realism". This has always struck me as a thoroughly feeble justification for at least three different reasons:

1) Realism is only ever important as a means of achieving fun. If it isn't fun, then who cares if it's not realistic?

2) In a fantasy world you can come up with your own rules as to what is "realistic" within that world and what isn't; there are no limits.

3) Having everyone constantly dying right and left isn't realistic anyway.

Point 3 is, I think, an important one. In real life, people don't die all that often. If I want to get past a security guard in real life, the lastthing I would consider doing is killing him. I might bribe him, or threaten to hurt his family if he didn't cooperate, or organise a diversion, or scare him away with the threat of poison gas or an explosion, or menace him with a gun (but not actually shoot), or knock him out, or wrestle him to the ground and tie him up, or drug his coffee, or sneak past him while he's looking the other way, or hire an attractive female accomplice to seduce him into compliance, or threaten to send compromising photographs of him to his boss if he doesn't do what I want; the one thing I almost certainly wouldn't do is kill him (unless my own life was being threatened). Similarly, if a fight breaks out outside a bar, it rarely ends in murder; even badly-beaten people usually survive. A large percentage of the murders committed in the US happen because of the presence of firearms, which most mediaeval fantasy worlds don't have. And virtually all wild animals will flee from a fight with a human if they're losing rather than staying and fighting to the death.

But in most MUDs, all fights are fights to the death. If one is really interested in realism, nearly all combat should be non-lethal - it will end in one fighter fleeing, surrendering, or being immobilised, but not dying. And, in addition, there should be a hugerange of non-combat methods available for avoiding, circumventing or overcoming monster- or NPC-related obstacles. Once all of that is in place, permadeath or the lack of it would almost cease to be an issue; and, more importantly, it's only afterall that is in place that one should start to worry about whether or not permadeath is "realistic".
27 Feb, 2008, KaVir wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
I'm not accusing you of wanting to emulate permadeath, I'm accusing you of wanting to dilute permadeath to such an extent that it isn't actually permadeath any more. Under a system like that you effectively don't die permanently, you simply have a high penalty for death and have to change your character's name every time it happens. How is that an improvement on keeping your character's name the same and suffering the same penalty in a "non-permadeath" system?


It's primarily an improvement for roleplaying purposes - it means you can assassinate the king and he'll actually stay dead, instead of respawning back at the temple and calling for his guards. If you cannot permanently kill IC personas, in-game organisations tend to stagnate, because it's always the same people in charge. You'll sometimes see examples of this in PK muds, where one particular clan dominates the game, and cannot be knocked from its perch without admin interference.

The approach I mentioned using in the past ensured that players didn't lose all their hard work, even though the game world was pretty brutal. However because the IC aspects of a character could be permanently killed (which included IC influence and social contacts), many people had the opportunity to rise to positions of power, as former leaders fell in battle.

shasarak said:
if permadeath is a bad thing it should be eliminated from the game entirely, not just made less likely and less common. If it's a good thing, don't dilute it to the point where it changes into something else.


Like many features, permadeath has both good points and bad points. A compromise can allow you to incorporate a better good-point-to-bad-point ratio than either extreme.
27 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
The problem with swingeing death penalties on many MUDs is that it makes the "grind" or "XP conveyor-belt" approach to advancement even more annoying than it already is. Too many MUDs basically come down to "grind": kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, level, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, level, and so on, and so on, and so on. This is bad enough without engineering a situation where a player has to go back to an earlier level of advancement and repeat challenges he has already overcome just to get back to a point in the game that is interesting.

There are other kinds of penalties that can be imposed than simple XP loss, no? I think I even covered some examples, that you cite back to me. :wink: (e.g. escaping from an underworld)

shasarak said:
I'm not accusing you of wanting to emulate permadeath, I'm accusing you of wanting to dilute permadeath to such an extent that it isn't actually permadeath any more.

That is what I meant. I'm not trying to call it permanent death – i.e. I am not trying to emulate permanent death. I'm not trying to dilute it, because I'm not trying to have anything to do with it…


Re: your argument that people don't die in real-life… I'm not sure it's exactly fair to compare, on the one hand, slaying dragons and waging battles against your sworn enemies to real-life on the other!
27 Feb, 2008, shasarak wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
There are other kinds of penalties that can be imposed than simple XP loss, no?

Loss of skills, stats, equipment, etc. can have exactly the same effect. That wasn't aimed purely at you, anyway, it was a criticism of MUD death systems in general….

DavidHaley said:
Re: your argument that people don't die in real-life… I'm not sure it's exactly fair to compare, on the one hand, slaying dragons and waging battles against your sworn enemies to real-life on the other!

As I've said already, realism is, at best, a means to an end, with the end being fun. The point I was making is that "realism" seems to me to be about the only possible justification for something as inherently un-fun as permadeath, and that even people who are seriously hung up on realism ought to have higher priorities (such as non-lethal and "social" forms of combat). I agree that dragon-slaying is not especially realistic: hence, all the more reason notto be seduced into attempting permadeath on the grounds that it would be realistic.

Having said that, I think it's still valid to ask: how come dragons never run away when they realise they're on the losing end of a battle? Any real animal would, and anything intelligent would be even more likely to run rather than fight to the death.
27 Feb, 2008, KaVir wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
The point I was making is that "realism" seems to me to be about the only possible justification for something as inherently un-fun as permadeath


Permadeath is a feature that some players demand in a mud, therefore it stands to reason that some people do find permadeath fun.

shasarak said:
I agree that dragon-slaying is not especially realistic


It is usually realistic within the setting described by the theme of the mud - or "internally consistent", as some prefer to phrase it. I can maintain the suspension of disbelief when reading a story about a dragon-slayer. But if he suddenly reappears in the middle of a nearby city after being eaten by said dragon, naked and alive, without any explanation why, and then starts running off to find his own corpse so that he can recover his weapons and armour, that will break my suspension of disbelief.

My mud doesn't have permadeath, but there is a good in-game reason why the players come back after they've been killed.
27 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Permadeath is a feature that some players demand in a mud, therefore it stands to reason that some people do find permadeath fun.


I agree. As I said before, while the futile attempt at a utopian game where everything is fun is a good theoretical goal, it's important to realize that it will never happen. You simply can't make everything fun for everyone, and there are a lot of game concepts that simply have to be un-fun for a lot of people in order for the game to make sense (not talking about realism here, necessarily).
27 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
The point I was making is that "realism" seems to me to be about the only possible justification for something as inherently un-fun as permadeath,

Some people argue that it can encourage world balance as a natural leveling force. By forcing a recycling of equipment and skills, you guaranteee that nobody becomes unduly powerful forever. I'm not sure I subscribe to the belief, but there you have it.

shasarak said:
and that even people who are seriously hung up on realism ought to have higher priorities (such as non-lethal and "social" forms of combat). I agree that dragon-slaying is not especially realistic: hence, all the more reason not to be seduced into attempting permadeath on the grounds that it would be realistic.

Well, the thing is that people want to get hung up on realism within a suspension of belief. KaVir made the point well, I think. The point isn't so much to demand a copy of our world: the point is to demand a world that makes internal sense.

shasarak said:
Having said that, I think it's still valid to ask: how come dragons never run away when they realise they're on the losing end of a battle? Any real animal would, and anything intelligent would be even more likely to run rather than fight to the death.

I agree entirely. I also think that it would not hesitate to slay the attackers if it could. The point was more to say that the combat is potentially very lethal, not that it always must be. In other words, there are plenty of occasions where fictional combat is extremely lethal, and it's not all about stopping when the other guy is KO.

drrck said:
As I said before, while the futile attempt at a utopian game where everything is fun is a good theoretical goal,

Actually some people say that even theoretically it's a bad goal, precisely because it's impossible to make something fun for everybody. Therefore, trying to do so will result in diluting all the interesting concepts to a meaningless mush of inane concepts.

drrck said:
and there are a lot of game concepts that simply have to be un-fun for a lot of people in order for the game to make sense (not talking about realism here, necessarily).

I would qualify this somewhat and say that while local aspects might not be fun, they contribute to (and are necessary for) making the game as a whole more fun.
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