I like that perma death option. Also, the final "perma death" should not BE perma death. You can just get sent to some horribly scary Afterlife or something like that, waiting to be resurrected :). Or you can continue on as your heir. Still having many of your items, but little skills/exp compared to before.

But that kinda defeats the purpose of having 'perma-death'. The whole point is to get people to think before they act. If I have a high level character, with lots items and money, but only a couple of lives left, I am not about to just jump in the fray with another player. What if I mis-judged him/her, and s/he hands me my arse? It would also see heroes/villains 'retire' as they cannot aford to play the high stakes anymore.

I have actually considered having an entire 'afterlife' setting, where you continue adventuring in the underworld. I got rid of the idea because as cool as it sounds, it's not much of a deterrent to rampant PKing. I slaughter them here, and once my luck runs out, I slaughter them there.

How does (on average) 20 monsters of your level sound? I'm currently using a formula similar to .hack://infection for experience. You need 1000 exp to make a level, period. Monsters give out EXP based on your level vs theirs. On par = 50 xp.

Oh, and I almost forgot, you can actually recieve negative xp for killing a mob of significantly lower level than you, which is another deterrent.

All things considered, I'd say you either allow PvP, or you allow Permadeath. You don't allow both. Unless you can explain to me how its fun to have uber characters running around slaughtering newbies, permanently.

Actually though I haven't seen any online permadeath games that weren't true roleplaying games, so I couldn't say for sure how well they'd work. Perhaps you should TRY it and find out.

sapphiremagus wrote:

Should player death be permanent?

Not in the typical game. Perhaps a game designed to have little or nothing to do with combat.

For typical games, the only working answer I've seen for PvP is Dark Age of Camelot's realm system, where you can't attack people from your own realm.

This means you can play entirely without PvP if you want (just stay in your realm), and that PvP situations are battles between groups of people.

All the standard problems with PvP just don't exist with this system.

I plan to tackle that topic in my game as well.. i plan on having permanent death.. but with a twist..

When you die, you are confined to the well of souls (a special area of astral space for dead people) where if you reach a goal (don't know what, mabey puzzles, mabey navigate a maze or something "intellectual") you get to be reincarnate...

I may add some measure of control to reincanation.. though for the most part it will be pretty much random.. when you are reincarnated, you start out a child under someones wing (or ward of the state if there are no families looking for children), very weak, but with a "stored" potential (your stats get "upgraded" to these stored values when you come of age.

while your growing up, and after you are grown, you can "awaken" though i can't really divulge how i plan to do this. this will be a hidden stat, thought you may get some vuage messages as to its progress.

once you are 100% awakened, you will regain your "psychological stats." buy your physical capabilities remain the same.

P.S: Rip me off and DIE!

The idea is like hitting a dog when it piddles. Same with Mass PKers.

I think the solution in my opinion is just give the players the options for PK and Non-PK. If they are PK they can only kill someone above or under 10 levels of their victem or they cant fight. That way, even if someone dose get spammed, well they asked for the damn PK.

Also make player corpses that stay in that room and are lootable and have the player load up in a crypt some spot away from the death, so there is a bigger chance of them looseing things they reall need.

My idea is that you have an alignment score: negative = bad, positive = good. The alignment goes up to a value of 10, at which point you are the personification of true good/evil. Killing things in reverse-alignment to your own (good kill bad, bad kill good) raises your alignment, while killing the other-way round (bad v bad, good v good) makes your alignment reverse.

The alignment is, at heart, how likely you are to snuff it if you get 'killed' in battle, but since my game is pretty much PRP (player-run-plot) based, you can only die in true divine quests.

Death, like in real life, can be seen as a good thing or bad thing, depending on the player. Once truly dead, you CAN (1 chance in 30 - spirituality) become a ghost, capable of only communicating with ghosts and those with the sixth-sense (one in 129).

Those with the sixth sense (and only those) are capable of necromancy, but the resultant undead being is greatly physically weak, depending on the time spent as a ghost and the ability of the necromancer. Amazing necromancer + ages spent dead (more knowledge of dead spirits and such like) = physically strong.

And that is my overly complicated permanent death system, based on necromancy, the undead, PRPs and a certain book (not 'The Sixth Sense' movie).

Wouldn't it make more sense for your alignment to go from -10 to 10, -10 being evil, 10 being good? You could then use abs(alignment) whenever you needed to, and you wouldn't need a seperate variable to track your good/evil status.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of permadeath, per se, it's a preference of mine not to have it, but it is personal.

In games in general I'm very fond of the concept of having a reasonable way to avoid any really bad thing. The big MUD I play, GemStone III, does in fact have permadeath, but you can avoid it by purchasing favors from the gods. People who get lazy with this can and do die permanently, dying multiple times and using up their few favors in invasion situations or long journeys.

Now, I think you might be able to have a perfectly good game with straight-out permadeath and item loss, I just wouldn't visit it much. But if you put in some way to avoid those things, a way that requires some expenditure, effort and even thought, I think that adds a lot of fun to a game.

If you make the price high enough, people will risk it, and you will see people losing their characters and gear.

At the very least, I don't want a game where my only way to avoid permadeath is to stick to creatures so easy they're completely uninteresting to hunt.

Z