Death is simple, send them to the medical bay saying they found the person in critical condition. :P

If you really want to make death realistic you have to look at it from a different perspective.

Why, in real life, do murders occur very rarely (in your average suburban setting), whereas in games they happen every other second?

It's not because death is permanent in real life. That only gives you a reason to fear death, not to fear killing other people.

The reason it happens less is because there are such terrible repercussions for murder; people who kill other people get arrested and either killed themselves (and it's permadeath, so that's feared), or sentenced to life in jail.

If your game world has no kind of law and order and is just anarchy then you must accept that people will just go around mercilessly killing other people for laughs, even with permadeath. That's what happens in real life, too (think war-torn unstable countries like a few african states or post-war Iraq).

If you want death to work a little more fairly, you'll have to set up some kind of justice system- either run by players, or by some kind of internal mechanism. It's what we did in real life to balance things out too and it works pretty well for the most part.

Elation wrote:

If your game world has no kind of law and order and is just anarchy then you must accept that people will just go around mercilessly killing other people for laughs, even with permadeath. < snip >

That's part of the solution, I think. The only trouble with that is that the griefer in question (let's be honest, that's what the asshole that pulls this stuff is), upon seeing that his character has been sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole for murdering generic NPCs X, Y, and Z can merely create a new character. He can start fresh and go on another killing spree.

There's no easy way to solve that caveat. I think that you lose no matter what steps you take to prevent this. Make "killing" accessible only to players of a certain level or age (duration of the existence of the character, not the player's age) and you lose realism as well as that crucial element of human distrust. Restrict the number of new characters per IP and you probably risk irritating more of your real players than the griefers (who will find a workaround anyway).

To pick up where Elation's analogy left off, people care about going to jail because they can't just start over clean.

I don't understand the attraction to permadeath in a long-term game anyway. What's so entertaining about losing the last X hours of effort you put into building your character if it's just going to be deleted because some jerk wants to prove he doesn't have a tiny cock? There are all kinds of other results that can occur from "failure" (losing a fight, hitting an asteroid, etc.) aside from death; Permanent or near permanent character penalties in the form of disfiguring or debilitating injuries, memory (skill) loss, loss or damage of equipment, and so on. Why you would choose instead to basically tell your players to quit your game once they fail a challenge is beyond me.

Oh, so it's a quickie deathmatch style game (where you go in not expecting to live for more than a few minutes anyway). In that case, it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference either way since characters are disposable anyway. It sounds like "permadeath" in the sense that something like Quake is "permadeath" - if you die you start over with one gun and have to go pick up the other ones strewn about the level again.

I don't really have any comments on the concept, then. That doesn't sound like any fun at all to me, but that's just me. Good luck on it, regardless.

Dead_Demon wrote:

(A building that holds another dimension that will be near impossible to escape from, and it is heavily guarded so attempted rescues will be very, very challenging.)

Hummmmmmm

I just want to point this out and remind you about the difference between challenging and frustrating. If something is going to be "near impossible" to accomplish, I don't see any challenge in that. It sounds like you're planning only to frustrate the player, and that kind of gameplay sucks. Especially with your desire for permadeath, which (I imagine) would severely hold back a player's attempts at learning whatever "challenge" you give him.

Giving a player a Rubik's Cube for the first time in his life and then threatening him with the loss of his character if he doesn't solve it within a minute isn't a challenge at all. You mentioned twice about someone losing his riches when he dies, so whether or not you have level-building you're still adding elements of progression and time spent in a game, just to rip it all away. :/

Thanks for the ideas, guys!

@Sarm

I didn't mean that the actual "jail" would be nigh impossible for the player to escape from, infact, it could be easy. What I am planning to do is when you are captured by the police and put in jail, your character is frozen for a preset amount of time(Probably 2 weeks). Once frozen, you could consider your character "dead" if you want, but before those 2 weeks are up, you have a chance to sneak into the jail and free your frozen character. Once freed, you can then either:
a)Attempt to rescue characters ship and weapons
or
b)Just get out of there before both of your characters are caught

And like I said, if you are a smart player and bring a cloaking device, it should be easy as long as you don't fool around.

@ D4RK 54B3R
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Great idea! Hmm. I was thinking, for a ship to be destroyed, you have to first board the ship and destroy the power core located within. The only thing that happens to a ship if your ship fires upon it, after the enemy ship takes enough damage, it "stall" until the ship has 1/4 of its power regained. A ship will automatically gain power back after it hasn't been damaged for more than 10 seconds.

@ Evre

No. I am trying to avoid that kind of thing as much as possible. You will be able to build your stats up still, but not by much. You start a character, you get a random starting for strength, speed and intelligence and aim. Those stats also are have a random limit(15-23 max). The greater aim is, the better precision you have with firearms. The combat system I have designed for it requires you to target your opponent, and once you press the fire macro, your character does the rest. All you do is control movement. The bullets will go to the position you were at when the opponents gun fired, so you still have a chance to dodge them.

Also, similar to what Jmurph suggested, turning in a player alive gives you 3x as much as it would turning in a player dead, and since wealth=power in the game, you'd want to try to keep them alive.