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For those who have created a permadeath system, what is the advantage in having one?
I'm not a MUD coder or builder, but one of the two MUDs I'm currently playing regularly has a "death means death" system. On , when your character dies, they die. No resurrection, no ifs buts or maybes. And if the man-sized scorpions, irate templars or blazing noon-day sun don't get you, ol' Father Time certainly will. Your character ages and eventually keels over from decreptitude.
And I love it. To the extent that I find it difficult to go back to less "rigorous" systems.
(The other MUD I currently play has a typical half-arsed sort of perma-death, whereby you can permakill a PC, but only at significant cost to your own character. Following most deaths, a character can be resurrected, but with a hit to stats and skills. I believe its lack of true permadeath to be a weakness of the game, purely my subjective opinion, but it certainly has sufficient strengths to keep me addicted.)
It is difficult to take death seriously if all it entails is the minor annoyance of the loss of a few xp. It is much easier to RP the terror of a character fleeing for his or her life when you know that if they fail to escape, that'll be the last you see of them; their terror is your terror. The adrenaline rush is indescribable.
Also, I enjoy a challenge, I appreciate being provided with goals to pursue. A major challenge to any new Armageddon character is trying to figure out how to stay alive, a major goal, finding their next glass of water. It can be terrifically satisfying to finally keep a character alive for more than a few hours.
People do get very attached to their characters, but because of the limited life-span, I think on Armageddon they get less hung up on creating an "uber-character", and experiment more with different roles. There's no point in spending endless hours maxing out skills because you will lose them, one way or another. You might as well get out there and live your character's life, because, as Valg puts it, "the clock is ticking".
Maia the masochist
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