[Jherlen]

Reading over this thread, I had a thought, and to me it seems like a rather obvious one: when we're talking about permadeath and how it affects RP, what we may really be discussing is immersion, and how immersed we tend to become in our characters in roleplaying MUDs.

I would submit that players who prefer permadeath prefer to become much more immersed in their characters and create a more solid barrier between the character's experiences/knowledge in the virtual world, and their experiences/knowledge about the game in the real world as a player.

Note before you start gearing up to argue me that here I'm not considering more/less immersion as promoting better/worse RP, I'm simply talking about boundaries between the player and the role they play.

The posters here who post that they dislike permadeath say that it means less to them, since you can create another character and continue roleplaying right away. The posters saying they prefer permadeath say it means much more to them, because when their character dies, they will never have the same role they had. The permadeath group is placing much more weight on an individual character and their story, which can't be recreated in the game once lost. The latter group instead is viewing roleplaying more in the context of the game, seeing it as easily transferred and replaceable from character to character.

Players who don't prefer permadeath often say that they're more scared of creating a nemesis who can fight them in the game for years to come down the road without absolute resolution of conflict. Players who do prefer it say they're more scared of creating a nemesis who can kill their character and end their story forever. Again, I think the fundamental difference in the viewpoints is that players who prefer permadeath are immersed down to their character level such as they disassociate the game from the story their character is a part of. To them, how the story ends is much more important than to a non-permadeath player, who would simply say "Well, I'll reroll and start a new one."

For me, coming from a permadeath perspective, a lot of the arguments against it don't have much traction with me. I've had characters I've lost who I simply can't recreate, because the other characters they shared their story with are gone, the world conditions have changed, I've changed as a player, and so on. For me, when a character dies and I move to a new role, the way I play the game changes. I do my best to avoid linking up too closely with characters my previous character was close to, I try to play in different areas, and so on. I would much rather be immersed in a new character and a new life than let OOC influences impact how I play. I know not all players are like that, not even all players on permadeath muds are like that. But by and large, I think it is a preferred level of immersion, whether you are playing the game as a character, or playing as a player who plays characters.