I did something similar. Whenever a character earned an experience point, they would also earn a soul point. If they died, they would have to go through character generation again, but they would begin with a number of starting exp (to spend on training) based on a portion of their soul points - and as soul points never go down, each time you came back you would always be at least as strong as you had been in your previous life. Other stuff such as class, equipment, IC name, knowledge of other characters, etc, would all be stripped away, but at least players still felt they had an investment in the mud. It worked quite well, IMO, providing the main advantages of permadeath without the downsides.
In the new mud I'm working on, however, the characters are gods, so it's not really an issue - if they are killed, they simply reform back in their own plane of existence.
|