Re: What types of games are impacted the most by permadeath?
This has been my experience as both a player and staff-member on Shadows of Isildur and Atonement; players love intricate plots, whether created by other players or storytelling admins. It takes very careful design on the side of the storyteller to craft plots that are open-ended to allow players to affect and shape them with their characters' actions.
My absolute favorite element of an RPI is that it is designed to make character actions important - cause&effect, consequences for actions, a world that is able to be shaped by the players. On Atonement, for instance, we opened ALPHA with characters that were suffering from amnesia, floating in space on a ship shared by a mutant race of aliens that have the ability to infect and turn characters into "zombies" (for lack of a better word). The current political structure of the entire game, its clans, its customs, its laws and law-enforcement and economy ... it has all been created from the ground-up by the player characters. The staff support them as necessary and play NPCs and run the storylines that the players involve themselves in, but the face of the game has been created fundamentally through the roleplay of the players.
And they do seem to love it.
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