[incognito9]

Most respectfully, prof, you may not have intended a flame, but your earlier post sure looked, smelled, and smoked like a flame to me.

I think that permadeath can be painful in both situations. I don't know of any pure H&S places that are permadeath (though pretty much all muds I come across claim to be role-play intensive). Personally, I find it harder to create a character that is distinct and recognizable and that I like to play than I do to grind through levels.

Once I played a mud that involved hack and slash and some roleplay too. I created a pretty decent character, who spoke and acted pretty consistently and whose personality was decidedly different than mine. In the end, I quit the mud not because he died and lost all his equipment (and I remember thinking "Man, I lost my Stormshield! I'll NEVER get one of those again), but because the imms decided one day that my name didn't sound fantasy-ish enough and said I had to start over with a new char. Losing my equipment sucked, but losing my personality was a show-stopper.