[DonathinFrye]

I don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying. I do think, however, that if you have permanent death as a feature on a roleplay-focused MUD, then you have to have complete respect for that feature. You can't let players get away with attempting to "twink" or cheat death, or to be uncooperative in a conflict-based scene. You also have to give players the chance to play characters who are not as typically threatened as combat-focused characters, but still are necessary for the story and the well (or ill) being of the rest of the characters. Using a rewards based system, having open dialogue with your game's community about what you expect and what you don't want to see, re-enforcing and empowering their ability to tell stories in a positive way, encouraging them to take risks, and showing them that accepting IC consequences for IC actions is something that lets them truly affect the world with more realistic stakes ... these are all just a small number of the many things that you have to do to make permanent death work (on an RPI-like game).

I think that your combat system sounds very interesting. I've played and designed so many systems - I have a true love for combat, and it's a unique approach. However, consider the scenario below.

What if your character is an arch-nemesis to my character? What if you were my brother and had stolen my wife and run the business that our father gave us into the ground? What if I were a generally good person? Now, imagine me, sitting infront of a lake, throwing stones. PCs pass by going on about their gossip, trade and general business; meanwhile, I am throwing stones and staring out at the lake, knowing that you will be alone in the shop come nightfall. I'm fighting with myself, using feeling/think commands/code. I'm trying to push myself to have the will to kill you, or to forgive you, or to run away and abandon the village. Nightfall comes, and I go to the shop; I find you sleeping on the floor in the backroom. I poison my dagger and sneak into the room. I lock all of the doors and steal your keys off of your belt. I then surprise you and engage you in combat, all the while unleashing the rage that I have for how you, my brother, have betrayed me.

This kind of storytelling - the kind of murder and sacrifice, fear and fearlessness, plague and inexplainable accidents, facing overwhelming odds while knowing OOCly that you may lose that four year character in a meaningful way - is hard to accomplish without permanent death. In your system, when you decide to stop fighting to avoid being murdered, where does that leave the scene but unresolved? Should you keep fighting and end up dead, where does that leave those relationships in a few days when your character is resurrected? I definitely do not believe that good storytelling can only accompany permanent death; however, permanent death lets you go places that you cannot go without it.

So it's a complicated issue, as all of these (mostly well-written) posts would indicate. Many of what I might think are positive attributes of including permanent death in a roleplay-focused MUD might be conceived by others as negative attributes. I think that, ultimately, the distinction lies in what kind of story you are wanting to tell. If you are wanting to tell a story where life and death matter, then death has to matter in an in-character fashion. No matter how creative an approach you take, there is always an OOC element to allowing resurrection of characters that makes certain kinds of roleplay impossible (or nearly so) to accomplish, as in the example situation I've posted above. If you are telling a story where death does not need to matter, either because your game is more of a hybrid of H+S and Roleplay-focus, or because your game isn't designed in such a way as to cause death to matter to the story itself, then permanent death may not be right for you. It's all in the genre.