[silvarilon]

I think the discussion is less a string of complaints about permadeath, or a competition for "who has it worse" - and instead a constructive discussion about the various negative impacts.

Why is that useful? As a game designer, I want to understand my players, and what they like and don't like. There are many benefits for permadeath, as well as disadvantages. Understanding the disadvantages puts us in a better position to maximize the benefits while minimizing the disadvantages.

For my part, Ironclaw Online has limited permadeath, because I'm trying to do exactly that - gain some of the advantages, while avoid the disadvantages.


When talking about roleplay-intensive players, how you tend to get the "stick with one PC" vs "regularly try out new PCs"
Correct - that can be a problem. Depending on the game design. If the game allows the PCs to pull out weapons and try to kill each other, then the players who want a new character can effectively attempt to kill off another PC with no "cost" to themselves.

I've myself had a few players attempt "suicide" by attacking my PC, with the hopes of killing my character, and when they failed they kill themselves, with the hope my PC gets charged with murder and imprisoned. That would be a totally fun situation if it had happened from roleplaying, it was less fun because it happens from players taking advantage of the OOC fact that they were planning to delete their character anyway. (It's happened to me a few times because my one character is rather unpleasantly nasty, and some players can't tell the difference between a character that is roleplayed as nasty, and a player that is nasty... as time went by and that character got better known people stopped doing that)

There are a few ways around this, but it would depend on your game setup. For our part, death is actually *optional* in many areas. The focus is on roleplaying, which requires cooperation between the players. So if you loose a fight and they decide to kill your character, it *asks* you if you want to have your character killed. You can say "no" and then it's up to the players to come up with a reason why they don't kill you. Cooperation. Roleplaying. Storytelling.

There are some exceptions. There are "danger areas" where your character can be killed without you giving permission. If you step into the dueling arena, for example - even though most duels are non-lethal, you don't get a choice. Loose a fight, and your opponent can kill you.

So that gets around the "take high risks" characters. Those characters can explore the "danger areas" without worry about death. The long term characters can avoid those areas, and instead focus on the politics and roleplaying. And if a temporary character attacks and wins a fight, the long-term character's player can choose not to die, or can choose to temporarily die. Most choose to temporarily die since, well, they're roleplaying and tend to go along with where the story is taking them. They know they won't be loosing the character forever, just for a week or two.

The players risking permadeath will know beforehand (you can get permadeath from being executed by the law, or by upsetting the church enough that they refuse to resurrect you anymore) - in both those cases, the player has to do some action before the premadeath will happen. They can avoid doing any death-penalty crimes, or avoid going into any danger areas if already excommunicated. It allows the risk-takers to take risks, while giving a way for the long term players to safeguard their characters.

This system isn't perfect, far from it. But it minimizes some of the problems with temporary characters doing kamakaze runs on long term characters.

We have our in-game legal system enforce this "escalation" - and boy does it upset players.
So we have constables that will just arrest *both* people and charge them *both* with assault. "But I was defending myself" - No. You drew a sword and hit your opponent. You *could* have fought back with your fists. Or drew a sword and only parried, while calling for the constables. Or parried while trying to retreat. Those are all valid in-character solutions *and* all valid things that the player can do with the game engine. But they don't want to, because in almost every movie, book, and computer game the hero doesn't just defend themselves, they also kick the bad guys ass.

In some games, it would be fine to draw a weapon and kick the opponents ass. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo & Sam happily kill orcs with no concern as to whether the orcs have families. If I was making a LotR mud, I'd have no negative consequences for killing off those orcs. In this particular case I'm making a political game. So there *are* consequences for drawing a sword. Political consequences.

... and yet, it still hasn't stopped the players from stupidly escalating things.

Actually, something that does help avoid the stupid escalation, is the above mentioned "you choose if you die" - as the players got used to that, they had to come to terms with the fact that they can't just kill off another PC unless they *ask permission* and *play cooperatively* - and most players won't give permission after loosing a fight, or if the death has no roleplay. So instead, they typically need to ask *before* the fight. "Hey, if I win, would you agree to die?" "Sure, if you'll do the same" or "What? Your character would kill over this argument? That's just insane" or whatever. It forces them to think about where they would stop fighting.

Players also seek conclusions. At the end of almost every movie, the bad guy dies. Death feels like a good conclusion. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to players that *letting bad guys go is good* - that allows them to *come back again later* and leads to *another story* and *more for the players to do* - but that seems to feel unsatisfactory to many players. They want the bad guy dead. They want to get a "you win" message. And that happens with combat escalation between each other. If they have a verbal argument there is no clear "you win" point (and even worse, if they feel like they're loosing, and don't want to, they're encouraged to start a combat and turn the loss into a potential win)

I don't have a conclusive answer for this, but something we're trying out is to have "levels" of combat. In our newly released combat system, when you have a fight, at some point when you've taken enough damage it stops and says "You're getting really tired. Do you want to stop fighting, or keep fighting and risk long term injuries" - if they keep fighting, as well as getting cut up, they might get broken arms or legs, or other similar injuries. After a while of that, if they take enough hits it asks if they want to keep fighting or risk permanent injuries. If they keep fighting they risk things like loosing an eye or fingers. If they get beaten enough after that then they die (but are resurrected later) - the intention behind this is to let the players have their combat and "win" or "loose" but give them an incentive to stop fighting somewhere *before* they fight to the death. The player can decide how much they want to win the fight, but if they keep fighting every time they will end up with lots of bad injuries, and spend all their time in the infirmary, unable to fight anyone for a while. While letting the roleplayers still fight "to the death" if it's something that they care about (and presumably, loosing an eye or something would be a reward for those players. It gives them a souvenier of the event. While the non-roleplayers who just want to win would collect a lot of meaningless disfigurements and disadvantages with no story behind it)