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Old 02-13-2010, 12:04 AM   #21
prof1515
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Re: What types of games are impacted the most by permadeath?

A problem arises though when the latter group encounter the former. The latter are given to taking unreasonable risks without regard for what their PCs would do realistically. The former typically are not. It's fine until the latter decide they want to end their character and they involve the former.

This is a significant problem indeed. It's always bothered me that players will role-play realistically until circumstances involving violence and death are concerned. Whether it's everyone in a bar drawing a weapon to cut down a *supposed* thief or casually walking past a corpse, violence and death are still one area where role-play tends to be far too unrealistic.

This is not necessarily the case. The H&S I used to play ages ago didn't have permadeath but it did have temporary death (the length of which was determined by how many PKs you had). The problem was that almost all of the veteran top-level players were cowards who rarely PK'd anyone within 50 levels of their own and sometimes as much as 150+ below themselves. Worse yet, many of them were also on the game's staff and they continually made it more and more difficult for new players to achieve anything near to what they had been able to easily, be it gaining equipment or experience points or gold. I suggested permadeath zones be added but the resounding chorus from them was a unanimous "NO" because they were too cowardly to fight one another with temporary death much less with the risk of losing everything. You should have heard the amount of whining that was done when, a few years earlier, the old staff had reduced the amount of XP that could be earned by PK, making the XP reward of PKing a PC 50 levels lower negligible.

I too have seen players (myself included) do things and put themselves in greater danger in the name of RP. The chief consideration here is that the game's staff police the reactions very carefully though. A problem with good RPers role-playing things like that is that there are also twinks in games who ignore such considerations and just see them as advantages. Players like that can destroy role-play because they just care about "winning", not about role-playing.

It's not that easy since more than just RPIs employ permadeath. A search feature for permadeath would be a welcome addition.
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