[Milawe]

The true difference between RPI and any other RP game is the fact the brutal elitism you have to deal with when people play an RPI as opposed to just roleplaying and enjoying it. I've played just about every sort of game there is to play, and honestly, I enjoy most of them. As a PLAYER, I enjoy pendeath more than permadeath, as I feel permadeath is kind of a product of the old 80s video games where you get X lives (sometimes just 1), try to get as far as you can and start over. I LOVED those old 80s games, so don't get me wrong, permadeath definitely has its place.

It's not "natural" for NPCs to come back year after year in the some room over and over and over again. This is NOT happen in real life, and it's not realistic at all. Animals reproduce AS LONG as they can find a mate, live long enough to reproduce AND raise their young. Currently, our extinction rate in real life is approximately 8 species per minute. When an animal dies, it isn't just instantly replaced, so I honestly don't think any realism arguments should be made here.

I honestly don't know very many MUDs where you can "bounce" right back into any given situation over a death. You really only find that on WoW, and even then, they might bother to make you repair your gear before you can go and fight some more. I don't think it's any more realistic for a character to die as often as characters die on permadeath MUDs with as few population as there are on many permadeath muds as it is for players to be resurrected by a given deity. That's just me. Given a village of 100 people, you don't have people dropping dead every 4 months and then instantly being replaced by a new neighbor everytime someone dies. Realism really has no play in this entire discussion.

What I DO find compelling in arguments for permadeath is the challenge, the often faster advancement rates, the constant hypersensitivity to the area, the competition for status while riding that fine line between being popular and being popular enough to kill, and lastly, the forced detachment to characters and the ever invention of new characters. THAT is what is fun and exciting about permadeath systems. Honestly, I find all the arguments for permadeath = better roleplay (usually with arguments to realism) to be bogus and, more often than not, elitist.

Again, the biggest difference I see between RPIs and RP-anything else is the amount of elitism people have to deal with in order to roleplay in a game. I don't know why it is, but so many roleplayers have this need to compare themselves to other roleplayers and belittle each other's roleplaying. It even happens within a single roleplaying community let alone between different games. Personally, I like roleplay-enforced games, which includes RPIs. Other people like a more relaxed game where they can roleplay with each other but chat about real life in tells. I find that to be jarring and dislike it for myself, but I definitely don't think someone is LESS of a roleplayer than me simply because they like a different system.

MUDs are, beyond all else, games. With ANY game, you have a quantifiable system to deal with. Quantifying something with a wounds system (I have no idea what that is, so I'm not making a judgment on it) is really not that much different than quantifying something with a numerical system. In all reality, there's probably a numerical system behind the wound system. It's just a matter of how transparent it is to the player.

On MANY popular games, people will turn off the TV, ignore calls, ignore REAL LIFE in general because they are so completely engrossed in what they're doing. Heck, sometimes people do this just while they're reading or watching football. I know that an ungodly number of people do it while raiding on WoW.

Roleplaying is a matter of suspension of disbelief and community story-building. The story must resonate with you, you must be able to build your character around it, and you must be provided with a set of rules that establishes the roleplay as a game with defined mechanics rather than a sit-down-game-of-pretend. What you do with what you're given once you've found something suitable for you is a determination of how good of a roleplayer you are, NOT whether you are playing a permadeath MUD, an RPI, and RPEncouraged, an RPEnforced, an RP server on an MMO. I honestly prefer a game that encourages people who WANT to RP (whether or not they're GOOD at it) and provides opportunities for them to do so than a game that constantly judges and excludes people's RP.

I prefer pendeath because the fun for me is constant character building and risk that carries a penalty but not completely annihlation of a character I've worked on. I also enjoy permadeath on games that allow for it because it gets that "survival" thing going in me, but I honestly only prefer that in certain settings. I honestly also enjoy hack 'n' slash games as long as the mechanics are good, and the atmosphere caters to a more mature playerbase. I also think there are all sorts of RPers out there who have a lot to add to the communities they choose, and they are not better or worse than anyone else simply because they LIKE something different from someone who might play on an RPI or an RPE or an RPP or an RPX or an RPQLSEFLKSER!