[KaVir]

It really depends on what the problem is from your point of view. In my eyes, the problem solved by regular permadeath is that of character stagnation, while the problem caused by regular permadeath is the fact that you throw away all of the work the player has put into their character (which, by extension, will result in a small playerbase - an issue which goes against the goals of most mud owners).

IMO that's not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, in my implementation I actually provided a "retire" command which allowed people to start as a new character which they wouldn't previously have had access to (much like a remort system). However if it's an issue with you, then you could choose to only give a percentage of exp back to the new character, or prevent them from changing back to a previously selected character concept, or limit them in some other way.

From a conceptual point of view, I don't believe in dismissing an idea on the basis of poor implementation, particularly when the poor implementation applies to other parts of the mud. If your mud has such poorly balanced classes, then that's something you should deal with before trying developing anything else - indeed, it's something you should have worked on in the design phase, before even beginning with the coding.

Well obviously not, as that's the very point it's supposed to address. The real question then becomes "do you want your players to suffer the biggest loss possible?" - and if the answer is yes, then obviously regular permadeath is the solution to your problem. As each mud is different, and each mud owner has a different vision of what they're trying to achieve, there can be no generic solution.

But for many people, the objective isn't to create the greatest sense of loss possible, but instead to create a sense of realism in respect to the exact same character springing back to life after being chopped to pieces several seconds earlier.

I'm not sure where the "I agree" came from - I've never suggested resurrection, and I've certainly never suggested that any system could be the "best" (because there can be no "best" solution to a problem which varies from mud owner to mud owner). Indeed, such a system is completely inappropriate for many themes, including that of the muds I've developed.

How does it allow for a higher caliber of roleplaying? In my opinion, your solution still retains the main disadvantage of permadeath, without the main advantage. I can plot for months to assassinate the king, so that I can put my own puppet ruler on the throne - but as soon as I do, he can just be resurrected, at which point I'm right back where I started. But on the other hand, for most players death will be permanent, and so many of them will quit when they die and not come back.

I absolutely agree. There are many issues to take into consideration when designing any feature, and each individual solution should address these in its own way.

Hardly - the "jerks" are those who are the least likely to be bothered by permadeath, as they care little for their characters. If you want to improve the process of eliminating jerks, you'd be better off screening new players more carefully.

[enigma@zebedee]

Hmm, in Live Role Play (which is a effectively a huge role play enforced MUD) there is permadeath. One of the unbreakable rules is that dead is dead and gone - you can never be the same again (although you can be raised as unliving that unliving will not be the same person as the living one).

On the other hand though it is hard to die permenantly unless someone is really trying. Virtually everything has some way to heal it and people tend not to wander around alone.

The result is a good balance, you have to be stupid or unlucky to die - but if you do die then you are dead and gone.

Another interesting point is that you gain xp for being there and in character - whether you go out and slay monsters or just hang around in the bards guild and play music.

[Lanthum]

[Kallekins]

Actually, the jerks care very much for their characters, at least for their characters' xp and skills. Those are the things that allow them to be jerks and pick on the characters who lack the xp and skills. At least, that's who I think are jerks.  A system that retains the skills and xp accomodates the jerks, and hurts (or helps?) the hardcore roleplayers.

Putting in permadeath for eliminating jerks allows the players to decide who they don't want and police themselves, instead of the administration deciding for them. So it depends on how much control you want over your playerbase.

This is really an interesting discussion, because permadeath can affect so many aspects of the game.

[KaVir]

Those would be what Bartle categorises as "Achievers".

Those would be what Bartle categorises as "Killers".

If you have a "hardcore" roleplaying mud, then the chances are that the good roleplayers are the ones able to achieve the most in-game power, as rewards for their roleplaying efforts. The "killers" however are more likely to focus their lesser amounts of exp purely on combat-oriented skills, and concentrate on developing their player skills in fighting rather than roleplaying.

A standard permadeath system would allow the potential for "jerks" to permanently remove the characters of the "real roleplayers", effectively ruling the mud - and it's generally only the "jerks" which have the skill and the incentive to do so. Allowing players to respend all/some of their exp would ensure that killed "real roleplayers" could come back as tougher combat characters than any of the "jerks" could attain.

I think you'll find it's the other way around (except for the so-called "roleplaying muds" which uses HnS character advancement). If you want the players to be able to police themselves, then you have to ensure that the most powerful characters are owned by the most responsible players.

[Stilton]

KaVir
Or that inordinately powerful characters don't exist at all. If 10 people get the jerk alone in a dark alley, they should be able to pummel him even if they're court musicians and he's a soldier.

Stilton

[JilesDM]

Our system (permadeath) simply ensures that a group of cooperating people will always overcome any individual.

The most powerful individuals, therefore, have always been the ones who are able to influence/control large groups of people.

Griefers do not typically have the ability to be inspiring leaders (or, in the case of MUDs, the ability to convincingly pretend to be an inspiring leader), and are therefore rather brutally "regulated" by the rest of the populace should they prove to be sufficiently annoying to a large number of characters.

It's also orders of magnitude more difficult to develop a characters' skills without help from others.

These two characteristics of the system make it largely self-correcting.

[OnyxFlame]

Perhaps Jiles, but you neglect the ooc cheating element. It's easily possible for a buncha buddies to help each other's chars get good and then rule the mud with an iron fist, including killing off any newbies who seem to be getting powerful quickly so their power can't be challenged. And in a system like this, lower skilled chars tend to prefer sucking up to the big guns rather than trying to overthrow them.

This is why in the mud I'm helping with, there'll be positions for gods, filled by people trusted not to totally unbalance the mud. So if it gets to a point where some faction of mortals controls the entire mud, a god could easily take action to rebalance it, whether by causing an earthquake, punishing their followers for being such asses, or backing someone else who doesn't like the way things are going. This is the only way I can think of to lessen the benefits of ooc cheating such that people stop doing it, the problem being of course that with gods running around, the mortals will feel powerless even if they happen to be kings. But oh well, we still have a long time left to develop it all to what it should be.

[KaVir]

Then how do you prevent the "jerk" and his buddies from systematically and permanently killing each and every character they dislike, one at a time? Indeed, if a group can always beat an individual, then the "jerk" and his buddies could create new characters for each such killing, making it impossible to know when or where they're going to strike next.

[JilesDM]

[OnyxFlame]

[JilesDM]

I'm not saying that at all. I'm simply saying that attempting to fix a certain class of cheating (OOC communication) is something that cannot be adequately addressed by in-game mechanics.

We log everything just in case we need to verify facts when presented with allegations of cheating. Actually proving that cheating did take place, however, is next to impossible, even with logs.

As for gods being empowered by players, doesn't that simply exacerbate the hypothetical situation of a group of jerks?

A system like you describe is interesting, and might provide a very unique experience, but, in my opinion, it would be folly to attempt to use it as a mechanism to enforce rules. Punishing players for rules violations is almost certain to be undesirable to the said players, making it among the least desirable courses of action for a "god" whose powers stem directly from what amounts to player popularity.

[OnyxFlame]

The way I see it, the players need the gods, and the gods need the players, so ideally there'd be enough checks and balances to make sure everything runs smoothly. Of course this is providing the gods don't start cheating themselves, but if they do then the admin of course can can them.

The way I visualize it, the gods wouldn't punish the cheaters so much as try to dissuade them from their course. At this point in the design, we're unwilling to give gods the ability to straight out kill mortals because of their obviously godlike powers. So the gods basically report what they see to the admin, and try to make things uncomfortable enough for the cheaters that they either stop cheating or stop playing, and if all else fails the admin either punishes the cheaters, or gives the gods permission to get rid of them. So most of the time the punishing of cheaters will look like an IC event (King Fred is under a curse, blahblah) and give real incentive to others to not cheat.

Of course none of this may work, but like I said the thing isn't nearly coded enough to be usable yet anyway, and we may end up totally changing it around by then. But our aim is to keep a buncha jerks from cheating and ruling the mud, and this is all we could think of to fix that problem. If you have other ideas that might actually WORK, feel free to share them. (I don't mean to be cynical here but in my experience only the most blatant cheaters ever get punished, and I aim to change that if I can.)

[JilesDM]

Well, about the only MUDs that I've run across that are meaningfully devoid of cheating are MUSHes, because everything in a MUSH is cooperative as opposed to competitive.

I really hate to say this, but it is absolutely impossible for an enforcement mechanism (OOC or IC) to eliminate all cheating. Until all players connect to your MUD through some type of remotely securable client (basically requires a TCP like Palladium, which I am strongly opposed to for home systems) there is no way to even guarantee that players aren't plotting their eeeevil schemes on an 8-way IM conference. Even if a TCP does gain widespread implementation in the home, those dastardly players could be exchanging email, talking on the phone, chatting over IRC, or even SSH'ing into a common private linux box and using wall.

Attempting to catch all cheating is an exercise in futility. Designing major MUD systems that have widespread effects specifically to do this will guarantee some very painful disappointments (and likely more than a few grey hairs). We only punish the most blatant cheaters because those are the only times we can actually prove with any meaningful certainty that they were, in fact, cheating. If we relaxed our standards in order to punish more probable cheaters we'd also end up punishing many innocents.

Instead of focusing on catching and punishing cheaters, design your game mechanical systems with the operating assumption that at least half of the playerbase will cheat successfully with every trick in the book and you'll end up with a more robust and enjoyable system for everyone.

[OnyxFlame]

[JilesDM]

[visko]

Back when I actively played a few HnS MUDs quite a few years ago, I ended up running around with a loose group of PKers who tended to stick to total-pk oriented MUDs simply because they got bored everywhere else, but who also liked to cause a little mayhem in rp/achiever MUDs from time to time.

Since they'd known each other for months or years, they all used IM, chat rooms, or other MUDs with sympathetic admin to devise an attack on a MUD. These attacks could take a day, or extend for months at a time, but the basic plan of attack was as follows:

One player logs, gets a general feel for the current society of the MUD, and befriends a few people on the game. He quickly learns the map layout and fun little tricks from the "explorer" class of people on the MUD, and hooks up with the "social" guys to get a feel for how he can start to undermine the current alliances kept together by the "sages" and other nonsense characters PKers have no use for other than fodder.

Then the posse arrives. They've been given constant updates by the scout as to how to powerlevel quickly, or failing that, how to attain enough power fast enough to start gang-banging some high-level guys to get the equipment to powerlevel to dominate the MUD. Usually, the goal is to dig in with a clan, make it exclusive to the kind of people they want (power-hungry pre-pubes who like to wreck everything in sight) and just take over. They sit outside of safe rooms and scream at the "wimps" who won't leave for fear of death, and meanwhile their clannies amass a huge stockpile of weapons and items necessary to maintain their dominance even through a major clan war.

The point of this is that perma-death is only a big deal for the first week. After that (unless your MUD requires months of work to get a decent character off the ground), perma-death is a minor annoyance, but probably even less of a problem than you'd expect; by the time a player is ready to take the risk of death, he's also got 4 or 5 other characters who always log from completely different IP addresses ready to be brought out quickly in the event of a character death.

Perma-death doesn't get rid of PKers you don't like. It's simply another obstacle that a resourceful PKer will learn to welcome as an asset and then use to his advantage to dominate a MUD.

The only way to get rid of PK mongers is to watch the pbase carefully and stay alert for the trends that severe MUD destruction comes from: a sudden influx of players who don't seem to be interacting with the RP side of the game much, who are quickly amassing power, and who seem to bounce around each other, pairing or grouping up to quickly advance. You see that, you watch it. Take action as soon as the massacre starts, and you may stop it before it gets out of control.

The other posters who said that using in-game measures to get rid of malevolent players was futile were basically correct. Until someone develops a highly advanced AI program to skim along the top of a MUD looking for certain abnormalities in your system and fixing them quickly, only humans have the freedom of will to be able to control a pbase that may or may not be getting out of control.

Perma-death is an RP feature. It should be used for RP purposes, and only for RP purposes. All other attempted uses for the feature will end up in either futility (frustration to the admin) or too much success (frustration for the player). Neither, as KaVir would say, is the usual goal of a MUD administrator.

-Visko

[fmike]

I'm agree with Xerihae. Realism is not the aim of the game. It should be a game with it's own rules. To have or not permadeath is a question of particular world without global answer

[Delerak]

The more realism a game has, the more entertaining it can become. I have seen all the other fantasy genres, and nowadays if the world feels and acts real, like virtual npcs and many many scripts that go from simple room echoes to advanced npcs whom will actually hunt down PCs. So the more real you make the mud, and the more rules you apply from real life, the easier things can be, and you won't have huge arguements like perma death, you die irl you're dead forever, no one is coming back, so on a hardcore roleplaying mud, you have to have it - and many other things. And if you don't. Well I will never play there.

-Delerak

[Eagleon]