[Jherlen]

Individual, specific NPCs with names and backgrounds definitely die if they are killed in most RPImuds I've seen. Not long ago a favorite NPC of mine and one my character had often interacted with was cut down in a mass murder spree by another PC. The NPC was taken out of the game permanently and a new one was written to replace her function where she'd been.

Now other NPCs are more "generic", reflecting large virtual populations of the city they live in. If you kill the shoe merchant in the bazaar, he will probably repop eventually, because there are likely many shoe merchants in the same bazaar to take his place. Is it a little OOC that they look exactly like him? Certainly. You could write some code to dynamically describe NPCs each time they repop, I suppose, but I've never seen a game doing that.