Permadeath.  Does that word evoke excitement or shudders of horror?  We got into discussing permadeath a little bit over at Strangelands a couple of weeks ago as it related to being “hardcore”.   Do we need to be hardcore to have permadeath for characters?  Or, can it be built into the fabric of the game in such a way that, while we are sad to see our character die, it’s not the end of the world?  In fact, permadeath could become the gateway into new stories, new adventures, and a legacy that we build in that world.

I’ve never played an MMO that has permadeath or even a “permadeath server” option.  And frankly, the idea scares the bejeebus out of me most of the time when I contemplate it.  Why in the world, after endless hours of playing a character, would I want to see said character die and lose all my stuff??  What’s more de-motivating than that?  In all the ways I’ve seen the idea brought up on message boards over the years, it’s always in this vein - total and complete annihilation of your character.  You start over essentially from scratch.  So I’ve always tuned out these kind of permadeath discussions because for me they seem to be pretty extreme, leaving no room for flexiblity in what happens post-death.

But what about ideas that could incorporate permadeath into the game design, and still leave you feeling as though you didn’t completely get the wind knocked out of your sails?  Are there ways to have permadeath at a certain point in gameplay, but not upon each and every death?  If you permanently die upon every death, that could be problematic due to the one huge issue that always kills these discussions - lag.  A hiccup in your connection, lightning strikes, your computer blows up, or your cable provider sucks - any of which would lead to your character, through no fault of your own, possibly dying a horrifc death.  That’s not even counting RL distractions that could cause death, like cats on the keyboard, coffee in the lap, kids fighting in the next room, or the dinner burning on the stove.

So how do we build this idea into a game, while trying to mitigate things like the “lag factor” and RL distractions?  Here are a few of my mostly-half-baked thoughts on the subject.

One:  Have some kind of “Generations” system - a type of family tree mechanic where all your characters in a certain character slot are linked together over time.  So your second character in that slot is the “son” of the first character, inheriting things from the first character.  These things might be experience, some bonuses or stats, some equipment, maybe a percentage of levels, etc.  It would really depend on how the broader system is designed.  But as you play the game, each successive character for that slot is the next “generation” in that family, founded by that original character from years ago.  So the third character is the grandson (or daughter), great grandson, etc.  Or you could go the route of saying, ”Fourth in the line of so-and-so”, or “10th son of the house of so-and-so”, or simply “Descendant of so-and-so”.  Maybe you could even pick from a variety of styles of how you would want your family history represented.

Two:  Don’t have permadeath mean irrevocable, permanent death upon the very first death a character has.  I’d rather see a “life force” type of system where over time, as you die and have to release (i.e. no rez available), your lifeforce pool slowly drains away.  Your tie to the world is progressively getting weaker.  So eventually, with enough deaths under your belt where you’ve had to release, your death will become permanent.  However, deaths where a player can resurrect you don’t affect your lifeforce totals.  And perhaps, just perhaps, there are rare things in the world that will increase your lifeforce totals as a one time event, prolonging your character’s stay in the world.  Things like this could potentially help to counteract the occasional lag/RL event induced death. 

Three:  Have an actual age to the character - at least a number that progresses if not the actual physical look of the character.  I’m really not thinking about having skills and attributes decrease over time to simulate the aging of the body or mind, but I guess you could go that route.  What I’m really thinking of is simply an age number that progresses, from say 18 to 100.  As your character ages, they will earn titles due to this, as most people probably won’t live a really long time with just one character.  So perhaps at 80 you get “The Elder”, at 90 “The Revered”, at 100 “The Legendary”, and after that perhaps “The Ancient”, “The Fabled”, and “The Mythical”.   Something that says, wow, you have really lived a looong time in this game and survived a lot of stuff.  And then when the character finally does die, you’ve got a pretty unique character as part of your family history and someone that people on the server remember.

Four:  Post-death, you should be taken to a special other-worldly, supernatural looking/feeling character creation screen where you can craft the next in your line.  You could choose to stay with the same class and professions (tradeskills), and perhaps receive some bonus to those if you choose to do so, signifying that you are following in your family’s footsteps.  Or you could go in a completely new direction with a different class all together.  This would also be the time when there might be choices about what to inherit in the various categories of skills, attributes, items, money, experience, etc.  Things like experience might be based on a certain % each time, while there would be choices to make about which things you want to inherit among the other categories.  While your characters might be able to always stash money in the bank that never goes away, you might only be able to select 5 items to take with you.  Finally, depending upon which age title you had earned, you would get some special bonus or honorific for that.  So the descendant of a Mythical character would get something pretty special, as opposed to probably nothing for a character who died at age 45.

Five:  This last idea ties in with idea three, and what sparked my thinking along these lines was a post over at Adele’s site.  The idea was that of a character morphing into a higher/better/or simply different version of themselves at some point.  The example used was the transformation of Gandalf the Gray into Gandalf the White in LoTR.  The MUDs I used to play used a system like this.  When you hit level 100 for instance, you would actually start over at level 1 again, but as a “prestige” class of sorts.  For example, if you were a level 100 Thief, you might start again as an Assassin.  So eventually you would have 100 levels of Thief and x levels of Assassin, each with their own unique skills and abilities.  So in this concept, you could tie it to levels.  Or you could tie it to age.  Maybe if you reach a certain status (i.e. Ancient), your diety gives you the option of being reborn into the world as a prestige type class.  Being reborn would also reset your age to a younger point.  Or you might simply choose to continue on with your character’s life hoping to reach an even greater milestone (i.e. Legend or Mythical).  At each milestone you’d be given the option.

I’m sure there are many other ideas and sub-ideas that could be fleshed out here, as well as many holes in my thinking.  I mainly wanted to get down some of my thoughts on a permadeath system that I think I could actually live with and enjoy (there are lots of other things you could add - family crests/tabards, paintings of past characters to go in your house or guildhall, a family history book that would contain it all, etc.).  Each new character would provide new stories and adventures, while remembering all the things that came before.  Each character in the family would take on it’s own life and history, with stories of the days of old told late into the night. 

Just as we remember stories and funny moments from characters in past MMOs, we would have those same memories here per character slot, over the life of the game, not just years after the fact.  Death would have a bit more sting, making things riskier and raising the emotional stakes, but it wouldn’t be so brutal that you’d be left with nothing.  So that’s my idea - keep it all in the family.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.