Perma death and the psychopath problem

What's an orbital laser platform? Why am I getting really warm all of a...

One thing about perma death in a multiplayer game is that, contrary to real life, someone else can all too easily not give a hoot whether they die. This makes you very likely to die. It's kind of like having 80% of the population be suicide bombers.

I wonder if you put some sort of forced deposit, upon attacking, that lasts say a week or so. Like a huge sum of gold. If you start a fight, then for a week X amount of gold will be lost if you die.


Of course there might be edge case get arounds, but basically the main thing of someone coming up and shooting you has more of a cost than "I logged in, hit create character and ran at the first person I saw". You'd need to earn all that cash, and your the one vulnerable in terms of cash.

But that'd require a cash sum that's available to your next character if your prior one dies. Though that's not exactly a crazy setting breaking thing - we have banks and wills in real life. We don't have spirit runs from the nearest graveyard (that I'm aware of, anyway)

Faux Death in video games

After having a taste of perma death in torchlight (twice!), it's interesting to be playing the...I dunno, is there a name for it? Perma death has a name, but not ever being able to die is given no name.

And it's funny - the shadow of death permiates playing with no death. But it's just a feeling. A strong one, but just a feeling because it's not there.

It reminds me of when I first played wow, having only played in imagined game worlds before in table top games where you could die (though to be honest, rarely did).

As in the feeling of possible death gives the world oomph, and yet it's completely BS oomph.

Indeed, when I was playing hardcore, stats became important to me. As important as they seem to get to people who play on no death games.

I'm wondering if, for people who get intense about the stats, the feeling of possible death just does not fade over time with them? When I play hardcore I feel drawn into the world because of the need to survive. Do people who try to collect all the stuff have a feeling of possible death that drives it - it's not just the collect everything urge? It's both?

What do you think?

Torchlight - another lamentable death

One of those tree things that spews poison. Man my health went down fast from full! I think maybe it multi critted me!

Nah - just too much time to get this far with the character. If it had a checkpoint system - say every two waypoints has a checkpoint. If you die, you go back to it at the level you were when you hit that waypoint. Perhaps with no gear (wade through the first levels to get basic gear and gear up again).

Even the brutal hydorah has save points (a limited number)

Trying to do it all in one chunk - well, lets say I've played table top where ostensibly your character could die, but it never really came up (for various reasons). But really we never played for hours and hours with one character. I guess I'm just not into huge permadeath. Not when it actually, and slightly ironically, eats up a large chunk of my own actual life time.

Yet another idea for perma death

Basically you have characters who never die, as per usual. But you can make one which you can toggle to perma death.

What leveling the perma death character does is unlock certain stat bonuses/rewards which are either A: Small and can only be gotten from leveling a perma death character or B: Larger and either you unlock them by leveling a perma death character, or you can spend gold to temporarily aquire the bonus for a few hours.

Idea for permanent death (in any game)

Killed by a grid bug!

Instead of only choosing your characters first name, you choose their surname, then their first name (or use the random option)

What happens is you have two records of your level - current level, and top level gained. Top level gained only goes up when your current level exceeds the top level.

When you die your back to first level! And the first name is gone - that guy is dead! Your 'character' is known by his surname, because your playing a family heritage, not one guy.

However, by paying money and using certain items (that can only be used X number of times per RL day), you can boost your level back up to your top level gained. The smaller the gap between current level and top level, the less you have to pay. Also paying only lasts for awhile, so although it's alot like most traditional mmorpg, it's not always that way and by default, if you don't have the money and items, your back at level one.

Indeed I think ages ago I heard of some game that used a family system along with perma death, but I can't remember it.