# Survival

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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Don’t go to sleep on the ground if it’s covered in snow; if you do, you’ll get hypothermia and die. The same thing will happen if you swim in icy water. In a desert, if you don’t freeze to death at night you may bake to death during the day.

That’s in the real world. In virtual worlds, you will either suffer some minor, temporary skill or attribute degradation or you won’t notice any ill effects at all. Characters are generally immune to the environment.

So? Why be unpleasant to players just for the sake of it?

Why indeed….

Well, it’s because there are subtle side effects to this kind of automatic survival. For example, people live in houses primarily for shelter. If they don’t have anything from which to shelter, they don’t have to live in houses. Sure, they might want them as warehouses, but that’s hardly the stuff of which communities are made.

There are other survival reasons that cause people to want to live close to one another. If characters are going to live anyway, though, these don’t apply. Easy access to food and water is only an issue if players have maintenance schedules that need them; healthcare is only important if people can fall ill; mutual defense is unnecessary if attackers can’t hurt you.

In other words, some of the more primitive and tedious aspects of the real world that players don’t want to experience act, unfortunately, to set up some of the more advanced and enjoyable aspects that they do want to experience. This conflict between what players want and what they are prepared to put up with to get it is a constant that runs throughout virtual world design [^43].


[^43]: For a brief, but cogent, overview of other aspects of virtual world design that dampen the formation of societies, see Darien Kane’s essay Sins of the Empire. http://www.stratics.com/content/ editorials/articles/sins.shtml.