Consequences
Different locations have different risks associated with them. A PvP arena, for example, has a greater risk associated with it than a marketplace; a dragon’s lair comes with a greater risk than, raccoon’s.
Players like to know their risks in advance. They like to be able to tell by looking whether or not they can beat a potential foe in combat. Some virtual worlds helpfully color-code PCs and mobiles to make it easier to check them out. Although in real life you might not be able to tell a martial arts expert from anyone else merely by looking, in virtual worlds you often can. If there’s no fiction explaining why you might be able to do so, well, you still probably can.
Risk makes things exciting, but it’s only part of the equation. Equally important are the stake (what you stand to lose) and the prize (what you stand to win).
In virtual world combat, what you stand to win can be anything the designer chooses. There are constraints imposed by other areas of the design (for example, the economy) and by the combat system itself (high-risk or high-stake fights should have high-stake rewards), but this still leaves a lot of leeway.
So, what do you stand to lose?
This is harder, because it must be something that you already have. It should also be commensurate with the risk and what you stand to win. It’s okay to favor the player statistically, because otherwise characters will not advance. In real life, if you stand to win $10 on the toss of a coin, then $5 is a fair stake. In virtual world combat, it’s like you get four tosses of the coin to win $10 for a $5 stake—the odds are stacked so you’re generally going to win. However, (in this example) one time in 16 you’re going to lose. If it’s only $5, who cares? The problem with virtual world combat is the size of the stake.
Fights can have three outcomes: victory, inconclusiveness, defeat. Most fights with mobiles end in victory; most fights with characters (where PvP is allowed) end inconclusively; a very small number of fights against whatever opponent end in defeat. Defeat can mean many things—capture, injury, loss of possessions, loss of prestige, loss of time, and so on. For mobiles it means death. Does it mean death for PCs?
As with PvP, character death is not entirely a combat issue: It can occur in other ways, too. In the real world, most people die through disease, old age, or in accidents. The number one cause of peacetime death among British men under the age of 35 is suicide 1. Death happens to everyone in the real world, combat or no combat.
Virtual worlds, however, are not real ones. Characters don’t “have to die.”
Old age in virtual worlds can traditionally be eliminated without the need for any explanation because only very long-term characters would ever qualify for it. Disease and illness, while okay as a temporary inconvenience 2, also don’t have to be anything more than that; this is just as well, because players would seethe with rage if their characters were merely confined to bed with influenza, let alone if they were dying of something incurable.
This leaves death by accident (deliberate or otherwise) and death by being killed.
In virtual worlds, characters are in theory physically capable of doing acts that would, in the real world, result in their death. They can jump off cliffs, stand in bonfires, swallow plutonium, throw a grenade short of its blast radius…. The virtual world can of course be crafted so as to prevent such events from ever occurring, albeit at a cost in realism. If someone in full armor is paddling a coracle across a wide river and they decide to light a fire, they really should expect to drown. Nevertheless, this can be prevented—for example, by not making coracles ignite while people are in them. It can be programmed round.
Death by being killed can’t be programmed round. You stick a mobile full of holes and it dies; a mobile sticks your character full of holes and it also dies—it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Is it the same kind of death, though?
When a mobile dies, it ceases to exist. It is permanently gone. Some reinitialized version may appear at its spawning site after a period, or when the virtual world resets; it’s not the same mobile, though—it has none of the experience or possessions it had when it died. At best, it’s a clone.
Never-to-return death is called permanent death, or PD 3. It’s the single most controversial subject in virtual worlds.