Approaches to Permanent Death
Let’s assume for the moment that a designer has decided they want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. The reasons why they might (or might not) make such a decision we’ll go into shortly, but for the moment we’ll suppose they’ve done it. What are the various ways it can be incorporated into a design?
It all depends on how you intend to ensure that a death is “fair.” Here are the classic ways to do it (most of which also can be applied to PvP):
Unmoderated. If your character dies, that’s it. There’s no comeback: It’s gone. PK versions of such worlds will frequently descend into barbaric slashfests, although this is not inevitable: If fleeing is not unlikely to succeed and the player base is too small to support gang warfare, an unmoderated world can thrive (and with a vibrancy it’s hard to match elsewhere).
Post-moderated. PCs can appeal to administrators to be resurrected if they feel they were harshly treated. The classic reason is because of communications difficulties (lag, line noise, cosmic rays, whatever) that prevented a character from fleeing at a critical moment. The administrators will look at logs to determine whether the player has a case. In worlds with PKing, there may be a justification system in place to ensure that high-level characters don’t wipe out low-level ones indiscriminately, but they can nevertheless avenge intolerable acts (for example, you stole my stuff). Again, administrators would normally enforce this on appeal. This approach also works, but is only sound in small-scale virtual worlds that can log absolutely everything (that is, textual ones).
World-moderated. The idea here is to implement a justification system by tracking player actions. Unfortunately, it can only ever track tangible actions: If someone insults your ancestry and you hit them, the virtual world will flag you as the aggressor. There are several ways to have a virtual world moderate PvP and PKing, none of which ever really work: Karma systems and NPC justice systems are the most popular. Grudge systems are the most interesting, because they allow slights to be traded: If I hit you, you get a grudge against me that you might sell to someone else who can beat five kinds of Hades out of me. This makes people think twice about performing unprovoked attacks, but has the disadvantage that it’s blatantly unrealistic.
Player-moderated. These approaches don’t work either, at least not yet. Here, the decision as to whether a character has done wrong is made by players, not by the virtual world (although the world will act on what the players have said—for example, by making NPC shopkeepers charge more to people with low reputations). In player justice systems, there may or may not be NPC enforcers available to make sure that justice is done. The problem with player-moderated systems is that they are too easily undermined by groups of players acting in concert. If 100 players say that some random other player is a thief, that player is going to have a problem clearing their name. There are experiments under way to circumscribe this problem. Sure, it works for eBay, but eBay doesn’t have 10% of its user base trying to screw it over for fun.
Opt-in. This is the classic response of designers who disabled PD or PvP and then came to regret it. They re-enable it, but only in certain arenas or between consenting duelists. It fails to deliver any of the major benefits of either PD or PvP. If your virtual world has no PvP or PD, you’ve already handed it over to people who don’t want it; adding it is not going to make them happy, nor will it attract people who do want it.
Opt-out. This is an approach that ought to work but which has yet to find favor. The idea is that by default PD and/or PvP applies (moderated using one of the other approaches) but characters can flick a “pacifist switch” to opt out—some kind of “holy person” fiction covers for it. They pay for this security by having a lower level cap than characters for whom the gloves are off. While this seems fair to non-pacifists, it’s deeply unpopular among pacifists: They want the benefits of not getting killed but don’t agree that they should give up anything to do so. If higher level content is available, they should have access to it.
Inevitable, but distant. Characters have a shelf-life, after which they die of old age, retire, or otherwise cease to exist except as a memory. This form of PD serves only one purpose: To force people to start afresh instead of staying on with the same, stale character indefinitely. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, even at accelerated timescales it would probably take several real years for a character to “die,” and guaranteed impending death would dishearten everyone—even newbies.
The preceding is the main approaches to PD. They all treat dead PCs as “gone forever,” resurrection being limited to external factors such as bugs, rule violations, and the occasional act of gross favoritism by members of the live team.
Most virtual worlds don’t go for PD, however; this is fairly clear from the fact that it’s PD that has the acronym, not “NPD” (which is just “death”). In non-PD virtual worlds, PCs do die in combat (and perhaps in other ways) but it’s not the same kind of death that the cookie-cutter NPCs suffer. What exactly it is instead, however, varies.