Alternatives to Permanent Death

Let’s assume now that a designer ¹ has decided they don’t want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. If there’s no NPC death either (because of world’s genre or application), that’s it, end of story, skip to the next section.

If there is NPC or (in most cases) monster death, the designer has to find some non-PD equivalent for PCs. If your character fights a monster and loses in the worst possible way, what happens to it?

Okay, well the big mistake is to say the character dies. It doesn’t die. If it did die, that would be PD ². One of the absolute, defining features of death is that the dead don’t recover from it ³. Whatever it is that happens to the character, if it can continue its existence afterward, then it hasn’t died.

The words “kill” and “death” have all kinds of powerful emotional connotations that often in no way resemble how the concept is handled in a non-PD world. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it becomes one when designers transfer too many of those connotations to something that doesn’t merit them. Sadly, this is something they are wont to do when discussing alternatives to PD.

Merely labeling something as “death” doesn’t make it a serious matter. In many cases (particularly in large-scale graphical worlds), the penalties for losing a fight are so lax that even the word “hurt” would overstate them. When I act as a consultant to in-development virtual worlds that don’t have PD, I insist that the designers don’t use the word “death” or “kill” in relation to PCs. This concentrates the mind on the mechanics and not the ideal. If someone says “when a mobile kills a PC,” I’ll correct them based on how they plan on handling it; unhappily, more often than not this means “when a mobile wuss-slaps a PC.” It may be sarcastic, but it leaves them in no doubt as to what they’re actually talking about, rather than what they thought they were talking about.

Okay, so let’s look at the usual ways that non-PD virtual worlds handle what they call “death” but isn’t:

• Resurrection. PCs that die come back to life, perhaps in a worse condition than they were in at the point of death, perhaps not. As with most forms of death evasion, in PvP worlds the exact penalties may vary depending on whether the PC was the aggressor.

• Insurance. This is a form of resurrection that PCs pay for in advance. It’s popular among Science Fiction worlds such as Federation II, but can work in Fantasy ones too. In DragonsGate, for example, players can accumulate “favors” by doing quests “for the gods,” which can be translated into resurrections. Sometimes, insurance works on a “save game” principle, whereby resurrection is only to the state the character was at when it was last insured; this means characters will regularly pay for new insurance, thus giving the economy a healthy cash sink.

• Ghosts and spirits. The fiction here is that PCs’ bodies die, but their spirit lives on. The spirit is usually separated from the body (appearing at some local last-save point or generic shrine) and has to find it to affect a resurrection. In the meantime, other PCs or mobiles can loot the body and steal the “dead” PC’s gear. Losing a fight therefore means a time penalty (you have to find the body) and possible tangible loss (if people loot it).

• Realm of the dead. This is a variation on the ghosts and spirits approach. “Dead” characters appear in some other dimension (that is, they’re teleported to a set of locations disconnected from the main part of the virtual world). They have to find/fight their way out, whereupon their soul returns to their body and they’re back to life again. Their body has taken the opportunity to recover from its massive system failure, too. Again, it’s mainly a time penalty to stop people who have just been “killed” in a battle from immediately wading back into the fray.

• Left for dead. Although PCs are clever enough to know when a mobile is faking death, mobiles are universally stupid. They think that the moment a PC hits the deck it’s Game Over. However, the PC is only stunned or unconscious or winded or otherwise wuss-slapped, and will be right as rain in no time!

• It wasn’t a fight to the death. This is absolutely fine in PvP situations, where it doesn’t really stretch the imagination too much to envisage duelers or gladiators who honorably fail to deliver the final death blow of a fight. It makes no sense against mobiles though unless the mobiles also accrue the benefits of it.

• Inheritance. Lefty gets killed. He really is PD gone. However, he happened to have a relative to whom ownership of all his kit passes. The relative is very close in looks, skills, and experience to the character who just died. Welcome, Lefty II! This works best in materialistic virtual worlds that define characters by their possessions more than by their attributes. The character may be nominally dead, but the player is no worse off for it. This is perhaps the best of these alternatives to PD because it offers some opportunity for players to start new characters when their old ones are wuss-slapped. Instead of Lefty III, you might go for Leftina instead (not that many players do—they treat it basically as resurrection). The fiction is basically sound, too, although it’s invariably stretched so thin as to be transparent.

• No believable fictional explanation. Characters who “die” bounce back with whatever time, movement, kit, experience points, and skills that the designers decide. There’s no sound rationalization, they just do. Asheron’s Call 2 with its progressive attitude that penalties for death in virtual worlds are “outdated” is the jaw-dropping epitome of this approach.

All these are alternatives to PD. However, the concept of actual PD is surprisingly incomprehensible to many players, who can’t quite bring themselves to believe that there are virtual worlds in which death really does mean death; occasionally, therefore, some of the preceding will be described as being PD even though they’re not. I’ve read reviews that described an insurance system as being PD, presumably on the grounds that your character is actually not there for a short period before rematerializing.

There also seems to be a good deal of denial among designers of virtual worlds. I’ve sat in on meetings where designers agreed among themselves to go with a PD system, then started to think of ways they could get around it (“Maybe we could have like a soul ring, that stores a character’s essence and…”).

As a designer, either you want or you don’t want PD in your virtual world. If you do, bite the bullet and have it. Don’t argue that what you have instead is “as good as” PD, or that it “hurts just as much as” PD; it isn’t and it doesn’t unless it is PD. If you don’t want PD, that’s your call; don’t refer to the effects of a wuss-slap as “death,” though, or you’ll be perceiving consequences that aren’t there.

It may seem from the preceding that I’m a die-hard PD fan unable to move with the times. Actually, it’s not so much that I’m a fan of PD as that I’m an unfan of the alternatives as they are often used—that is, with complete ignorance. In many cases, PD should indeed rightly be off the agenda; I have no problem with that ⁴. What infuriates me is when people put up ill-considered alternatives to PD without addressing the consequences, setting unwise precedents that the equally badly informed designers who follow slavishly copy.

If you want PD, you must understand what it buys you, and what you have to pay for it. Likewise, if you don’t want PD then you also must understand what that buys you, and what you have to pay for it. If the consequences of PD are too hideous to contemplate, fair enough, go for non-PD; however, if you do so you should make sure you can address the consequences of not having PD, too, or you may end up with something equally hideous.

So, let’s take a look at these consequences.