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The Eight Stages of Permadeath Debate
MMOG Designer and commentator Damion Schubert has up an article on the constantly renewing Permadeath debate. Permadeath is the concept of permanent death for a character in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. The design hasn't shown up in any major commercial games yet but, to borrow a phrase, the soul still burns. His commentary is a great synopsis of the debate, from the rearing of its head to the final bitter back-biting threads. From the article: "3. Captain Obvious Speaks. 'People don't like to lose their stuff.' 'It isn't fun.' 'It's hardcore, and only hardcore games will ever use it.' 'Any game which depends on the internet for its reliability has no place permanently taking away all your stuff.' 'Why in God's name would anyone consider this idea a good or compelling idea?'"
It is hypocritical for this guy to keep bringing this idea up again every time it gets killed.
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My previous comment (which was a joke, thoguh it sounds a bit more mean spirited than I'd intended) aside, I think this would work in the correct game. Say, MMOGTA or something.
/goes to RTFA.
You'd have to seriously rethink (or more likely abandon) the idea of leveling and posessions, though.
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Move/allow characters of a certain level into a separate world which is inaccessable to lesser characters and may or may not let the greater characters to leave and reenter. Sort of like an Olympus or Valhalla.
The definitely 'hardore' XBOX mech sim Steel Batallion did this a few years ago, as I remember. While that wasn't an MMORPG, it's easy to see how the feature would translate. People start getting overly cautious when they could stand to lose a creation they put months into. One thing that does do is allow beginners a small advantage, because they don't care if they lose their puny avatars. They can afford to be wild, in other words.
The hardcore market would love this. It's the ultimate sense of danger, lending reality to a fantasy world. Most everyone else, however, doesn't. The quote about losing your stuff is absolutely, wholly true. Case in point: the success of World of Warcraft. When you die, you lose a couple dozen silver each time at most. No xp, no lives, no item penalties. Nothing. The other night I must have died a dozen times or more in attempting a difficult raid without enough people and I racked up 3g in repairs (for those who don't play WoW, at max level you can make 3g back with 15 minutes' lightweight work or 10 minutes hard grinding).
People love that. Hell, I love that. It encourages raiding and confrontations and risk, and pretty much adds to the enjoyment of the game knowing that attempting something difficult or even stupid won't set you back. It's just fun.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Does Diablo II's old 'hardcore' option count?
I played it today. Went up a level in the Council of Light. Meh. And you would REALLY have to blow it to catch a permadeath. But it could happen.
Maybe you could make it so that if you "die" in the special world, you revert to your original state in which you first gained access; but if you "die" in the regular world, it's a permadeath.
Or maybe the other way around. I don't know, the only RPG I play is Nethack, where death is (almost always) permanent.
Well a Permadeath-only game would be a failure, by why not have the option to make a permanent death or a regular character, and seperate the servers? This works in Diablo 2, the Permadeath (hardcore) characters are more fun to play with, the game is more challenging, you actually have to use your brain, and the best incentive, the items gained in hardcore mode are better than in normal. Plus it's a status symbol - "You have a Level 99 hardcore Assassin? Wow! I bow down to you."
It's not exactly an MMORPG, but it works alright. There are always those who seek to ruin the game by player-killing though, so anyone implementing Permadeath mode might want to take care of that, unlike Blizzard.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Its not multiplayer or really online (nethack.alt.org aside), but it definately qualifies as a massive role playing game, and it not only has permadeath, but has stuff that will kill your high level character before you even have a chance to react. Of course it sucks to lose a good character, but without meaningful death you get people throwing their life away in an attempt to zerg something more powerful than them. Just look at diablo, you might be seriously outpowered mephisto, but as long as you can do more damage than it can self-heal by the time you get back, you'll kill him eventually. Even worse would be watching a game of team fortress where you'll die 12 times just trying to keep the flag alive moving it a few inches at a time.
For the record, I enjoyed all the games I mentioned here, but if you want to play a role, unless that role is already undead dying should kill it. (Though that is an idea.. make death force you to live your life as a zombie/ghost/whatever, with the ability to still transfer your items to a live player, but no ability to really level or continue as you were)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Permanent death emphasises skill with the game over pure dumb luck and brute force. Which goes right back to the idea that this sort of option will be most appealing to hardcore players.
So, why not?
Well, it's a poor strategy for a game like WoW where everything is a time sink and your ability scores are largely based upon items that you spent long hours grinding away for. It sucks to die after you've spent a week on a character, and with a subscription based service you don't want someone just giving up because their character that they sunk umpteen hours into kicked the bucket.
What circumstances might it work under?
I don't know for sure, but I would have to say that it would work best in a game where leveling up was quick, and there was less emphasis on all of these time sinks. That way, even if your character does die, you can roll a new one and make it back to your old level pretty quickly. Attrition is fairly low for lower level characters, but things sort of drop off from there. This would of course be something that places a greater emphasis on strategy and careful thinking rather than one's ability to click. But I'm sure other people who are more familiar with MMORPs could offer better advice.
Diablo II had this as an option. I liked playing it back in the day, but ultimately quit because my internet connection wasn't quite reliable enough. If World of Warcraft had a permadeath server, I would definitely try it out. The challenge is appealing. Comparable to nethack, in some ways (nethack being a great example of a permadeath game).
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Well, I run a MAngband server, and we have a sort of perma-death there. If your player croaks, then he turns into a ghost... which can be revived, or die horribly. It seems like a good balance. The players don't mind too much. It works because hey, they had a chance to avoid perma-death. Most of the time.
Mourning Realms of Krel (used to be Realms of Torment) is planning on having permadeath. You also have the possibility of having kids and passing traits onto them before death, then being able to play the kid when your character dies. One of the possible death paths is growing old, based on actual play time.
Now, an interesting twist on permadeath is that in certain situations, you can become infamous enough to be executed. Their hope behind this is to have an honor system of sorts in PvP, and if you are dishonorable, in the end your character will die forever. Hard to say how it will work in practice, but it does seem like an interesting theory. If I could somehow get some level 60 twit that much closer to losing his character in WoW for corpse camping my level 25 guy, I'd be happy.
While there are MUDs out there that have Permadeath (PD), the most promising graphical game that will include Permadeath is Frontier 1859. The game is going to be an Old West adventure with as much realism as possible, and because of Player persistence via offspring, the possibility exists for a character in-game to die of sickness, wounds, or bad luck.
[i]"The design hasn't shown up in any major commercial games yet but, to borrow a phrase, the soul still burns."[/i] Seeing as it HAS been in games... including (but not limited to) Diablo 2, which is most certainly a "commercial game."
Grammar Nazi
If you made a MMOG, Highlander Online, where when you killed someone, your character got stronger. And the person you killed has to jump onto another server that's starting up(probably have serious wait time before starting though).
Diablo 2 had hardcore mode, which was fun, because it wasn't a complete grind fest.
In a MMORPG, I've seen people quit because they lost equipment that took them 3 months to aquire.
God spoke to me.
I think permadeath will definitely attract the hardcore -- and I think there are a lot of those to be attracted.
Despite that fact that I agree that permadeath would successfully link skillful play with the level of one's character, I think there could be another way of achieving this.
The notion of permadeath doesn't really exist in warcraft III or chess, but a characters "level" is quite accurately reflected in both of these games (actually, the new rating system in WC3 isn't as good, because it purposefully rewards people that play more even if they don't play well, so I guess the chess rating sytem is the better example). So perhaps game designers could try and construct an mmorpg in which one's avatar level is a function of success percentage on tasks/quests or other, more meaningful metrics -- basically any metric that doesn't reward those who just play a lot.
A good way to think about such metrics is to ask oneself: "Would it be possible for a prodigy to come along and rise to the top of the level heap quickly?" Someone else posted that the game would have to be easy to level in. If he/she meant that the game would have to be fast to level in *if* one was good enough, then I agree.
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
There should be a permadeath server. It's funny that when the discussion began about permadeath, the idea that you could run multiple servers of the same game was considered unthinkable. Now it's standard practice.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I played three hardcore charecters in Diablo II. Hardcore basically meant, when you died, you were dead...and there's no coming back. One of them lasted to level 74.
I'll tell you right now that every second of gameplay with those charecters was interesting. When your actions have great consequences, they also have great meaning.
Lag was just part of the game. If you started to lag out, a couple of quick health potions and an Alt-F4 was all you needed to keep yourself safe. Of course that's a double edged sword...die, and stay in the game, and you can have someone recover your stuff. If you were too slow on the keyboard, and quit after you died, you lost all your stuff too.
I say, being on the permadeath! I'd be nice to care about my RPG charecters again.
...and variants (moria, nethack, *angband)? 'nuff said.
There's a slightly better solution -- if you are wearing a soul amulet your soul is transferred into the amulet, and you run no risk of having your body rot away... but you can't send a tell... And if you were killed by a player (DartMUD has no limitations on PK....) they now have you in an amulet, can float you far out in the see, bury you in the depths of the underdark, ...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Over at IBGames, while really a MUD instead of a real MMORPG, had permanent death in it if players weren't careful. Players started out with insurance for one life, and if they died, their cloned body would wake up in the hospital, good as new, except for dropping any items the player was carrying. The problem was that the player was now uninsured, and his character would be deleted if he lost again. Insurance was easy to get safely, but the problem was that the cost of it would go up with each purchase, and the price could get hefty after many deaths.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Losing your hard-earned stuff makes people so risk-averse that it will freeze up the game flow. Will you likely try new things and explore with perma-death? Have you ever grouped with incompetent players and one mistake got the whole group killed? Would you group with people you don't know? Some say to just make the rewards much higher for the risk. But, these are the same rewards that you lose when you die. Once someone gets an uber item, their career is practially over due to the chance of losing that item. This sounds like the ideal game system for gold farmers to sell stuff to out-of-luck recently dead players, rather than a game for any type of casual player or someone looking for a good time. Since the cost of death is so high, this also sounds like a game system where only those in uber guilds will succeed where they have lots of help to stay alive. After you've spent 6 months to get your currently level and somehow you get killed, are you likely to go through the process all over again? Call me a skeptic.
This would require a non-dice baced game. Because if luck screws you to the point where your skill is irrelevant(chain-misses, enemies chain-critting) then that adds frustration to the death which you can't recognize as being your lack of skill. It's far too upsetting to lose everything when it's out of your hands. This is impossible to avoid in an MMORPG. MMORPG's have new content being created, new skills/feats/enemies/items/whatever. All these things can be bugged or unbalanced. And during that time of bugginess or unbalance, people will die and lose everything. You have so much more at stake to lose to factors you cannot control.
I've thought about permadeath in games before, and it does add something that you can't get out of games where death has little consequence.
Without permadeath, there's no notion of sacrifice, daring, or true adventure. If you and your group run into a giant dragon that's going to destroy your sorry asses, your Paladin can't tell the rest of you to run away from the dragon while he holds it off and gives you time to escape. You can't have a hero in the game, because there's no actual danger. Dying is just the thing that costs you a few minutes of time and some minor frustration.
Now that said, I'm not sure that the addition of such a game concept is essential to good gameplay - in fact, it's provably not essential, since there are lots of great games that don't have permadeath.
The balance is trying to find a way to include permadeath to really make the game exciting, but not have it so often that people become frustrated at rerolling new characters. And, there should be at least some reward (a heroes list, or something) for being brave enough to throw away some of your time for the sake of adventure.
I don't think there is anything wrong with Permadeath, but as in real life they could have auctions if they wanted, or pass it on to another account they had predesignated. Have a lawyer hut you go into, and if you don't keep it current maybe your stuff could go to an enemy or charity.
I would love to seea Call of Cthulhu mmorpg with perma-death(or perma-insanity). I think it would be rather fitting. There are ways to mitigate the "losses" of perma-death. In a Call of Cthulhu game I could imagine having multiple characters per player, one of which would/could be your professor-type that never adventures but keeps a trove of artifacts/cash/weapons for his/her assistants(other characters), granted this character could die still, but would/could be kept safe if you wanted to play that way. Another possibility for mitigating losses would be to allow someone that leveled a character to 10 and died, to start a new character at lvl 5 (or whatever is deemed appropriate).
I think perma-death could add a lot to a game.
Answer: No. Otherwise they would already have it.
Permadeath might sound like a "cool" feature, but it's one of those features that, from a developer side, is far more trouble than it's worth. For every player that loves it - there will be three that die and can't accept that fact. The dialog will go approximately like this - several times a day, hundreds of times a week:The moral of this story: Users, because each has completely different opinion of how the game should work, do not always know what they really want.
I doubt too many players would object to the concept of Permadeath if it wasn't Hardcore style (die once and you're done).
In DragonRealms, a large MUD, all players can gain a number of 'favors' from various gods. When they die, as long as the player has several favors they're good to go. If not, they have a good chance of permadeath, if not resurrected by a cleric.
Proposing some sort of real death in a video game begs the question "what about real life?" or to be even more diametrically opposed, "what about real birth?" Perhaps MMORPG's should start your character as an infant and make you spend some time growing up. And the best part could be that when you do finally have an adult (or irreponsible teenager) character, you could mate with another player and have babies who could be new characters inherriting traits from the parents. This might even be good practice for meeting women in the real world. Although I can just see some of the in game conversations resulting. Merlin: "Yeah so that elf chick I left the tavern with last night... Holy sh#&, she was an animal!" Hrianth: "Nice duuuude. I struck out with that Ogre girl for some reason." Merlin: "You're a 2 foot tall halfling and she was a 12 foot tall Ogre. You're way out of your league."
In every dice & paper RPG I run, Permadeath is "on". I don't give second chances, and if you do something stupid, make a bad roll, or generally just get ganged up on, you're dead. End of story, get a clean sheet of paper and roll up a new character. You don't find many D&D or Vampire games where the GM announces "Free rez for your character if they die, just gotta start back at the nearest town." I also don't have a problem with group dissension - ie, PvP. If one player decides to be a dick and "accidentally" pop another player's character in the back of the head when no one is looking during a firefight, and he makes his rolls, then it happens. On the flip side, the game system I run doesn't have "classes" or "levels", and character generation can pop out a 70 yr old War Vet as easily as an 18 yr old street punk. You can improve your character's skills and stats, But the net effect of all this is that a year old (real time) character doesn't have that much of an edge on a 5 minute old (real time) character, and if he slips up when he's offing his own party, he'll be next. I think permadeath in a game will greatly increase interest in role playing and team building, and PvP won't be much of an issue - because you won't respawn, and eventually the victims will team up against you. I'd play in a permadeath game in a heartbeat. More challenge, more fun, less grind. Just my take on it.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
No offense, but I thought the linked article was a discussion of the stages that every permadeath discussion goes through.
"Permadeath" comes up so often as a debate topic because of the general conservativism of gaming imagination. Just look at the debate here. As long as these games are about A) encouraging risk-taking (the "Supersoldier syndrome" , to borrow a term from military simulation speak) B) building prestige among one's virtual peers and C) levelling through boring activities, "permadeath" ain't gonna work. People want to be rockstars, and these games let them be rockstars and socially important, but only through the investment of a lot of time and suffering. If you somehow make that rockstar status risky -- so that people routinely lose it, and have to repeat the same old stuff to get to their peer level again, permadeath ain't gonna work. "Dead is Dead" is one of the most obvious gaps of realism in these games, and that's why people mention it. The problem is that it reveals one of the fundamentally attractive features of on-line gaming (or anything else online): the appearance of being able to achieve the glory without the risk. Most people are cowards (or, in other words, socially crippled by a fear of the consequences of their actions), and uneasy with that. Games give them a chance to be brave, where the penalty is pretty slight. Make the penalty major, and people will go play something else.
Now, if you did want to do permadeath, the way I'd do it would be to take advantage of the progressive development model of MMPORGS: since they're worked on for several years after release, make the "updates" reflect a temporal progressivism: players choose skills for their "avatards" at a fixed point, and that avatard can advance in those skills. But as time goes on, new and more interesting skills are developed, which can only be adopted by younger avatards. That way, you make the aging superplayers gradually become obsolete. They may bitch and whine and stage their million-gnome marches, but every virtual year their numbers will grow fewer, as they give in and explore the game from a different angle.
I think perma-death would be great. Make it hard enough that your character has about a week or so lifespan before he pops his clogs - it would level the playing field between people who don't have jobs and those that do.
Also you could try all the different characters out without having to pump hours into it to get to the good stuff. Like kind of how I fly through characters in angband. "My Mage is dead? Cool! Now I'll be a beastmaster"
It also would mean theat developers could not make grinding a valid form of "entertainment"
It depends on the way you look at it. Currently, on MMORPGs, players expect to be able to grind up to the level cap and sit there. "Winning" the game is hitting the level cap and getting access to end-game content. But look at the example of things like old arcade machines. The goal there was to get your name at #1 on the scoreboard. But at the same time, you knew other people were going to come along and bump you off. You knew that from the minute you started playing the game. If you want permadeath to work, you need to change the goals of the MMORPG.
What I wouldn't mind seeing is a game that would do something like this: Every players starts off as a human, and can increase their in-game abilities. When they are killed, they become undead, and they're abilities are frozen at the place they were at time of death, and your job essentially becomes to kill the humans.Instead of levelling by experience, the total time online is what counts towards your level (or perhaps, time spent in zones dangerous to someone of your level). The goal would be to stay "alive" as long as possible. Of course, as you get higher and higher, more and more attention is going to be paid to you, and, sooner or later, you're gonna get killed. At which point, you'll become the highest-level undead. Until someone else survives longer...
While not technically permadeath, it certainly has that aspect that the people who want that sort of thing seem to be looking for - permanent consequences to death, and a challenge to staying alive. As well as recognition for the best players.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
There is no "Y" in "God's name"! (now, don't go getting Indiana Jones on me...)
Marques Johansson
"Also, making all of the lazy, incompetent people in your player base want to quit is bad for business."
Translation: "We are too greedy, lazy and retrogressive to even consider solving this problem."
MMO designers will always rip out game elements in favour of lowest-common-denominator hacks. Richard Bartle tries to spin this by claiming MMO games shouldn't be treated as 'games' at all. Why? Because he (or Raph Koster, or whoever) can't design a fun game, but can just about manage a treadmill that can hold thousands of customers. So, of course, that's what should be done, and who cares if the resulting 'games' are tepid glorified chatrooms?
MMO games will continue to be a hateful, tedious, pinhead-sized niche as long as their development is guided by 'designers' and financiers who believe that their shitty, decades-old conventions are immutable laws of the universe.
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but this topic has been killed by circumstances involving D/C (dropped connection).
You'll have to work it back up from level 1 again.
One of the points in the article was "losing the tired concept of the Avatar." Since this concept is akin to roleplaying a god, it depends whether that's appropriate for the game in question. If you think of every RPG as a story being written, death is really a point where you erase what you did back to your last major mistake and rewrite. Since most RPGs are pre-written, the story has many mandatory "waypoints."
In some MMORPGs, the modules are prewritten, but the basic overworld is just a framework where social interaction rules. Now, without permadeath, you have a series of smalls stories about characters--all of which are ultimately successful--that often intertwine. It's very much like that section in the SciFi/Fantasy where the books are numbered. Books of that type are usually a good read if you like the framework universe. Generally speaking, they're not considered great literature because these are "working for a living" authors, some of which really don't feel passionately about the universe itself.
Bring permadeath into play, and the story is never re-written. It is very much like regular life, and you're no longer "god" nor "author" of the story. The "author" is actually a collective. Most of it is boring and ordinary, but that 10% that excell are the "literature" or RPGs. This leads me to believe that permadeath is actually a balance of low-depth-high-fun on one side and high-depth-low-fun on the other. "Low-fun" doesn't mean it isn't rewarding, it just takes a grand effort to achieve the "fun." "Low-depth" doesn't mean it's not grand in scale, but the odds of it being "literature" are low. It would take a great effort to achieve "literature" level in such a universe.
So I will make my contribution to the debate.
--If money is the goal of the MMORPG, permadeath is a bad idea to apply universally to the players.
--If this is a freeware application aiming at high standards, aka a "labor of love," than permadeath is a great idea to apply universally. It will filter out casual and reckless players very quickly.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned that the original plans for Star Wars Galaxies involved Jedi suffering from permadeath. Of course, since they are such an iconic class, and a reason a large number of people play the game, that has since changed, which only lends weight to the theory that permadeath is not viable in a commercial game.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
The 'inheritance' idea is an interesting one. Die and your next character will get X percent of the experience points.
Anyways, I think the key to getting permadeath to work is to put more emphasis on the player skill than on the character skill. Equipment could also be used to store the momentum you've built up. In real life, a toddler with a gun is more dangerous than a... real ninja. Assets like weapons and gold could be kept in a bank so the next character can use it. Stuff dropped in the field might get looted so there'll be some tactics in deciding what to use and what to keep safe.
A graveyard is a must, so you feel your character just didn't move to NIL. The graveyard could contain a little list of accomplishments the character made.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> If you want permadeath to work, you
;)
> need to change the goals of the MMORPG.
Oh no, a smart person.
Permadeath doesn't work because currently, nothing in any MMOG is really a *challenge*. It's all a number of arbitrary signs that say "you must be this tall to adventure here". The major advance of MMOGs so far has been to arrange the signs more sensibly, so you don't have the two foot section immediately adjacent to the six-five section, and to make them more clear to the player. But the signs still work the same way: if you have a high enough level and good enough equipment, you can collect the rewards in these rooms. If you don't, you can't, and you will almost certainly be killed.
Permadeath takes tall players and makes them short. Unfortunately, having been short *before* doesn't make growing any easier. It doesn't matter how good a PLAYER you are, *all* of the ability to enter an area and claim its rewards resides in your character and equipment. We need to shift a lot of this onto the player, so entering an area and claiming its contents is something that can be done with any combination of level, equipment, and skill that exceeds a certain threshold.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
In a sense this feature is already available to the "hardcore" folks. All they have to do is delete their character after they die the first time (or when ever) and start over. Realisticly, if they really wanted a hardcore experience nothing is stopping them from setting their own bar that much higher than what the game requires. Given how many high level, supposedly "hardcore" folks I've seen running around in the online RPGs I've been on, perhaps actual permadeath isn't really that interesting to people.
Klein bottle for rent - inquire within.
A MUD I played for years had a system that seemed to work well for those who like some risk but isn't too tough on the average player. A death resulted in a loss of credits (miniscule for a low-level player but significant for someone of a higher level). There was no chance of permanent death as long as you still had credits. However, any death that caused a player to drop into negative credits generated a roll (I don't recall the probability) to see if the death was permanent.
As long as you had a reasonable buffer of credits, you didn't worry about death. However, too many cowboy stunts meant that you were cred running for a while. I found this to be a reasonable balance that introduced some risk into the game but wasn't hardcore Diablo II.
sure, every MMO game seems to have a similar tack: build up your character, get them stuff and levels. obviously if perma-death existed, this could mean a spot of net lag or a down router would mean perma-death for your character, and as many argue that is unacceptable.
however, let us imagine games "outside the tiny box" of current MMO. how about a game where your "character" is really just a soul, which possesses a mortal being. sure, you can upgrade this mortal with some gear, but the real "stuff" is being accumulated by the "soul" - that is where things like special skills, experience points, levels, or whatever "progress" constructs you want to have are attached. so when the mortal is killed, your soul escapes to possess another. so we have something like "perma death" where your "character" dies, period, but you go on in a different fashion from the majority of MMO which I have seen. you could even have it set up so the "soul" would die a permanent death if they wander too long without a mortal body, and if that is too harsh, you could have that soul be "recoverable" in some fashion.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Ok, Dont know if this has been suggested, but what if the game is free to play until certain level (say 30 of 60). And until that level there is permadeath. Once you get to level 30 there is a means of resurrection (even if there is a minor cost like a level loss, die enough you go down to 29, one more time and uh-oh). They a fee starts kicking in once you get over level 30. I thnik this would even promote community play so people band together and help people get to level 30....
You can fool some of the people all of the time
I think for games where the focus is on actual role-play instead of the hack-and-slash grind, perma death makes a lot of sense. Paper and pencil games use this concept. You die, grab a blank character sheet. MUSH'es pretty much follow the same approach.
One MUD I recall offered an interesting balance. The focus was on role-play, but there were MOBs (computer-controlled characters) to fight also. If you lost to them, you got knocked unconscious and suffered some penalties similar to what MMOGs have. On the other hand, if in the course of the role-playing with other characters or GM's, your character wound up dead, you were expected to delete them because they were no longer part of the storyline. This let you do a little of the griding type stuff when there was no RP going on without worrying about dying to out-of-character things like a bad ISP, and it also maintained a similar feel to paper-and-pencil, since if your actions in the context of the RP story lead to you dying, you were dead.
Wouldn't work for MMO's at all however. A lot of times, conflicts involved players role-playing and coming to a consensus about the consequences, which they all then accepted. GMs aren't always around to arbitrate, and letting the game engine decide things turns it from role playing events out into typing "kill soando". It really only works with a community of people are all willing to put roleplay and storyline ahead of their own ub3rn355 which isn't going to happen on a MMO.
That was until I saw the Faces of Mankind open beta. And I have to say it was the most ridculous idea for an MMORPG.
Picture this:
FOMK (or some other similar MMORPG) comes out. You buy the game and install it, being a fan of MMORPGs. The manual doesn't really have alot of specifics on the whole permadeath thing (relating this to the open beta where they had absolutely ZERO information avaible to players). So you really don't know that you get 3 "lives" and can only make one character within a 24 hour period (real world time). You login teleport out of your apartment to find a guy camping the vortex beam with a uzi and kills you. Since that is the only place to go from your apartment really, you die another 2 times. Now assuming you could buy "insurance" or more "clones" (read, more lives) theres noway to do so cause you can't due to being camped.
So you have to wait 24 hours in real life time to make a new character and only one character per account. You have paid cash to sit there and wait a full day before you can play again. You are paying cash, your own money so you can die X number of times (or in some cases ONE time) and not play that character again or any character again for a possible time period.
It's simply outrageous some games can impose such "penalties".
Now I'll grant you the following: that is one game alone I used as an example but other games could be similar. And players should research the games before hand knowing if their main gameplay has a permadeath or permadeath like feature in them.
However some games just like FOMK, have poor documentation which don't let the user know he/she may face such things.
Aw Frell this
Permadeath would require a lot more thought and depth be put into the game, which may just take the fun out of it. You have to remember that the reason games are fun is because when you do fuck up, you just hit revive or restart and go on your merry way.
Another option may be that almost all major MMORPG have multiple servers. Just make one a hardcore server.
If you'd like to see what it would be like to permanently die, try playing MAngband over at mangband.org
In MAngband you turn into a ghost when you die, and can get resurrected at the town, at the cost of half your experience.
this, however, is not generally the best idea, because dungeon levels are random, so your corpse wont remain when you leave.
If another player comes and resurrects you (After picking through your stuff, of course) you still lose half your experience, but can reclaim your lost items.
If your ghost dies, you have to start over from scratch.
Needless to say, dying is not a happy thing.
Let me just say that if this system was implemented in a more mainstream RPG, we would be seeing a lot more gamer suicides.
If there was a certain time period where a "trauma team" could come in and rescue your incapacitated body and nurse you back to health that'd be fine. It'd also encourage people to be more nice in some of these games, who's going to want to come rescue you, if you're a dick?
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!