Problems with Permadeath
Sorry for the late Friday post. I got tied up at work and did not get a chance to post this when I would have liked.
Syp wrote a post today contemplating permadeath within MMORPGs - not necessarily MMOs with the permadeath feature but instead people holding themselves to a permadeath standard. Syp's focus is Dungeons and Dragons Online and the various "permadeath guilds" within that game.
Permadeath is an interesting concept to me. I love playing NetHack and that game is all about permadeath. People get killed on hundreds of characters before they ever "ascend" and beat the game. I have spent many years of my life playing pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons so I have a laundry list of characters that have died permanently in random and often gruesome ways.
For me, MMOs and permadeath do not mix and unless MMO design changes drastically with a "permadeath-based game" (which I think would be awesome, by the way), the two will stay mutually exclusive. Within your average MMO, there are multiple design elements which I feel get in the way of permadeath.
Roguelikes are mostly random. Within Nethack, aside from a few key levels, a majority of the game is random level design with random monsters and items placed on those levels. MMOs do not have that random element to them. Going through the starting area of almost any MMO is going to be the exact same experience every time.
A further problem with the style of roleplaying permadeath in DDO is that you as a player already know what the game is going to be throwing at you. In tabletop Dungeons and Dragons permadeath works because you are not retelling the same story to each character. Your character may die half way through the campaign and you pick up a new character, but you do not replay the first half of the campaign with the new character. With MMOs, every subsequent character benefits from the knowledge of the previous character. Oh you died to the two zombies hiding around that corner on one character? Well on the next character you know to avoid that corner because there are two zombies there.
Another thing that hampers permadeath in MMOs is that most MMOs nowadays expect you to die... and die often. There are multiple quest in World of Warcraft that require you to die in order to complete them. And between raids, battlegrounds, and world PvP, your character is going to die and die often.
If MMOs did have permadeath options, the rest of the game would have to become trivial. Roguelikes work with permadeath because if you die, you only lost a couple hours of game time. Games rarely last more than five to eight hours max. Today's MMOs last thousands of hours. I would almost expect the game to require a style similar to Darkfall where gear and other items are not that hard to replace.
While permadeath is a fun thing to think about, I really do not believe it has any place in current MMOs. I do think it would be interesting to see an MMO built from the ground up with permadeath as a feature (maybe not mandatory, but a feature nonetheless) but as for now, I think games are not conducive to that style of gameplay.