I'm a little behind the ball on this but I recently read a very good blog post by Barry Reddy called MMOs and the Suspension of Mortality . He discusses the concept of permadeath, which is a core tenant of Werewolf. This is not to say that permadeath will be a non-negotiable fixture of Werewolf but simply that in the current design we feel that permadeath is an important feature. Barry explores many of the concepts, ideas and alternatives that we explored in designing Werewolf. This, to me, is very encouraging. It means that we're on the right track, that someone else is thinking the same way we are.
Dealing with implementing permanent death as a game design element is not a trivial task. You do not simply take your typical MMO recipe and eliminate respawning. This would ultimately lead to frustrating the player. We decided in designing Werewolf that we had to address a few topics of game design before implementing permanent death: how a player dies, what happens when a player dies, and what defines a successful character. The first two probably seem obvious but the third may be a surprise to some people.
First you need to determine how you handle player death. How can a player die and what kind of measures are you going to provide to help guide a careless player away from a senseless death? One of the things the Werewolf team considered was a realist approach to character death. It was sanitary, brutal and uncaring. You walk into the woods and see something lurking and don't run away? That's just too bad then. We thought maybe that would be too harsh and may discourage players from experimenting and exploring. So we considered implementing handlers that "took over" your character when in danger. This is a concept familiar to people who have played MUDs and have set their "flee" hit points. Werewolf however wants to guide people away from stats and game mechanics and wants people to play not calculate. So giving players the flee threshold was out of the question.
While I don't think this is completely settled our ultimate goal is a mixture. We want the village or Laurelin to be a bleak and foreboding place that's dangerous. We want it to feel dangerous to the player but we also want the mystery to be difficult to solve. With no consequences to wandering around alone in the Vargskogen we knew without a doubt that people would just run around the forests, caves and mountains looking for something. If I die then so be it, I'll just respawn and head back out! The first iteration of Werewolf will be this awful and brutal response to player death. Sorry, but if you run into something bad in the woods then you're dead. As the first chapter evolves we'll be adding psychology handlers onto your characters so that if you're foolish as a player your character still knows better. If you're an exceptioanlly foolish player no amount of compensation by your character will make up for it.
This last paragraph touched a little bit on the how you die but not on the what happens part. One of the conversations I had once with patosan was about a time when I played Call of the Cuthullu D20 with some friends of mine we deviated from the typical pen-and-paper RPG character generation. Instead of spending 15 minutes generating a character and then 30 minutes generating a background story and personality we spent 15 minutes generating 5 characters and 5 minutes a piece on background. This gave us very little bond with our character and the reason the GM did this was to limit our emotional tie to this character so that when and if the character died we'd be frustrated but okay with it. I went through all five characters that night and I had a blast. The point is this: to enjoy the world and the adventure my character does not necessarily need to be successful but I do need a way of continuing to play.
We tried to think of ways of compensating death. While we wanted character death to be bleak and unforgiving we also did not want to leave the player high and dry back at the beginning with nothing to show for it. We struggled with this one and I think we still struggle quite a bit with it. We looked at ideas ranging from account karma to a complex concept of inheritance and offspring. Barry also discusses these and in particular focuses on account karma. I really like this idea and I think it has a place early on in the development of the first chapter of the game but for one core reason: it's a reasonable compromise to the offspring system we truly want which will require a sizable effort to plan and implement correctly. Barry's discussions about account karma really leads us into the next topic of character success so lets just pause and consider how account karma would work with regards to the what would happen. Barry suggests as a stop-gap a "judging of the gods" as a means of arbitrating character death. His reasoning on this is that if you have a Leeroy Jenkins type of incident or a problem with griefing that you may need way to stifle the flow of complaints. I played on a MUD called Medievia some time ago that led a similar concept of death. That once you die you have to go and find an altar and pray. At the time I really liked this idea: I lost my loot, a bunch of experience and I was inconvenienced for my stupidity but I was still able to get back up and play. But when I began designing Werewolf with the others I realized that this wasn't truly a punishment that forced me to consider my actions, to take better care of my character or to heed danger. It was a punishment that inconvenienced me and really lead to very little change in my game play or behavior. I still went running into rooms and areas to see what was there - I just made sure to visit a bank and drop my gear off at a locker first. I think to impose this true sense of risk to your character there has to be a true consequence to actions. You must die and stay dead.
So you've died and you have a way to start over. Without explaining the specific mechanics of account karma or offspring you still know that you have a way to start over but not totally from scratch and assuredly it will be a different character. It will force you to design a new persona. But now we have this mysterious question of what defines a successful character. This is really the key reason why the discussion of permanent death is typically so negative. Today players are diluted into a sense of suspended mortality which distracts them from story telling and into character building. It's not the only reason we do this - the fact that most MMOs encourage the grind or make merely a haphazard attempt at disguising it contributes greatly as well. If the measure of your success is the level of your character or the loot you receive you will be sorely disappointed when your character dies. In Werewolf one of our challenges will be changing the definition of character success and focusing more on player success instead. We still have an astounding amount of work to do around this but I think the core principle of this will be the backstory of Werewolf and the evolving involvement of the players.
Werewolf intends to tell a story and provide mysteries to solve. The idea behind Werewolf is to empower GMs of the game to interactively tell the story and involve the player. It may be their character living the story but its the player hearing the story. As players an guilds unfold the story their players will be awarded for this through merits and medals. This we know. We also intend on engaging the role players to expand the story and in distant future versions allowing for character-run politics. While this isn't a measure of success this concept will help make permanent death more interesting and more, I dare say, beneficial. This is the other thing - harness permanent death to fix frustrating game mechanics. How many times have MUD clans battled it out? I can say through years of playing MUDs I was "in" a number of clan wars. These are ultimately fruitless endeavors that have no end result or resolution. There really aren't true winners or losers. With political intrigue the best that games can offer now is some means of "voting" for their representatives. But there's no danger of a coup and if there is danger it isn't truly risky - so you're ambushed a couple times and killed. Respawn and restart. Now with permanent death things like this have a possibility of being changed. Real battles for political control of a village or town with real results.
Just something to think about. Maybe permanent death doesn't have to be bad. Maybe we just need to rethink the standard recipe for MMOs.