How about this: Aging & babies.

When you start a new character, you have to go through a short but limited "childhood" phase. During that phase you would spend your time predominantly with other children, and lead a very safe but educational existence. What I mean is, this would be the time for newbies to get acquainted with the game without worry of death, battle could happen on schoolgrounds and end in a bruised knee, and since most children would be newbies, the social aspects of virtual childhood would be very similar to real life. Your experiences as a child could have a very important role in the formation of your character''s stats, and the two of you would probably develop a much stronger relationship.

By the time your character is a teenager, you would be almost physically mature. From that time until you''re about 40, your base stats could remain very steady. On the tail end of your character''s life you would slowly become less capable, encouraging the player to start another character. I think the player would be more inclined to start a new character if he felt like he had a choice, rather than something totally forced upon him. This would also keep the game fresh, as even the best players would have to start new characters once in a while.

I previously suggested playing as a family or lineage instead of just a single character. Any characters you are not currently using would be A.I. controlled. I think this would fit perfectly into the game as well. You could find a player of the opposite sex, and decide to have babies. (for some reason, on this planet babies are always born in pairs). Each player would get one of the babies, which would become a whole new player character. For the price of raising and equipping your child and keeping him alive, (sounds like tamagochi) you would get a sort of insurance policy against death, since you could immediately log on as your son, and your friends would know and recognize that *you* are still behind that character. This way an experienced player wouldn''t have to start all over if he had a son, who might be a strong character in his own right. However, a troll or PK''er would likely not have many/any children, since they take time to develop, and players breaking the unspoken rules of the game would likely not find mates as easily and they would die much more often. Should a player lose the last character of his lineage, he truly has to start over from the beginning of the childhood phase, in which he could do little damage.

Chi''s poltergiest idea rocks my world. It''s a perfect addition to absolute death! You can log on as a dead character, and you will always be in such and such range of the person who killed you. In little ways you can make their life hell! (unless you died honorably, or the killer can get rid of the ghost by apologizing, supporting the widow, acts of charity, etc.) It''s a little bit more "Morality Squad" than I like, but hey, it''s TOO GOOD! Chi, you rule!

As for what you said earlier, I meant to imply that. I was thinking about an even more diverse faction system, where the game would take place in a country 20 years after a war with a far off land tore it apart. It was a losing war, and the land is only now building up it''s (seperate) military now. There might be two houses, a mercheant family and a militant family, both with several families that support them. The politics of that structure alone would create political intrigue, but if you add a heavy handed religious order, and a struggling central government, a personal vendetta for one in five players, and a new menace developing in the country that had formerly defeated this land, a quest for some ancient truths, some people who with to suppress those truths, etc. Is that enough for you? It shouldn''t be. These things would be spread out over time, so no more than three or four REALLY important things happen at once.

Like I said earlier somewhere, we are aiming for the turnover rate of a soap opera (not the dialog or plot structure...). The players should always be able to get quickly involved in something important to their character.

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread... working through all that I missed over the last month...

I am another person contemplating the use of permanent death in my game, which is more of a MUD than a MMORPG. My motivation is that having death as permanent will make people play their characters in a much more thoughtful and careful way, will make them more empathetic towards each other, will make them want to work together in the pursuit of common goals, will make dangerous situations even more exciting, will increase attachment to a character, and so on. An interesting side-effect that may not seem immediately relevant, is that permanent death actually makes a character''s experience/skills/level even -more- impressive than your traditional revolving-door-to-the-graveyard online game, due to the rarity of high level characters. (I personally use a skill system w/attrition, rather than levels, but the theory applies in any case.)

The problem is, sometimes I think permanence is still just that little step too far. I am going for a certain type of audience for my game (I only need 30 players or so online at once to break even, and this is more about having fun than floating on the stock exchange) and have asked them their opinions on permanent death, to gauge it''s popularity among said target audience. Sadly, they seem to be divided 50/50. I would have preferred some sort of consensus either way. Even though I can stress that the game would be written so that the careful, helpful, teamworking player could still enjoy ''dangerous'' adventures without dying, there is the fear that an act of random stupidity on the part of another player, or an unforeseen burst of net lag at an inopportune moment, or simply a puzzle which turned out to be too hard for an otherwise model player, would kill off someone who invested a lot of time (and maybe money), and who would therefore decide not to bother making a new character and continuing. (As an analogy, have any of you got halfway through writing a really long reply to these forums, had Internet Exploder crash on you, and then repost a much shorter message because you can''t be bothered to retype? I know I have, I expect I am not alone, and this is perhaps a pertinent metaphor...) I would not want to lose my best players to something which was perhaps not their fault.

One answer is to encode all ''experience'' as player experience, rather than character experience, so that successive characters can be built up in almost no time. This is the way MUD1 works, and this is/was also a pay-to-play game, which refutes the old "people won''t spend money if they could lose their character forever" idea. But in other ways, my game is designed for the -opposite- approach... in that it rewards player-to-player assistance, socialising, group travel and so on. Therefore, you will get to know someone''s character, and perhaps their in-game role too (I expect a high rate of roleplaying, although I don''t decree it) and this means that, although the player''s 2nd character can be effective in terms of his own abilities very quickly, his social ties have been broken, which makes it a tough (and possibly -too- discouraging, mountain to climb.)

One kludge would be to perhaps name secondary characters after their ''parents'', so that you would see as their name: "Anonyfish, son of Landfish", so that there is a -plausible-, if not exactly realistic, way of linking the new character with the old in the minds of the other players, preserving some of those social ties and making it worthwhile for that player to continue in the gane. Or for the player of a dead character to receive a number of credits (proportional to their previous character''s advancement) that they can spend on their new character to buy skills etc., reflecting their previous investment in the game?