Icarus Studios News

Part 1 described the two types of LARP: salon games, which often have permanent death, and boffer games, which often have a player character respawn mechanic. But how do those inform the permadeath debate for MMOs?

In an excellent article on MMO development from 2004, Dr. Richard Bartle, one of the progenitors of virtual worlds, mentions his theories on why permadeath would be useful in MMOs. It increases roleplaying, makes it easier to reuse content throughout the game, keeps early adopters from permanently being ahead of later adopters, and makes achievement mean more because it cannot just be gradually accumulated without risk. Many other designers share this longing for permadeath, even though the realities of the market do not allow it.

Permadeath is the assumption in most single player RPGs: when the character dies, it is a saved game, not a respawn, that returns him or her to life. Obviously, MMOs would have problems if every player could roll back the world state to avoid death, but respawn is still somewhat jarring when moving from single-player to multi-player RPG. Some MMOs include full in-game rationales for why player characters respawn—such as City of Heroes’ superhero medical teleporters and Fallen Earth’s establishment that player characters are special because they can be cloned—but in many games, the respawn threatens the fiction of the world, as it’s not explained why dead NPCs don’t get the same benefit you do.

However, respawn is a useful development and continues to be used despite permadeath being considered better game design by many. Perhaps the reason for this is more than just achievement-style gameplay and player attachment to characters: the utility of respawn in MMOs is directly analogous to its use in boffer LARPs.

Many of the MUDs that have successfully used permadeath are similar to salon-style LARPs: heavy-roleplaying scenarios where violence is an option, but not necessarily the best one. Players are encouraged by the environment of the game to play tactically and avoid dying, and this is especially important given the lack of respawn. Meanwhile, most modern MMOs are more akin to boffer LARPs: sprawling games of fantastic combat. Just as in a boffer LARP, instituting a permadeath mechanic would have a chilling effect on player willingness to engage in combat. Without a safety net of respawn, even with penalty, all one’s work on a character can be undone by a single unlucky fight, so players are encouraged to play much more conservatively. As the combat system is a major selling point for all the major MMOs, it would be directly counter to design goals to make players want to avoid it. And any permadeath system that doesn’t reduce the urge to fight will have likely made concessions that reduce the benefits permadeath creates in the first place.

There are, of course, ways to design an MMO that make permadeath viable, just as there are ways to design a boffer LARP that owe less to D&D. Yet, the most popular of both game types cater to the large masses of individuals that just want to swing a sword and be a hero, and that’s harder to achieve if a single run of bad luck can knock you back to the starting point. Until designers and the public buy into a noticeably different style of play, respawn is a useful mechanic for the genre.

Postscript: Another interesting parallel between LARP and MMOs is that those most likely to initiate combat for its own sake in salon LARPs—those with highly-specialized combat characters and those without much investment in a character—are precisely the same types likely to engage in player killing in games with a stiff death penalty. The SomethingAwful.com GoonSwarm in Eve Online is based largely around the idea that a large group of newly made characters can bring down a single long-term character, as they have little to lose on their own.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team