That is very similar to what we have done on Primordiax with the Unblessed. They advance more quickly, and have some interesting roleplay characteristics. In exchange, their characters only have one life. Their life force “burns too brightly”, in effect.

The one problem I see is pve vs. pvp. If your character can permanently die in pve, you aren’t going to run dungeons. Often in a raid there are wipes, that are beyond your control. Are you going to risk you characters life for a raid that nets someone else random gear?

How do you handle resurrection spells and revive abilities? I think it could be done well, where it would appeal to more then just the core ‘hardcore’ players, but in most MMO type games it would be permadeath, under certain circumstances.

Outsider: great point about significant consequences not only being a barrier to entry for PvP, but also pushing people towards only being interested in a PvP fight if the odds are grossly stacked in their favor. I think we both know of a game where that happened. But unfortunately, when that game removed PvP consequences, that seemed to ruin and destroy what was left of PvP. Because of the RP nature of that game, people decided it was pointless.

This is an EXTREMELY important point, and why I am so strongly against pvp death consequences. Unless you give your opponents no chance to win at all(thus playing in a very unfair fashion), when you pvp alot you are going to die alot. Generally I expect to die twice for every three players I kill.

Death consequences end up acting as a barrier to entry to pvp. If I lose a 1 minute long fight and have to spend days or weeks recovering from it, I’m not going to get involved in much pvp unless I can guarantee a win by stacking the deck highly unfairly in my favor. The risk vs reward is just too unfavorable otherwise. Frankly, such unfair fights hold very little interest to me.

Wiqd also has some fun thoughts on permadeath and inheritance models, as does Psychochild.