MMO Design Thoughts: Permadeath
Permadeath. Permanent death in an MMO. Why in the world would you want such a thing? Simple: 
emotion. The more you're risking, the greater the emotion — the greater the fear when you're risking it, the greater the sorrow if you lose it, and the greater the joy if you succeed. The World of Darkness Online will naturally have a horror element, which means sometimes you should be afraid in the game. Also, "danger" is one of the four descriptors of what the game is trying to evoke (power, danger, mystery, romance).
Permanent death is something that just isn't done in MMOs. But it is explicitly on the table for (most) tabletop games. Why are people comfortable with it in the latter, but not in the former? And would it be possible to have permadeath done in a good way in MMOs?
I think the answer to the first question is, "Control." In a tabletop setting, the game master has control over the game, and if you're sitting down spending several hours with your group, you presumably trust the game master not to just gak your character willy-nilly. In an MMO there is no such control. In PvP games there are definitely griefers. But, I think such control could be added to MMOs. Which brings us to the second question.
To answer the second question, I do believe it could be done well in an MMO. I think that permanent death should only be able to happen under certain circumstances. In a tabletop game, your character generally only dies under a few circumstances:
- You have really bad luck. And even then a good game master will give you an out.
- You do something really dumb. Again, a good game master will generally try and give you some hints that this might not be the best plan of action.
- You want your character to die. It does happen.
- Your game master is a dick.
I think that these could be translated to MMOs quite nicely. So for each of the points above, here's how I would address it in an MMO.
- Mechanics can be put in place to eliminate "bad luck" as a cause for permanent character death.
- This is the area that has the most potential. Maybe if you kill and loot other characters enough, it flags you for permanent death.
- No brainer, but again there's potential here. In most MMOs you just delete your character if you want them gone. But what if there were some way to go out that had a cool story, or that set up the story for your next character coming in?
- In this case it would be the game mechanics themselves being the dick. Make it so that certain circumstances, which are within the player's control, must occur before a character can die permanently. As one example, maybe if you go on this certain storyline/quest, you risk permanent death — with great reward comes great risk.
To put this in terms of the World of Darkness MMO, I think permadeath is assuredly feasible. I would do it thusly:
- Overall, anyone can permanently kill anyone else, at any time. This requires not just putting them into torpor, but making a choice to take it one step further.
- If you permanently kill someone else who isn't the subject of a blood hunt, you yourself become subject of a blood hunt. Congratulations, now everyone is gunning for you because they'll gain prestige by killing you, and they won't have any negative consequences for it.
- In certain areas, have NPCs come to the aid of any character being attacked by another. Maybe a cop comes to arrest the offender. Maybe some gang bangers decide they don't want other people bringing attention to their area.
As a possible alternative to permanent death (or better yet, something that could be added on), perhaps the "fog of ages" from Requiem can be tweaked. This is the effect that causes vampires to forget things (and lose blood potency) as they grow ancient. Well perhaps when one is killed really good, they don't actually die but it puts this process into fast-forward, and you lose some blood potency, which could also cause you to lose some abilities. The only thing I don't like about this route is that it smacks of the bronze age of MMO days wherein you lost XP if you get killed. However, I think Vampire has a great built-in mechanic for this and it makes sense to use it.