Permanent Death - in Other Games

In Other Games

Few non-electronic role-playing games give players the opportunity to resurrect characters, although older combat-oriented games, including the most popular game, Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes do. Most modern games emphasize plot and character development rather than hack-and-slash combat, and as such, player death is rarely part of the game, permanent or otherwise.

Even within those games in which death is possible, the frequency of permanent death varies greatly, based on the desires of the Gamemaster and the play group as a whole. Similarly, because of the freedom of the Gamemaster to modify rules, some Gamemasters choose to add permanent death to games that normally lack it. Others may subtract it from games where it is normally present.

For most games with character resurrection, PCs typically must pay a price to be restored. The price is often an in-game fee paid to a non-player character with magic or technology capable of restoring the character. Such a fee might be paid by the PC in advance, or by other PCs. In many games, the effort required to create a character is decidedly non-trivial, giving players a significant incentive to avoid permanent death. Unlike MMORPGs, new player characters can be created at a power level equivalent to the remaining party, to allow the new character to meaningfully contribute to a game in progress.

Games of other genres, most notably early arcade-oriented, casual, platformers and others (where the savegame functionality is usually not available) often feature a version of permadeath where the player is given a fixed (but sometimes replenishable) number of avatars (or "lives"). Following the loss of one avatar, the player usually loses progress through the current location; after the loss of the last available avatar, the player loses progress through the entire game (i.e. see the Game Over screen). Examples of such games include Super Mario Bros., Digger, Pac-Man, and various Breakout clones.

A unique variation of this was Square's 1986 fantasy shoot 'em up game King's Knight, which featured four characters, one per stage, where the player must keep them alive before they join to face the final boss. When a character dies prematurely, it's a permanent death, and the game shifts to the next character in their own stage.

Some specific strategy games, have featured permadeath.