Permadeath gives people a very good reason to think twice about combat. This means that it's a good thing in games where combat is possible but not the central focus, but bad for combat-oriented games.

I agree that running a greatly accellerated timescale (one week to one year?) and having the Pendragon family system to provide you with extra "lives" would be interesting to see in an online game, though not a very likely one for anything but a niche market. I'm just caught by the concept of applying the Pendragon mechanic, as I've just started running the "Great Pendragon" campaign at my local games club.

A more practical solution, for games that want to have combat but not have it too much as a focus, would be to have "Fate Points". When dead, your character actually is only badly injured or otherwise has a near-miss, and loses a Fate Point. If a character with no Fate Points dies, then it's Permadeath. A character would start off with a certain amount (One? Three?) and then slowly accumulate them with the passage of time (one per three months real time?).

This would mean that a character who avoids combat won't be in that much risk, unless they're the target of a determined campaign of assassination.  Characters who repeatedly engage in combat, however, will eventually have their number come up. It also means that if two characters take an intense dislike to each other they can try to kill each other off, and will eventually succeed. There could also be certain high-risk situations judged by the GMs where Fate Points don't apply and all deaths are Permadeath, though players should never be able to enter these without being aware of them.

Although laking the charm of the Pendragon suggestion, the Fate Point idea gets rid of the most glaring problems with Permadeath whilst still making it possible to permanently eliminate a character. It would also be much easier to implement than a complex family system, only needing a means to keep track of how many "lives" a character has each time they respawn.

The Fate Point system is never intended for a typical combat-fest MMORPG, but for a moderat combat one. So if they get in a situation where they're needing to go on a mission where combat is likely, then it isn't a suitable world for Permadeath. With ANY permadeath concept, the game needs to be built around it. And Fate Points would need less changes than any other system.

With the Pendragon model, you have the problem of characters being killed before they manage to found a family- that's often the case in the tabletop Pendragon campaign as well. The family system would reverse the trend of MMOPGS- there would be serious, indeed final, consequences for death in the early stages but once a character is well-established, the player has a powerbase that will be very difficult to destroy.

As an amendment to the Fate Point sytem, how about a "chance of permadeath" score? A percentage chance of surviving a potentially fatal incident, which goes up slowly with time and drops after each survival. This produces the same effect as the Fate Points, but the player can never know for certain if his characters will survive (unless it's at 100%). Particularly fatal or not so dangerous situations might have reduced or increased survival chances. And ideally, a player would never be told what his survival chance is at any given time- he might suspect it is high or low, but will never know for certain until his character dies or survives.

I don't understand this. If combat is part of the game, then surely there are situations where it's likely? Some of those probably being missions people go on voluntarily. Apparently it's likely enough to eat away a few Fate Points now and then, or otherwise what's their point?

Trivial. If you die early, you pick a brother of sister or cousin or whatever next. There's always someone to put a claim on the estate.

I'd probably like to play in this system. It'd probably allow a few plunders or strikes of bad luck and still have the possibility of death looming about. But it doesn't address what happens when you eventually do permadie. No matter how many times you didn't die before, you'd still get very pissed off after you die.

This would also lead to a kind of a "certain death curve", at least if applied to a game where death (or near-death) can't be reasonably avoided completely. Meaning at certain point of the career of the average character he's more or less certain to die. Don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Agreed. As long as none of this leads to death, it'd be great fun. And even death might not feel as stupid if it wasn't sudden. This combined with a way to not lose everything upon death, would be great, in my opinion.