There's a very very simple solution to this whole problem.

There is no such thing as death. At least, it's easily avoidable.

Try to 'lose' at SimCity or The Sims.

It's about genre. If you don't want to die, play one of those.

Totally ignoring the method of implementing permadeath, there's another issue to consider.

If you can never totally die, you eventually get bored as hell.

If you can kill anything in the game, there's no challenge to any of it, thus why bother? If you've done every quest 20 times, why bother doing it again? You don't have the fun of figuring it out anymore, that's for sure. If you can rob any person or store, why bother? Not to mention that if you've lived that long, you'll be rich even without robbing anyone, so why bother? I can't think of a single aspect of a game that wouldn't eventually get extremely boring with a high level char, other than perhaps intricate RP, and that's only because what happens depends on other human beings who are never entirely predictable.

Permadeath totally removes this problem. You probably won't survive long enough to do everything that's possible in the game, so your goal with each char becomes either to see what it's like to play a different kind of char, or to manage to progress farther than you did the last time. It adds challenge, and makes it take much longer before you know every aspect of the game inside & out, which incidentally milks more money out of you in the process of discovering it all.

Of course this is totally disregarding the PK aspect, but I won't go into that here.

Well, I've always been interested in the permadeath concept, to a certain degree. It's a very scary subject to approach the mass-market with, as this playstyle and mindset tends to lend itself to a hardcore audience. If people pay money, to play a game monthly (mmorpg's) then their effort and time invested has a "real world" value. It's no longer a "oh I died I'll try again", players feel a real sense of loss. It would be like trying to play through Morrowind without ever being able to save your game /cringe.

Playing WoW actually led me to think that playing the game as the ghost, could be interesting... Simply put, it would be a counter-existence to the "living" world. There would be spirits that the dead avatar could interact with, quest for, and "earn" a way abck to the living world. (I'm not going too deep into this, because I haven't thought too deeply and put all the what if's into play). So outside of getting a res from a "priestly" character, you play as a ghost (and yah, there need to be different sets of abilities "spirit based" and not any sort of race or class based).

So you die, you lose time progressing your living avatar. You get to experience a different type of game when dead, a different world. Possibly even accomplishments that you get to "take back" to your living avatar, like being able to speak with the dead, or spirit sight, etc etc blah blah =)

The could be other repricussions as well. Death would not be an easy thing for the body to handle, so the player must choose a negative trait, something that is a permanent negative stat. There could be very involved quests to remove negative stats. Scars would give your character a further unique appearence (and possibly negative social effects), losing an arm (again, kind of unique, but you get much stronger in the remaining arm, possibly even being able to wield a 2h weapon in a single hand), the repricussions for death could be both cool and not cool at the same time. The bad makes the players fear death, the possibly cool aspect makes players not give up because of it. It goes on, but just thought I'd share and throw the idea out there.

D