After my post last week about Shadowbane, I was asked, both in the thread and in email, whether or not one of the various Permadeath designs could be seen as a reset button. To me, the answer is simple: Unless you are talking about universally applied systematic character permadeath (i.e. a character wipe), I would argue that it wouldn’t.

Why? Well, the whole point of the reset button is to level the playing field, and bring everything back to an even keel. Reset the risk board. Get back to the land rush, where everyone has an equal chance of getting their stake.

Permadeath tends to have the opposite result on a game world. It creates a positive feedback loop, which creates a very real and insurmountable gap between those with skill and those without it. The rich get richer, the rest are forced to reroll, and have almost no chance of amassing the resources and/or skill to surplant the rich. The end result is almost always going to be a locked world state, where those in control of the map are almost impossible to dislodge – exactly the world state that Shadowbane is hoping their reset button resolves.

Also, while this post does not explicitly state that permadeath is a bad idea, I would like to apologize in advance for the inevitable.