Game wide mortality/perma-death for everyone
I wrote something about mortality
on the wiki about three years ago when it got trialled on Beluaterra. It seems back then I was in favour of it because, as has been mentioned in this thread, it can shake things up. But the effects of mortality on Beluaterra turned out to be something no-one was particularly happy with. It was too arbitrary. And although there is an idea that mortality will remove older characters past their prime who are just sitting on positions, it cannot be targeted like that. Mainly mortality removed a lot of characters that were still young and in their prime and overall it had a negative effect. I recall Chenier talking about how it basically gutted Enweil of its most active characters and surely this is the opposite of what most want mortality to do?
I think we have to be careful as well because you do form an attachment with your characters. I've had a character going since December 2004. Albeit, he has been a hero since 2005 and by rights should have perished a long, long time ago. Perhaps atypically, he doesn't hold any positions of power these days. Any realms he was once prominent in are all gone. Still, that's a heck of a commitment to lose suddenly and arbitrarily because some people feel older characters, perhaps older players even, are clogging up positions and keeping realms in inertia. I might not be as vocal or interactive with Malice I once was, but I faithfully roleplay him as an older man now, past his best and longing for the past. Just because a character is old does not necessarily preclude them from having meaningful interactions with the game.
Rather than try and start killing characters off, perhaps we should just return to an old system. There was a time when any wounding or imprisonment would remove characters from their positions. You could see a single battle go bad and between woundings and imprisonments have to replace your entire council come the morning. It certainly made life interesting and assassinations were much more worth the risk. I'd wager just reintroducing loss of positions in that fashion would do a lot to see positions change hands more often and cause a lot more instability around BattleMaster.
