Mourning Perma Death is interesting.  500 hours is a lot - almost 21 days of online time which for a casual gamer could take 6-12 months. 

In D&D Online, I feel that it will not happen.  A good death penalty that makes you feel like you have worked for would be good as well.  95% of a population base would not like perma death, and the majority casual gamers would not like to start over.  I see D&D online getting a lot of casual gamers that will play because they love D&D.  The devs will not want to alienate them or anyone else.

From a guy on the DDO boards:

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If you want permadeath for purely personal challenge, you don't need it coded into the game. If your character dies, delete him and start with another.

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Unfortunatly PnP and online computer games are completely different.  Perma death may work in a PnP situation, but it wont work in a mmorpg.  In order for combat to be challenging in a computer game their has to be risk.  If their is risk then from time to time they will die.  If your character dies you have to start over. 

Here is were the problem is..  Whenever you play a game, pnp or mmorpg  you play with friends.  If you die in pnp, dm lets you make a new character and bring you back into the story.  On a computer game if you start over you no longer are the same power level of your friends.  So, perma death in a mmorpg would be way more extreme then pnp, because it seperates you from your friends.

The only other option I could see is if they required a rez after death.  Problem is, if they do that, the game we be overwhelmed with beggers.  Being a class that can rez in games that just have an xp penalty (such as eq) the clerics are forced to try and hide their identity due to none stop begging.  Unfortunatly people don't understand that while it may not take a great deal of time to go somewhere and do a rez, if you don't say no at some point you never get to play the game for yourself, you just run from one body to another.  Now if you had perma death the begging would turn to complete desperation.  Making the time played by classes that are able to rez compeletly lame. 

I remember my last permadeath in AD&D, long time ago.

I was 14 at the time, A very unfriendly Dm deceided to get rid of me and set 4 vampires on my ass. I died permanant like-- THen the Dm refused to allow me to reroll a new character cus "the campaign has just started".

I suppose i wasnt kewl enough/nerdy enough or whatever, having just moved to a new area.

It was my very last time playing AD&D.

i love playing for months and then i die and its over... seriously i do...

BECAUSE as you all know high level content is just... well too FUN for us to ever experience. I mean what right do I a lowly mmorpg player have to experience high level content? i mean what do i expect? end game content?...wait...you mean...i SHOULD expect that?

with permi death fuck even losing half your levels is not viable in a mmorpg market and people are idiots for thinking it is.

No offense "every action you take could result in your death" excitement!! well lets see you get to max level/skill then your internet dies while fighting some monsters and boom your dead yay now i have to spent another 100 hours getting back to where i was(or more ALOT MORE). when in real life have you been playing D&D and all of a sudden you hit a laggy spot and you die? or worse... you lose your connection. it happens ive died alot because of internet dieing. Dont say "get a better connection" im on cable and it dies all the time

what about clearing a area and server crashes etc and then when you log on its all re-popped and you die.

ORRRR grouping with someone who gets disconnected and dieing, or he does a bad move

spending half your time playing re-leveling in the EXACT same areas you did last time is not fun. I don't know what kind of drugs your doin but give me some. But grinding is NOT fun its NEVER been. And any game that will make me do ALOT more grinding, really pisses me off.

and mournings bloodline system is just silly. I'd love it auto-created kids would be fine.. But now its going to be people going up to all the female players going "hey want to mate" etc etc etc i feel sorry for them already...

don't say "omg you can mate with npcs tooo ya know" because if you want a valuable heir youll have to find a player, because it would combine both your skills on the kid not just yours.

   While i agree that perma-death would make for a more interesting and intense gaming experiance. Its just not ethical for gaming companies who would like to keep a large number of players, First of all after loosing 5 or 6 chars to permi-death (especially due to server lagg) many players would simply give up, now im sure that a more harcore gamer would say good ritance to someone that quits due to loosing chars  to permi-death, the gaming companies see that as a profitable loss.

  Another good reason to not include permi-death im game is becouse after spending a year to "max out" a character to highest level/stats WOULD bring some gamers to tears if their character was to die; and also push them to finding other games.

   Now a good solution to the same old boring death without consequences would be to offer certain quests that offer unique and uber rewards but at the penalty of permi-death should you die while trying to complete the quest. Or the posibilty of  Hardcore server that all deaths on that server are permi-death so that the players have the chice to make pemi-death chars or conciquencial death chars.

This was the coolest thing about Diablo 2. Having the option to make a hardcore character.

I think that permadeath is very cool, but it should not be forced onto players. I would love to see some sort of system setup so that once you get a character above a certain level, you then have the ability to make a "hardcore" character, one that dies only once. Having the level req to me is just to get people familiar with the game before letting them kill off toon after toon.

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Originally posted by drydale
As some have already mentioned, there exists in the D&D world spells which will bring your character back. If they follow the rules then I don't see the problem. While this will cause many low levels to perma-die, they can quickly relevel. For high levels, it will be a matter of time and expense to bring yourself back. NPC's should be availabe to resuurect characters for a price. In fact, I hope they implement the max death=Constitution rule. While some will be upset at this, it will mostly be the people who suck. I think everyone can relate to being in a high level party and finding themselves grouped with someone who has no clue what they are doing. While mostly these are Ebayers, some are just people who managed to grind their way to high level.

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DnD 3.5 Rules do not have CONSTITUTION limit to raising the dead.

You lose a level when you are raised unless the 9th level divine spell true ressurection is used which has a material spell component worth 25,000gp which is consumed during casting.

If you are first level, die, and are raised (other than by true ressurection) then you lose 2 CONSTITUTION points permanently. You can't come back to life no matter what with 0 CONSTITUTION (unless I suppose you come back as an undead type).

Having a cleric around to cast 9th level spells is typically rare in paper and pencil. It will be quit common with DnD Online since there will be no perma-deaths.