TheOldestJoe

Long time reader, finally got around to making a forum account. Been gaming since Pong, but currently obsessed with FTL thanks to you people. Also occasionally known as LiBiPlJoe.

On a completely different topic, being the mention of character aging in a persistent game world at 12:50 or so: (Pulls a dusty tome from a high shelf. As he blows away the cobwebs, you see the word "CompuServe" stamped upon the spine in a very mid-eighties font.) 5.7.1. AgeAs in 'real' life, the character has a finite life span. The exact time of a character's death is determined by the Fates at the instant it is born. As the character approaches a natural death it will exhibit the various aspects of aging. An average player can expect to last for about fifteen thousand battle rounds.* It is rumored that high-level magic users can actually cheat the Fates and prolong their lives, but only if they are very high level. * The battle round is the standard unit of time measure in this simulation and is analogous toa "turn." The usual duration of a battle round is twelve seconds, but this can vary, depending on the particular command being performed. For example, a fight command will take four seconds longer than a movement command. Island of Kesmai was one of the first commercial MMORPGs, on a pay-by-the-minute online service. And from the beginning, they had limited character lifespans. Roughly fifty hours based on the manual, though I remember more like 200 hours of game time. Death from old age was permadeath. In later years they introduced youth potions and an Underworld from which you could be reborn, but in my day it was a brutal reality. The DayZ discussions reminded me of the old old days of online gaming, in a way. The worlds were fairly brutal and unforgiving; you needed help, but establishing trust was not easy. With an IoK character in old age, you needed to find someone to hold all of your possessions while you rolled a new character. You might even make a deal where you'd allow them to kill you repeatedly for experience, in exchange for payment to your next incarnation; of course, at any point they could just loot your corpse and run off. Being active and valued within the community was an absolute necessity. I did a lot of Knight quest escorts and helped map the Axe Glacier; others acted as money transfer between lands, did research on weapon effectiveness, assisted in emergency corpse runs, etc. Now if only I had the free time to get good at DayZ...