I'm intrigued to see people's view on this.

I love playing perma-death. I get really attached to my characters, and when they die, it becomes a really sad time. But it means I'm really careful with my characters, and makes me that much more careful with what they do. I love recording their adventures with fraps too, then once they die, I make an emotional montage and a slow "Sean Bean" style death scene.

So I'm probably the second option. I find that it really enhances my role-playing experience, because it means that I'm as concerned with their self-preservation as they would be.

What about you guys?

Sean Bean has one of THE best death scenes in the history of fantasy films, hands down. After that scene, I became even more obsessed with killing off my characters in glorious and beautiful ways. I love that man...

Anyway, no, I haven't really tried it before. I might but I know I tend to die a lot unless the difficulty is close to the very left side of the slider. XD

I play like the Prince Of Persia Sands of Time style. You never actually die, you just go back in time before the event that killed you. So its not invincability, its just making smarter choices.

Nearly every time I've made a death montage (out of a possible three) its been the Lord of the Rings score

I just find it really moving though. Odd, but I do

I do understand though why it might be an unpopular mechanic

I tried it once and didn't die until level 13 or so after getting surprised by trap, but there's was just no way I was going to go through the beginning of the game again and again as it would wear it out and decrease the likelihood of me starting new characters. I have no problem telling myself that I'm playing a perma-death run-through, but I've invariably cheated when I've died. I still, of course, don't think of my character as disposable and try to get through it dying as little as possible, but there's just no getting through an FCOM install with 0 deaths.

Oh god, stuff that. I only play perma-death on Vanilla settings (with a few kind of minor tweaks and graphics mods a plenty)

Nope! If I did that, my character would never leave the safe confines of the first city she comes to. Plus I play with OOO & MMM, not gonna happen!

I'm with OuijaU here. If I played dead is dead, I would never allow my character to leave town. :tongue: I am already PLENTY attatched to my character without addtional 'help' from dead is dead. I feel what she feels enough that we already play extremely cautiously and death would be a huge - but not permanent - deal. My character is a spirit that pretty freely crosses boundaries of time, space, worlds and games so we certainly have the ability to reincarnate her.

In some ways I suppose the question is academic and more a matter of state of mind. By that I mean that although I do not play dead is dead, Buffy has over 700 hours in TES IV and has never died in this game. Neither has her horse, in fact.

I thought about it, but then it came time for me to uphold the death I couldn't do it and reloaded.

I understand the concept of DiD, but would never play it. Even so, I do take care of my character and consider him sent to Aetherius even once as a failure. He has been there but could be brought back fortunately ^_^

I was confronted by this very issue the other day when one of my characters nearly died in the wilderness. I didn't intend to play him as dead is dead but he'd never come close to death before so I didn't have to worry about it.

He survived since I managed to get back to Anvil and get all healed up again, so I still haven't decided what to do should it happen again.

With a different character I'm just as involved in though, I don't worry about reloading her. The first time she died it was due to a trap in an Ayleid ruin and I just refused to accept that her journey would end there. She was a level 10 but as far as I was concerned, our journey was only just beginning, so I accepted I'd made a mistake and just reloaded a previous save. The second time she died, it was due to a surprise bear attack in the west weald and she kept getting staggered, so much so she couldn't cast a health spell or call a summon. Again, I reloaded when the bear killed her, just because it's not how I planned her to die, should I ever end her journey.

So yes and no, really. It depends entirely on the character. I had a dead is dead character who lasted 2 days before she was killed by the Chorrol guards. I let her die- she'd slipped up trying to murder someone, so I felt it would be wrong trying to reload her, since she was doing something intentional. A surprise bear attack or ayleid trap to me isn't intentional.

Just bought the game actually so its my first playthrough and I still kind of svck :/ no perma death for me B)

I have one character who is dead-is-almost-dead. The premise of my character "Echo" is that for reasons she does not understand, she is doomed to be reborn, again and again, into a world she is ill-equipped to handle. In each new reincarnation, she gets one item related to each previous incarnation (if she can get to it.)

I use several mods for this. I have an alternate start mod that allows me to drop the character into various different places and situations. I have a mod I made which puts a hidden chest into the Vilverin dungeon, where I place the item using the CS.

This is an intentionally weak character, played on maximum difficulty. Her starting skills and birthsign are determined by random dice rolls. Her starting locations are always far away from Vilverin, usually in very dangerous places, and she starts with nothing, at level 1. She has only managed to actually reach the chest to retrieve the accumulated treasure a couple of times. She has died quite a few times.

I only play the character when I am feeling ready to deal with frustration.

I pretty much never play "perma-death" aka "dead is dead"

The reason is because playing that way makes you very risk adverse and not willing to see just what you/your character can do. Also noteworthy is that I play with OOO/MMM which makes the game much more dangerous at lower levels.

So for example, you might be on a road or in a dungeon and you see a bunch of baddies. They look pretty tough. With Perma Death I'd probably avoid them. But it's more interesting to see if I could defeat them. So I'll save and try.

Also with OOO things like traps are very deadly. One wrong move and your dead. I'd hate to lose a character I've spent 100+ hours on because I missed one trap. And chests can be trapped, with one trap that pretty much assures insta-death. So with perma-death, I'd pretty much have to avoid all trapped chests.

And with OOO/MMM one mountain lion with a low level character is assured death. And you don't have to go far. I've run into mountain loins just outside Skingrad. With a low level character, one or two hits drains health, and you cannot outrun the lion at that point. So unless you can turn invisible you're basically done.

I do try to seriously avoid my character's death, so I'm not sloppy. If the character dies, I often load a save and defeat the enemies more than once just to prove than my character could survive - or if I can't defeat the enemies I just avoid them.