Permadeath – Rogue
The very first computer role-playing games were heavily inspired by tabletop experiences that featured permadeath. As early as 1980, the mechanic had not only been implemented in video games, it had given birth to its own genre, the Roguelike. Rogue, the game from which the genre gets its namesake, implemented the concept as its central game mechanic. It lowered the stakes in comparison to more brutal permadeath in tabletop experiences, encouraging players not to grow attached to their characters and instead experiment with trial and error tactics and different character builds. It punished, but by making XP and item recovery accessible, permadeath was entertaining, not painful.
Permadeath in the traditional tabletop sense – in which central playable protagonists important to the game’s narrative can die at any moment – has also lived on in subsequent video game RPGs. Games like XCOM and The Banner Saga aren’t afraid to kill off main characters with their own story arcs, with whom players have invested dozens of hours into building and role-playing. Of course, this sort of permadeath is strictly limited to games that spread their narrative across multiple playable characters. Losing a single character when you have a party of six or seven is a little easier to swallow then having your only playable character die after hundreds of hours of gameplay.
