Permadeath without the Death bit - Help
 

How easy is it to do this:

When you die, or should I say just before you die you go unconscious
At that point when the player is on the ground unconscious I’d like to roll a dice as it were. Say 1 in 500 chance of permadeath.

Obviously most of the time you wouldn’t die but be laid on the floor in a sort of feign death way waiting for a good time to stand up.

The threat of permadeath would be a powerful deterrent against recklessness and I imagine it would raise the players heart beat a little.

Ideally it would go something like this

You have been knocked unconscious
The priests of discord roll 187 you roll <short pause> 54 Hurray you LIVE.
Or (alternate ending)
The priests of discord roll 124 you roll <short pause> 124 You are Dead!
Your character level has been set to 1 – Fortune has smiled upon you as you still have access to your bank and friends list.

If fact I’d make the chance of dieing 1 in level times 20
1 in 20 for a level 2 and 1 in 1,000 for a level 50.

I’m pretty good with php mysql etc. but I’m not sure where to start.
Perhaps at the point of death teleport the player to some sort of Judge who rolls the die.

Any ideas?

tech implementation is easy, but psychological one...

when you playing 20 min Deathmatch in FPS, permadeath means you out of the game till the game ends and new one starts.
When are you lev 75 with uber raid gear who died zillion times, and you suddenly rolled a bad number... You will smash the keyboard over your monitor and freaken NEVER play ever again.

On hard core Diablo 2 only those people played who were- ultra good with the game, and were extremely bored with it. And speed and easiness of D2 is nowhere near EQ.

You could have it delevel you to 1 instead of permadeath.

De- level to level 1, then create a series of quests to get some levels back... time consuming, but not as much as having to go through the whole leveling process again...

I hear you ChaosSlayerZ about the psycological impact.... I have a plan for that.

About the tech implementation being easy -
where do I start?
At the point the player dies or just before?
what / where is the trigger I can manipulate to set my sequence of events in motion?

I can write quests and stuff easy.

I'm thinking off the top of my head:

When the character falls and would normally die
Give them a few hp
Feign death them
Roll random number
If random number = special number they die
.....Set level to 1
.....Remove hit points
Else
.....Leave them there feign death to get up and escape if they can
Endif

But I don’t know where I would put the code / quest to start it

I'd appreciate any ideas from anyone because I'm completely stuck.