THOUGHTS: PERMA-DEATH IN A GAME?

I feel that permadeath works mostly in games where you can refill your troops to make up for losses - it keeps you from running into an unwinnable situation and also allows for the interesting moral decision of maintaining the safety of your crew vs. throwing them away like cannon fodder. There still is a loss if you can regain actors as you lose all progress on the ones who die.

=Using many save files.

So what you're describing is kind of like a group survival game, in a sense? Where you might lose a few survivors in a battle, based on how they fare in battle? This has worked for group survival games such as horror survival flash games The Last Stand and Rebirth as well as, obviously, life simulation games like The Sims, although in the case of the latter, The Sims executes an autosave each time you exit the home, which is a valid form of punishing a player for their insolent misactions, such as locking Sims in the pool and deleting the ladder.

I would say that permadeath, in general, hinges on the basis that you cannot simply reload a save and quickly get back to the exact state you were in, unless it is the case that it is almost inevitable that people will die at every turn, and save scumming is part of the gameplay whereby you need to decide whether you should continue with your current group or not, or load a previous save. Oftentimes I see permadeath being implemented successfully as a central mechanic is in roguelikes (Nethack, Rogue, ADOM) and roguelike-likes (Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, The Enchanted Cave), where dungeons are randomized, to some extent or in full, and each experience is a relatively new one. Permadeath, in my experience, hinges on the fact that "dying is fun", if each time you die and are reborn, you have a new experience, losing the avatar's skills in the game world, but retaining the player skills you learned from before the death. This would mean that theoretically, the next time you tackled this challenge you would be better equipped to deal with it. In the strictest sense, I would consider multiplayer games such as FPSes to be permadeath - you shoot, you die, you respawn but you start from the beginning state. The difference is, that in multiplayer games each playthrough is different because of emergent gameplay arising from other players' interactions spicing the gameworld up.

The key point I think to take out of planning for permadeath, is that either there needs to be randomly generated content like in a roguelike, or, if it is a largely linear game like your traditional JRPG storyline, deaths in battles need to be pretty much inevitable, and battles long. Another tactic would be to make save points less frequent, so you can obviously save scum less. Hopefully save scumming becomes less convenient due to how long it takes you to actually finish a battle, or how long it takes you to get to a save point.

In essence, permadeath works if dying is fun, and to a large extent, inevitable, and if there is no easy way to reset back to exactly where you were, disabling save scumming either by using autosave, or some other alternative design.

The thing is, in X-Com, you usually can't still win after someone dies. It's an RPG where you can't stop and grind, because the enemies keep getting harder, so you can't really replace characters easily. Any replacement characters will be at a major disadvantage due to being lower level or otherwise weaker, unless it's very early in the game. So the actual end result is the same as it is in Fire Emblem: any character death is a game over. Technically it's a self-imposed game over, since the player could keep going, but to keep going at that point is just to give yourself a slow, painful, inevitable demise, or at least to make things unnecessarily really hard on yourself. Better to reload every time. And if you make it so the player can't reload their save, they just have to start the whole game over instead. And if the game isn't randomly generated, then starting over will be boring enough that they'll probably just quit forever instead.

If you want to make a game like this, then that's fine, but don't kid yourself into thinking players will keep playing after a key character dies. A small minority will, but just about anyone who understands the game won't.

Darkest Dungeon uses a different kind of model. That game does manage to get you to keep playing after characters die - by ensuring that all your characters are guaranteed to die no matter how good you are. I've seen a few tactical games that work like this too though I can't name them at the moment, and obviously RTS games all work like this. I remember a couple games where your characters would eventually die of old age even if you never lost a fight. One nice thing to do in this type of game is to let the player build up gold or fortress upgrades or other resources and earn a lot of permanent army-wide upgrades, so that they still feel like they're making progress and getting stronger.