Far from home

Another big gripe I have with a lot of persistant worlds is how they lack the feeling of true distance, and how being away from home, in the deepest and darkest corners of the world holds absolutely no trepidation because you simply need to log out and back in again to end up safe and sound in your warm bed. Part of the fun in going out into the world is the fact that you no longer have the comforts of home to protect you and keep you safe, and life isn't so taken for granted. Being miles away from civilization should feel like you are miles away from civilization, and it should force you to think more about your survival.

Survival

One benefit of this is to give more value to survival skills or knowledge about how to survive. Food and water now become incredibly important as they are now your lifeline to living, and spells that create food and water suddenly become important. Not only that but you need to keep warm or protect yourself against certain environments or risk coming to harm. Lastly there is the sense of getting in too deep and not having enough supplies to get you safely back to civilization. All of this builds up a sense of risk, puts a value on the choices you make and then gives you the rewards when you manage to make them.

Starting Location

Of course this problem only exists when the starting location is fixed, and you appear at the same point whenever you enter the module. You cannot however just rely on restarting the module where you left off as server resets lose this information and the last thing you want to do is end up smack bang in the middle of a fight. You also run the risk of someone using their current location to "camp" while they are offline so that when they return they are right in front of the treasure and waiting to claim it.

The template handles all of these issues through a feature called "Camping Locations". Whenever a character leaves a server, it is assumed that they leave the area they are and return to the nearest safe area where they can make camp and rest. These locations are always relatively safe areas, which are also away from the places where people will most likely camp. It could be a road-side inn, an open field, a lake side camping ground, essentially somewhere that would be considered out of harms way and a place where they can rest and recouperate.

By doing this, players who log in are not instantly somewhere they shouldn't be and will need to travel back to where they were. It also maintains the feel that they are still out in the world somewhere, and are not instantly transported back home safe and sound.

Avoiding Conflict

But what if people purposely log out of a session to try and avoid the current encounter they are losing? This of course is a very serious thing, and nearby enemies are taken into consideration when you choose to end your session. When you start a new session after doing this you may find yourself with an injury that will require time to heal, or having come close to death as a result of getting back to a safe location from where you were. The idea is that you should choose your camping location carefully, instead of just logging off wherever you happen to be. You can judge the difficulty of reaching a safe location during the process of logging out and either manually move to a better location before leaving, or take the risk and leave, allowing the system to determine if you made it back safely or not.

Down Time

What you do with the time when you are not connected to the server is affected by where you are when you are offline. If you are in a city or town then a variety of options may be open to you, while being camped out in the wilderness not only means you are restricted in resources, but also that you dont have access to as many options. Again you need to choose carefully where you decide to camp, and being away from home starts to have a very real impact on your character and instils a feeling that you truely are in a different place.