Permadeath can mean a few things:
- For role playing purposes, it refers to a player character being killed in an RP/IC (Role-Play/In-Character) sense. This death of a character, if the Real Life (RL) player chooses, can be permanent, hence permadeath. The player should not log on as the character if they have declared this for that character.
- This can also mean that the RL player deleted their character off of the server and wrote up an RP story to explain it — most likely with an OOC (Out-of-Character) explanation as well.
- Some games support permadeath in the sense that when a character dies in-game (under some circumstances) they cannot be resurrected, revived or otherwise recovered to play again. This situation is rare (old Unix text-based games would do this) and World of Warcraft does not technically support this in-game. The equivalent would be to delete your character, but Blizzard can be convinced in rare cases to recover the character (too much to explain the details of here).
- If the player chooses to log-in with the char that has been permadeathed, most likely it will be for PVE/Game Mechanic Reasons(check mail, raid, Battlegrounds etc).
- In rare circumstances, the RL player of that charecter has died, therefore will not be played ever again.
- Other games that support Permadeath: Diablo II(Blizzard Entertainment game) Hardcore Mode: In Hardcore Mode, you only have one life when you create the Character, if your Character dies it is a permanent death(cannot be ressurected) and will not under any circumstances be ressurected by Blizzard/Battle.Net