Death Penalties

Another option might be to have a no item drop penalty, i.e. you would get no drops from X number of monsters you kill after you died.
This wouldn't slow you down but in an item dependent game its something your going to want to avoid if you can.
I'd also surgest that you respawn somewhere other than were you died as it just looks silly (from a realism point of view) if you get killed then just jump up and get stuck straight back in to the fight.

realism in an ARPG in a fantasy world?

Like a friend of mine always says. *if u want realism, Join the army*

Respawn after dead itself is against realism :)

Why not a system in which you pass out when killed for idk 30s-1 minutes then regain an exceptionally small amount of life but don't regenerate for 10 minutes. Monsters will assume you are dead for the same amount of time you have been out and move away. Your odds at continuing the fighting is just going to have you end up dead again. So you will need to get away from where you are to re-stack healing potions and or seek out healing. Or you could keep on fighting but risk ending up unconscious several times and prolonging the battle.

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30s -is- a really long time especially in action games .

possibly when you get 'knocked out' you are moved the current map/screen's entrance . you could then heal up and continue to fight the good fight or retreat in shame :)

30s + potion is far better than running back from town, though!

I like the idea of rewarding the player for keeping their characters alive
instead of penalizing them for death.

Being sent back to a check point of sorts should suffice, in my opinion.

I think there are several, please don't do's:

1) No dropping the body at death site to retrieve it later.
I hated this in Diablo 2. It was pointless since you would probably return to the site much weaker (without your items) or you would have to store secondary items in your stash for deaths.

2) No constant loss of experience: You work really hard to earn that much experience, and if a boss keeps kicking your butt and you keep losing experience, you will probably lose interest and turn away from the game.

3) No dropping items. Items aren't always easy to get. Say you played hours and hours to get a nice item. And you lose it upon death (someone else picks it up). That would be a highly negative experience for the player.

So then what is considered a fair penalty?

How about....
1) gold loss?
Gold, if it ends up as a more useful currency than in Diablo 2, would be sorely missed if lose, but it can be gained again, so not a big loss.

2) Another possibility is level loss/xp loss for a fixed time period...you can become 1 level lower for say, 5 or 10 minutes...this would mean that the player would have to work again to gain that level, and could level up to that again and beat the aforementioned boss, and upon the completion of that penalty-time, would receive that experience back! and be stronger than before!

What say you, fellow Path of Exilers?

I will not play games that allow you to loose items and I do not like games where you lose gold upon death, but this game is not designed to every ones likes or dislikes.

My opinion is like someone said earlier, you loss exp upon death, but one can gain it back quickly from monsters because exp gained is monsters maximum exp until the lost exp is regained. This idea may be too difficult to program though.

Bad Ideas for a Death Penalty

- Losing Experience. Why should a player, who has been patiently trying to level his character be punished in this way? This was one of the reason I hated Diablo 2, it was a stupid penalty then and is still a ridiculous penalty.

- Losing Items, or Corpse Running. Why force the player back into a difficult situation with absolutely no killing power? It's not fun and doesn't work. You want a fun enjoyable game? Then this is absolutely not the way to go.

- Losing Gold Directly at Death - Another bad Idea, how can you possibly support an gold based economy if everyone is losing all their gold when they die? It just devalues gold.

Better Solutions to this problem of Character Death.

- Place Check Points in strategic Areas inside the instance (Safe Zones if you will) so that the player does not have to run terribly far back to the point were they died. These check points can be as often as you like. Because town portals will be available to the player, he will not need to respawn in town, unless he wants to go there with a town portal.

- The major and only penalty for death should be durability lose on gear. Durability that needs the be repaired. Now, I might suggest expensive Field Repair Kits that give the player the choice of repairing gear in the field if they need to. I do not suggest that durability be easy to lose though as that would be annoying. Gold alone could also be used to repair durability. In this way gold is a little more valuable.

I'm not advocating that durability gets diminished any other way, just through death. Once an item breaks it must be repaired to gain benefits from it or use it out-right in terms of weapons.

durability loss, maybe gold loss.
Not exp loss. leveling up is such a fantastic feeling. Everyone can say they spent hours killing things in diablo just so they could get that next level, to unlock that next tier of spells. If I die, I feel crappy enough. If I die and it just increased the time its going to take for me to experience the best part of the game, I usually just put the game down and come back to it later.

perhaps also implement a graveyard and spirit healer type system like from WoW. It gives the player a punishment, because its annoying as hell to run back to your corpse, but it doesn't really ruin the game experience.