Death Penalties

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Vandro wrote:

How about a reward for not dying in an area? Increasing your magic find temporarily for example. That would be a good incentive I think :)

Now this sounds like a good idea - reward those without deaths. It could be an additional quests, an adrenaline boost which increases attack, defence or both, special aura/skill or you could build up a point system which you can use the built up points to exchange for items, the more points the better the item.


To build up the points can be done via different ways; collection points of soul for every kill made without death, or time based (time probably a very bad idea with players opting to go AFK for prolonged periods), could even be a conjuction of both x amounts of mobs/bosses killed in x hours = x amount of POS.

Death penalties that cause you to lose money/exp/loot/character are all the same, basicly all you lose is time so why not just make the character not able to move for 5 minutes or so?

Everyone should remember that Death penalties do not make the game harder (only more irritating in most cases).
When the death penalty is harsh enough (hc mode) it only encourages carebear tactics.

My idea for death penalty is not only exp penalty but... time penalty for respawn :P

Let's say it would be based on level AND on how many times u died that day (reset each day).

Something like u need to wait for respawn...

respawn_time=level*2*times_u_died seconds;
(and this would also affect people health, those who play a lot - if some1 die, he will probably take a break from pc for these few minutes :))


Of course that would be for PvE deaths ;)

Item drop is not a good thing I think... This can make people mad ;p

I got another idea which I wanted to implement in my wc3 map hero-def :p, so u may make use of it:
The longer your character is alive, the bigger exp bonus u get (for example starts at 100%, and 1% bonus per minute OR few monsters killed, and cap at 300%)

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rabidwolf9 wrote:

I don't like having a reward for staying alive. It's just not appealing. Death penalty for sure.

Loss of exp is okay. As long as it's not overdone by losing hours or days of progress per death.

An enemy group that kills the player could get HP restored (the weak become food for the strong!) This would make suicide tactics ineffective. My reasoning: If you continuously die during a boss fight, you're probably not strong enough. Go back and level up some more like other RPGs.

As for respawning, the point of respawn shouldn't be too far away, but certainly not at the exact location of death. I didn't like restarting from the beginning of the dungeon in TorchLight as it could be a long ways away.

A thought toward the checkpoints.. they could be linked to the warp system in town. You die and get sent back to town- go to the warp and teleport to the last checkpoint.

Pretty much feel the same about what rabidwolf9 said. XP loss is ok, but these shouldnt be 1=1 vs D2; how it was made there. Powering up enemies that you tried to kill is one thing, maybe give them full hp + some sort of buff for X amount of time so you dont have a chance to kill em straight away.

Death penalty should be there but no bonus for just staying alive. Example if there would be a bonus of staying alive, one could idle in town for waiting bonuses before venturing forth. If bonuses would be tied vs venturing forth as the game progresses then it would/could make sense.
IE. you complete ACT1 without dying, u could get a random item of X type.
2 Acts random better item of X type and so on...

I liked the idea used at Age of Conan; here it is, combined with my own thoughts on how to further improve it.
When a player dies (by PvE), a tombsone at the place of his death created. This tombstone lasts for a limited amount of time (like 45 minutes) and containes inside of it a certain percentage of player's experience needed to be gained for another level, and prevents any further gaining experience until the player comes back and touches the stone.
Every five minutes, or so, like 20% of this experience contained at the tombstone is lost forever for the player, but he has a 20% amount of new experience gaining speed returned back to him. After 45 minutes and player did not appear at the scene of his death, the tombstone becomes available for touch by another players. Again, it starts with returning the full amount of the experience contained to anybody that touches the stone, but with every five minutes the amount significally decreases by 20% untill the stone disappears completely.
Important notice: if the player had only gained, say, 1% of experience since last level up, and the stone penalty usually grabs 5%, it can only contain this 1%, no more. It may encourage players that just gained that new and shiny lvl up to go and explore more dangerous places without sacrificing too much. It would also reduce the possibility of massive pk battles on the tombstones from the players that would like to touch it themselves later instead of letting the original stone owner to take what originally belongs to him, at time.
But it will still create a nice potential PK ground for the players from tough pk leagues. Not to say, it teaches an inexperienced player an important lesson, and provides just enough frustration to get hurt from the occasion but still wanting to play the game despite possible multiple failures.

personally i am not a fan of loss of exp, rather have the body pickup idea or gold penalty

Never been a huge fan of death penalties but instead love the idea of bonuses for staying alive. A perfect example would be the Survival Bonus in Sacred 2. It would slowly raise while in combat and it granted a bonus to your stats and increased the quality of gear that would drop. It also made the enemies stronger the higher it reached.

http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php5/Sacred_2:Survival_Bonus

Having a reward for staying alive I think sounds way more appealing than a penalty for death.

How about this? Your chance of getting rare items increases the longer you stay active and fight inside a zone (so no idling) of difficulty close to your level. This chance to receive better items caps at maybe 5-10% increased chance, but takes a while to build back up when you die.

And perhaps, you receive more of a reward for all quests (10-20% more) when you complete them without dying some set number of times.

Perhaps there's a "combo" for killing monsters. Every 50 or so monsters you kill, and for every boss you kill, you increase your xp gain% and chance to get items% by a certain percentage. This "combo" ends when you die, so you want to stay alive for as long as possible.

And finally, the longer you stay alive, the more xp you gain from killing monsters and completing quests, this caps at around 5-10% more XP and takes about 30-60 minutes to max.

54 pages, wow.. I feel I will repeat a lot in this post.

It would be kind of neat to come up with something original that fits your theme.

Loss of items/gold/exp is old, so is walking back to where you died.

How about you get to fight something upon death? Or perhaps you would get to play one move of chess against death? If you end up losing X (nothing?) happens, If you end up winning Y happens (you get rewarded). Actually, I like that idea! The first time you die, you get to a chessboard and its your turn, next time you die one of the black pieces move, then its your turn (you are white of course). Now that I think of it, this would not solve anything... You would still have to walk back to your corpse I suppose. But I still like the idea! (C) Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal