Death Penalties

Make it incentive based, not fear based.
Reward for not dying.


Anyone remember PeP system in TcoS?
It was a second xp system with 5 levels. Killing stuff would give you PeP and you could gain PeP levels where each level would slightly increase your stats. When you die, you loose your PeP.

There are a lot of good thoughts on the penalty system. One thing I have not seen a game do is change the severity of the penalty based on the difficulty. So if you get killed by a monster on your level or below it should be a bigger penalty than if a guy who killed you who is several levels above yours.

How about the area you died in terrifies you and you suffer penalties in a zone around where you died.

Personally i feel as though the idea of having to run back to my body as a ghost or all the way back to town or doing any sort of ghostly activities would take away from the game and get very tedious, very fast. What if you die 3 times in quick succession? it's hardly rare. I think a loss of XP is always a good idea though. I don't feel there should be a penalty which stops you getting back in the game asap though as I said that could become incredibly annoying, nobody likes waiting around for debuffs to finish. I like the idea of you dropping your body and you have to get it back to retrieve your items though like in D2, never found that to be very frustrating.

Perhaps you could lose a level on a couple of your skill gems or something too?

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MarlonB wrote:

Make it incentive based, not fear based.
Reward for not dying.


Anyone remember PeP system in TcoS?
It was a second xp system with 5 levels. Killing stuff would give you PeP and you could gain PeP levels where each level would slightly increase your stats. When you die, you loose your PeP.

This is a very good plan actually

1000xp without dying - you get 500xp bonus
5000xp without dying - you get 2500xp bonus
but then if you die you don't get the bonus for 1000xp without dying again, you have to get back up to where you left off to continue your progress up to the next bonus. Then you could add some really big rewards for players that have reached like 891548956xp without dying

i would always be happy with a experience and gold penality as in diablo 2 because poeple tend to clown around at higher lv and try things they wouldnt do normally if they knew they would be penalized.

even having a corpse recovery to get at the area you died at seem a good idea.

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MrBigwilly wrote:

This is a very good plan actually

1000xp without dying - you get 500xp bonus
5000xp without dying - you get 2500xp bonus
but then if you die you don't get the bonus for 1000xp without dying again, you have to get back up to where you left off to continue your progress up to the next bonus.

I really like that idea. It gives excessive players a goal and weak ones won't be that frustrated, because you can train at any time. Maybe players that haven't played hardcore yet, will try it, because they got used to being more careful anyway.
However, I would set the rewards at a smaller rate, like 1000XP without dying = +50XP, 10.000XP = +500XP,

Another idea might be, that you get a slight increase on XP-rate at a certain "battle-time" without dying. Especially at higher difficulty people will train anyways to not die (so for that kill weaker monsters that don't give them much experience anymore) and that would help give them a reward for that.

Many games these days have removed the fear of dying and in some cases dying is a travel tactic. (since there is no penalty or a minor gold cost associated with death)

Games lose their edge when there is no Death penalty.



When you die, you should lose Experience.

You have to look at the purpose of a death penalty.

In gaming, you are usually going for some sort of goal (a challenge), and when you reach a point where the difficulty peaks you create tension with the user (this is not bad, because without tension, it would be endless grinding and boring). The important thing to recognize is that death has to -mean- something to the user; they have to be afraid of death, to create the tension/interest. A player in a game only has so many things... Time (make them wait to respawn), attention (basically a "spirit world" approach where you have to grind through and get back), currency, achievements (could be anything from items to quests to experience). One could even opt to temporarily weaken the character, but this creates the problem of a positive feedback mechanism, where dying yields higher chance of a second death.

A way to overcome this problem, maybe, is to have a penalty where after you die, you revive and have to retrieve a glyph that drops where you die. The glyph allows you to continue the quest you were working on (or maybe it let's you go to the next area or WHATEVER) but it gives you a curse that lowers a stat a small amount, then gradually becoming more bad of a penalty, then dissipating. The purpose of the gradual increase it to allow you to progress a little, but then have to push forward to get any farther (the player knowing this creates a sense of urgency, wanting to get farther before the penalty gets worse, at least that's the intent).

I hope you all like my idea. I just wish I could play.

for default league it should be an inconvenience not too much more. Personally I'd like something graphical, like your screen is in black and white and slowly regains color, or tunnel vision when you only see the center of the screen and it slowly expands back to full screen.

If you're dead set on having some more penalties maybe have this for the first death a day before you get a penalty, sort of like a free death