Death Penalties

Been thinking about this...tons of suggestions...but really death boils down to 1 thing:

We all (mostly) agree that death must have a cost.

This cost, when all is said and done, is merely your time. No matter how you dress it up or complexify it, in the end the penalty robs of you some of your time, making it take more time to reach your in-game goals.

This makes me think the XP loss is fine as a penalty. It is honest and straightforward. No dressing up, no hiding behind complex systems. You died, so you are docked some of your time. The end.

I'm fine with a "weakeaned" state, like in Guild Wars that passes with time, and gets worse the more you die (to a cap), or until you say, recover your bodies or something (Like in Diablo II getting your items back).

Or, getting a hit in experience and you get a % of that exp back if you get to your corpse.

I like the idea of corpse hunting (...ew?), it makes you want to go back and kick the assess of whatever just mauled you, yet if you want to really move on, you simply can. I'd disagree with Diablo and say keep all of your items, or at least your equipment. I'd not mind if your corpse had "loose loot" that was floating in your inventory either.


Edit: Boils down to taking a hit for dying, but being able to recover SOME of it by overcoming whatever just killed you, even if it's just getting to your body and fleeing.

I think the death penalty needs to be well balanced, as I find with a lot of games that have too harsha death penalty, or just simply something annoying about it can ruin the whole game. You dont want players to punch in their screens and never play the game again, you are going to die at some stage. I've been playing Dark Soul's lately, and its good at making you fear death, without putting you at a ridiculous disadvantage (as far as this game goes since its meant to be a harsh and unfair game).

Obviously corpse runs were in D2, and probably no the most enjoyable death penalty, although there was the logout trick. TQ had the graves that returned some of your lost xp if you could touch it without being killed again. Theres also the common MMO of becoming a ghost and travelling back to your corpse, although that got annoying for me in games like Rift, as often id get to my corpse, repawn, and then just be killed again from the same enemy (there was the option to respawn in town for a cost though).

I think a good balance might be to respawn in town, with no immediate resource penalties (gear/gold/xp) but a death debuff of some kind (which is also common in mmo's) that might decreased your xp gain for the next 10 mins or so.

Either way its not a deal breaker, the most important thing though is to ensure that death doesnt take players out of the action for too long, as its no fun having to spend 10mins back tracking to get back to where you were before death.

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EternisRequiem wrote:

I'm fine with a "weakeaned" state, like in Guild Wars that passes with time, and gets worse the more you die (to a cap), or until you say, recover your bodies or something (Like in Diablo II getting your items back).

Or, getting a hit in experience and you get a % of that exp back if you get to your corpse.

I like the idea of corpse hunting (...ew?), it makes you want to go back and kick the assess of whatever just mauled you, yet if you want to really move on, you simply can. I'd disagree with Diablo and say keep all of your items, or at least your equipment. I'd not mind if your corpse had "loose loot" that was floating in your inventory either.


Edit: Boils down to taking a hit for dying, but being able to recover SOME of it by overcoming whatever just killed you, even if it's just getting to your body and fleeing.

And now I get an idea from this post also. Maybe death could give some incentive for revenge on the monster. The monster that killed the player gets a moral boost or something for killing you and becomes more powerful (not necessarily all monsters in the vicinity), but also now rewards more xp and/or better loot for killing it. Combine that with maybe some kind of debuff/xp loss/whatever else, and it could make death more enjoyable then painful (however still being something worth avoiding). Either way your going to die, dont make players want to die, but dont make them feel like committing in-game suicide because of it.

Hi,
I haven't read all th 80+ pages, so forgive me if something similar has been sugested before.
I don't like the idea of loosing something (items, gold, xp..).
How about having a swarm of small ghosts flying around you for some minutes after respawning and stealing some (all?) of the xp's from your kills. This would have the same effect as loosing xp, but it would feel better because you still get loot from the kills, and it could look cool.

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JanT65 wrote:

Hi,
I haven't read all th 80+ pages, so forgive me if something similar has been sugested before.
I don't like the idea of loosing something (items, gold, xp..).
How about having a swarm of small ghosts flying around you for some minutes after respawning and stealing some (all?) of the xp's from your kills. This would have the same effect as loosing xp, but it would feel better because you still get loot from the kills, and it could look cool.

Wow, nice idea it is.

However, what if you die again with the ghosts flying around You ?

It is a pretty discouraging solution, moving "back" in Your progress seems a lot more "attractive" to me if this word could even be used in such way. ;)

You could get 5 ghosts when dying the first time, each stealing 10% xp, then one more if you die again while the penalty is active, and one ghost disappear each minute.

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JanT65 wrote:

You could get 5 ghosts when dying the first time, each stealing 10% xp, then one more if you die again while the penalty is active, and one ghost disappear each minute.

I think it should be rather not time but killing and exping what would make the ghosts leave you, they could f.e. feast on the dead monsters, which You kill.

Other option which could be nice would be if they were to leave only in if You kill other player ;) Then they would haunt them instead ;) -> ultra PvP enhancer :)

If you were ruthless you could just reset the instance on them. Alternately, you could just respawn a % of the common mobs. In either case you need to consider the ramifications of implementing this with a party system. Does everybody need to die?

Alternately, you could spawn your zombie clone at the location you died and have to contend with that when you returned.

Okay, something has just come to my mind. I have no idea if someone has suggested something like this yet, but:

Thinking about rewarding not dying instead of penalizing death, I thought about the system of Champions Online, in which you get a small buff to your damage and healing capabilities when you fulfill mission, that is diminished when you die. However, this means that players who don't have problems anyway will have even less problems, making the game easier when it isn't required.

This lead me to the thought of inflicting a buff/debuff on the player upon death, that reduces experience gain/chance to find good items but increases the combat capabilities of the character. This would stack with itself up to an arbitrary cap and last until the mob that killed the character is killed/the mission in which the character died is fulfilled.

This would of course require a balance of both effects that makes death undesirable but helps the player to overcome the threat that he might otherwise get stuck on.

Edit: The XP debuff could also be extended by an amount of time that depends on how long it took you to kill the relevant mob after respawning.