Death Penalties

I kinda dig the idea of rewarding one for not dying rather than a death penalty. Carrot vs. stick, like. Or, perhaps better still, a combination of the two. Consider this:

A PC death incurs XP debt, similar to the scheme in City of Heroes/Villains. In this model, upon death, you are penalized a percentage of your then-current total experience. The XP are not gone for good, though. Rather, half of the experience you accrue when indebted goes to pay off the "lost" XP, and half is put toward your next level. Also, a character cannot gain a level until debt-free. That's what we'll call The Stick.

The City games ended it there, but there's no reason PoE shouldn't bring into play The Carrot. Sure, this could come in the form of a modest XP bonus--say, 10%--if a chapter is cleared without dying. Frankly, I find that idea rather boring. I'd like to see something a bit more creative employed for The Carrot. Maybe False Death: if the character sustains lethal damage, he/she falls to the ground in a death pose, and enemy creatures then move on to their next target(s). When the PC feels safe doing so, they rise from False Death with major combat handicaps, but increased movement speed, allowing them to escape and find some place to heal up. And for the purposes of The Carrot vs. The Stick, False Death does not incur XP debt.

Or instead of False Death, we could have Last Hurrah. Upon taking lethal damage, the PC becomes a veritable engine of destruction. With infinite mana, damage immunity, and ridiculously high combat buffs, the PC attempts to destroy all enemies around hm/her. However, Last Hurrah is *very* short-lived, on the order of 10 seconds or so. Once it wears off, the PC becomes immobilized and incapable of doing anything for a long-Irish time, 30-60 seconds. So if Last Hurrah doesn't finish off one's foes, these same foes will be playing dress-up with your internal organs very quickly.

Those are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head. Yeah, simply losing XP is standard, and pretty damned boring to boot. But by putting some thought (and a pile of difficult coding, I've no doubt), an interesting PC death dynamic cn be introduced. An it's just this sort of little touch that makes me really sit up and take notice if a game.

Thoughts?

"

Apocalypse23x wrote:

i always wondered why they didnt reward you for not dying as opposed to penalizing you for dying. probably harder to implement? i dont know but could be something someone will try


I think this is an excellent suggestion.

Penalties for dying is not fun. And only really necessary in PvP combat.

Death from PvE should never cause downtime. Where you must wait, or otherwise be unable to continue playing the game for any reason. Respawning in town with a symbolic 10% gold loss, having to beg your party members for a 'townportal of shame' is more than enough. :)

In PvP you will need to keep the players from just charging directly back to take vengeance on the player that killed them. So an increased PvP damage debuff would be good.



Why not have a steadily accruing (albeit small) bonus to XP gained or the rarity of items found whilst alive, that gets reset to 0 when you die?

That way you reward players for not dying rather than punish them for dying.

Not sure how it would work in PvP though.

This sounds good enough, well, there should be more to it obviously, but the idea in general is great!

Personally, I always enjoyed full drop on death.

rather than just have a flat out penalty when you die, one should be rewarded by staying alive with bonuses to % of exp/gold/rare drops and when you die it gets reset to zero. of course this has to be balanced so that players wont immediatly get rare drops after fighting a couple hundred enemies.

Something along the lines of killing one enemy is equal to 0.01% bonus, after killing a thousand enemies you get a 1% bonus, and perhaps killing a boss without dying gives you a 1 percentile point increase to bonus percentage (basically 0.5% bonus + killing boss without dying = 1.5% bonus)

Plus, this has to be further balanced when it comes to the levels of enemies faced. so obviously the bonus should not increase when a level 10 character kills a level 4 enemy but should increase when killing a level 8-12 enemy, the upper limit is to circumvent having a lower level character (lvl 10) being in a party with higher leveled chararters (lvl 20).

I'm pretty sure this has been suggested but this is my brief rundown on how the nuts and bolts could be like.

May I suggest an option dialog box at the point of death that would give you the option of respawning in town with no penalty, or use a scroll of resurrection to respawn at the point of death with like a 2% Xp loss.....

I'd like to suggest and at 90 pages someone may have hit this already.

I think Sacred had some sort of "Not dying bonus" tied to increased item drops and magic find, it's been a long time since I've played it that's for sure.

You could implement a morale system. Dying makes your morale drop and you do less damage until you kill enough mobs to raise it. Also killing strong monsters will raise it above and beyond 100%. If I remember correctly Guild Wars had a system like this.

The idea however remains the same, don't punish people for dying, dying is frustrating enough. Instead, reward them for living, more so during longer/extended play sessions (as to prevent abuse).

Its probably been mentioned already but Ill input my 2 cents.
Death penalty could follow something along the lines of Guildwars where a player loses a percentage of maximum health or mana, the more they die the more they lose up til a maximum loss until they leave and rejoin the game.
I don't agree with permanently losing items. I havent played POE yet so Im not sure how things quite work yet in regards to gameplay, partying, etc. but I do like the way Guildwars deals with death penalties. Also the greater the difficulty, the more loss of total health/mana.
This could also implement the use of new items that players can find that would remove some or all death penalty like some sort of magical scroll.
I also like the idea of "morale boosts" which are the opposite of death penalty.
I think most players would agree that if a player has to pay a price for dying, one should also be rewarded for staying alive, perhaps adding to maximum health/mana or increasing loot or quality of loot.
Anyway just my 2 Cents and I hope to play the game soon and discuss further

Death randomly sends you to Hell. If you beat the Devil, you get to re-spawn back to your location. You choose to fight. If you lose, you take an xp hit, $ hit, and lose at random, items in your inventory, and re-spawn back in town. Skipping the fight results no penalty, except re-spawning back in town. The devil could have drops.

Cheat death, like a boss.

Rustychops said:

"You could always lose your body when you die. It holds all you weapons and items (only you can pick it up). You also drop all your gold and lose a bit of XP.

Iv never seen this idea in a game before.It would be great to see GGG try it out!"

...Diablo anyone?

Well IMO we don't need gold lose penalty, but i have a idea

Instead, after die we respawn with currently lvl 0xp...wait, let me explain...

we should run to pick your dead body (but we don't lose our gear) to get all that xp again plus the xp gained in the way...this should boost the lvling in some way...diablo did this and i think that is a good idea.