Death Penalties

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

First for all: Could be some sort of an underground area where the dead will be. A maze or something else. Small waiting to get out or some sort of credit that you can come out.

Secondly for the player killers: Economy, that the Outlaws would be in jail, and to indemnify deeds to get away. It could be restrained in vain to kill the other players.

Personally I'm a fan of the "exp debt" concept (i.e. exp points required for next level gets increased, rather than exp getting subtracted from your current total). It can potentially decrease your progress significantly, but you're never actually in danger of backsliding.

I realize this isn't an uncommon concept in games and has probably already been mentioned before in this thread, but 50-something pages is a lot to search through just to make a short response just as this.

Wow im coming to this very late so I am sure most ideas have been rehashed many times. Regardless I will voice my opinion even if it is shitty :).

A few quick concerns is the value and viability of currency in the game. How useful is it going to be? If in fact currency becomes a needed thing in the game I certainly suggest that penalty upon death will be a loss of the total amount of currency you have on the character.

I suppose dying more than twice within a time window of say 10-15 minutes should also further penalize by depleting a small amount of xp.

I really dislike the idea of having spawn timers. I would much rather have to run and get my body then sit there and stare at my body for 30 seconds to a minute.

Permanent Death for HC Characters and a small graveyard at the end of the act.

And for SC, I liked the idea that you have a 5% chance of dropping an equipped item and losing everything in your inventory.

Liked the idea with monster that killed your char to lvl up. Add some XP loss or debuf for short duration. Done=)

How about apon death you are teleported to an afterlife, and must do a couple of quests from the god or gods to be givin a second chance at life?

My take would be what would be fun for the player, corpse running isn't really in nowadays, on the upset something like a Power-up clicking on where you died (EX:could be a little mound with a sword on it) could provide with a boost to health/mana, could be to weapon damage or spells as well.

HOWEVER, Near the area from where the player death, there would be stronger mobs/one rare monster added or those monsters that slayed you rank up lets say

Another idea would be to decrease chance to hit by EX:10%, something minor. For this to fit in gameplay wise, the character would have some kind of death penalty for 10 minutes, however if he manages to kill the monster who delivered the death blow, the death penalty would be gone.

Now while fighting a boss that death penalty would stay active on your second attempt, but the penalty wouldnt have TOO much of an impact.

Just some quick thoughts :)