Death Penalties

I really like the ideas about something else happening upon ones death. An underworld for souls who died and getting ur way out by 'playing a chess game' with death or doing some other fast errands or quests for underworld gods sounds real fun and 'new' and if they r timed right would b an answer to 'waiting for a period of time for a re spawn'.
And i fully support the idea about being rewarded/punished if u win/loose against death. This would maybe b an answer to how to b able to recover the loss upon death.

This have most like been mentioned about 50 times already considering the size of this thread but I'll say it anyway.

I think that having a bonus for not dying is better incentive, if you complete X without dying (or without dying more then Y times) then you get some kind of bonus upon completion, if you do die then you lose that bonus.

But that would be for a more "casual" death penalty, depends what kind of game you're trying to make ;) If you want it to be harder then something like dropping your money on the ground where you die or xp loss maybe. Or both.

Love some of the, in-depth ideas after reading through :)
Quick ideas off the top, would be:

Idea A:
1. You Die.
2. Cut-Scene appears with dark ghost figures, who drag your soul to the underworld. (Like something from the film "Ghost".) Big on-screen message "Your Soul has been Exiled! The darkness now surrounds you!"
3. You wake up on a boat on the "Sea of Souls" and have to speak to and/or, bribe the Boatmaster (with currency), to take you back to the world of the living.
4. You wake up, back in town.
5. Look up and you have lost, single or multiple things such as:
- "X" amount of currency.
- "X" amount of Experience.
- Socketed gem level has decreased slightly.
- All Attributes decreased by 50% for 10minutes.

Random Idea B:
- Once dead: "Your Soul has been Exiled, you will now join the undead, until released by another member of your group". <-- Group has to then find and kill you as undead, upon killed, you can then respawn. Not sure how it would work when playing on your own. :O

I know Ive mentioned a couple of the usual penalties, but you can always mix them up a bit, or have a random penalty, which gets worse the more times you die.

Overall, keeping in with the penalty idea, it would be a breath of fresh air to see something new and unique, to an action RPG.

Keep up the good work people! :)

Just throwing another idea out there. Most of what I've read so far seems to deal with players not liking this or that. Dying in the game is a significant event and there's a great opportunity there to make the game more immersive, which everyone likes. We just need to do it in a way that isn't too annoying or repetitive. Here's what I think would be fun:

After being killed:
-You respawn at the nearest town.
-Your character appears visibly injured.
-Your maximum health is temporarily decreased by a certain percent.
-The monster that killed you is flagged and increases in level / difficulty.

What can be done:
-Wait for the temporary maximum health limit effect to wear off.
-An NPC should be available to heal your injuries for a price determined by your level or wealth.
-The amount paid to the NPC is set as a reward on the monster's head.
-Whoever kills the monster gets the reward money. You are notified.

Other considerations:
-The percent your maximum health decreases by could be determined by frequency of deaths or by the number of monsters still alive that have killed you.
-If someone else kills the monster before you heal, no reward is needed and the NPC will heal you for free.
-The monster that killed you should be visible to you on your map if you happen to be in the same area.
-Being injured should increase your aggro radius and potential.
-A monster killing a player could result in more lower level enemies being spawned to aid it.
-A monster that kills a player could attempt to "run away" to a random location.

To me dying itself is the real penalty since not much else gets me so infuriated. Only thing that tops that sensation would be that after death i would realize I had to run for 10 minutes since i forgot to put up a tp or missed the wp. Only to get mauled by the monster standing right next to the body.(ref. Diablo)

But... I dont mind running to a corpse, and exp and gold (obviously) penalty never botherd me. The only things that did bother me and punished me was those wich prevented me to rush back and beat the crap out of whoever it was that killed my precious char (most likely those ***** exploding dolls)

I like the idea of the murderer getting leveld up or/and empowered with a new skill (and perhaps renamed: *char_name*s Bane, if a regular monster). And I will hold to the idea of corpse running with the inclusion that the murdering monster gets teleported a few feet away.

Hmm perhaps the murdering monster steals an item and you have to kill it to get it back... thats the only way i would back an idea of item dropping. It sounds ok as I type it anyway.

If any of this has been stated before I agree.

Anyways, my thoughts

I'm not going to read 50+ pages to see if this has been posted before, so I apologize if something similar has already been proposed:

Full item loss with a twist*, with some minor XP loss as well.

* A game mechanic could be added where you pay an NPC to bind your items to your spirit / put some sort of recall magic on them, whatever (it's insurance by another name at the end of the day). The cost would go up depending on the rarity / value of the item and it could be done either per item or for your entire load out at once.

When you die, you would drop unbound items but reappear with the bound ones (or find them in a special part of your stash). You would have to re-bind items after each death.

It should be cheap & easy enough that it's pretty much accessible to anyone with a reasonable item set for their level, but difficult or expensive enough that it provides some temptation to gamble, especially with items you're not so sure you want anyway.

This lets the players protect their most valuable stuff while still being able to feel that death has consequences in the game world.

While nobody enjoys dying in game the fact remains that it does happen. Having to run back to your body or respawn in town uses valuable time and is probably the biggest deterrent for people being careless, losing that momentum.

My ideas for death penalties other than time loss would be the usual gold loss, durability damage on items and my personal favorite is the exp loss. I would not take exp away though, instead I would make it so that you get a exp debuff for a set amount of time which stacks with consecutive deaths to the point where you are only earning say 25% of normal exp.

This gives players a big enough incentive not to die but doesn't take away something as valuable as exp they have already earned, but rather limits it for a time. It could be a good indicator that a player is not ready yet for the content they are attempting.

While losing Exp is something most people are already accustomed to in various games I believe the ability to delevel would be of some use aswell as durability being brought into play for gear.

what if one would suffer a huge stat decrease upon death, which would not stay at a constant value and be just restored after some time, but returned to the base value incrementally? the affected stat could be random and/or based upon the "type" of death (pve vs pvp, league vs league, type of "trauma" that caused death, as in ranged vs melee vs magic etc)

and just to be able to avoid the annoying weakening effect, a NPC in town could heal you to base stat values instantly, but you'd had to pay a significant amount of currency (the amount could scale with character level and/or number of deaths). or there could be potions/items that sped up the incremental "countback" to base values, for less money (and of course as rare drops).

I think if you die you should have to make a corpse run like in Diablo 2.
If you die, you take and experience penalty, but if you recover you body you get a percentage of that experience back.