Death penalty options

[JWideman]

After talking it over with the owner, it looks like we're going to a levelless/classless system. In this case, what death penalties are available besides loss of xp or equipment?

[Kjartan]

Well, maybe I'm stretching here, but you could get a reputation as an idiot if you died too much. Mobs would make fun of you, bullies would pick on you.

Many of the options discussed on this thread so far seem to work... permadeath, forced afterlife journey, stat point loss, etc. Or, presumably your system has something that you build up, skills or something, you could lose some of that.

Have you decided not to have xp or equipment loss, or are you just looking for other ideas at the moment possibly in addition to those?

[jmurph]

I am assuming permadeath is out. A non-level, non-class based MUD can still impose death penalties such as equipment damage/loss, temporary or permanent skill or attribute decay, temporary or permanent advancement penalties, reputation effects, fees for revival, etc.

Other, less standard, consequences have been mentioned such as zombies/ghosts/etc. of the slain character (maybe the restless dead even seek the death cheater out!), required quests to redeem yourself in the eyes of a faith (the risen dead may be "unclean", "cursed", etc.), maybe even revival as an undead type (crud, my arm fell off... again.). Dead characters may be sent for a stint in the underworld before they can revive.

[JWideman]

[shasarak]

The problem with most death systems is that they're viewed simply as a means of penalising the player. I would go so far as to say that there shouldn't be a single feature in the entire game that is unambiguously about penalising players (other than OOC punishments for OOC offences, of course). Instead, any game feature should be a) interesting, b) fun, and c) likely to involve tactical and/or strategic decisions with significant consequences.

Suggestions about some sort of "afterlife" game phase are heading in the right direction, IMO - it makes death a potentially interesting and fun piece of gameplay rather than simply an annoyance. But I'd like to see them taken farther, to the point where dying might, under certain circumstances, actually convey a strategic advantage on the player.

For example, suppose that, while dead and in the "other world", the player has the chance to harvest other souls which will boost his powers - not simply within the dead realm, but when he returns to the real world as well. But, balanced against that, a non-reincarnated dead soul loses (say) 1 experience point per heartbeat until it chooses to return to the living.

You now have a death mechanism that becomes an intrinsically interesting and tactical part of the game. A player might actually deliberately commit suicide because some combination of circumstances in the real world has led him to believe that he has the key to a rich vein of spiritual energy that can be tapped swiftly and efficiently before he is reincarnated. But, if that turns out to be wrong, and he is trapped in the spirit realm for longer than he expects, he will be weakened rather than strengthened when he returns to the real world.

Alternatively one could give interesting real-world abilities to disembodied ghosts. Perhaps ghosts could wander invisibly, walking through walls and locked doors at will. Perhaps they are disrupted or otherwise inconvenienced by sunlight. Perhaps high-level ghosts can have enough power to influence physical objects - even perhaps to slay the living by squeezing their hearts inside their chests. (Who's seen The Frighteners? ) Maybe, if a player is being pursued by a powerful, non-corporeal being, it is only by actually voluntarily dying and becoming a non-corporeal spirit himself that he is able to battle it!

The possibilities are endless, but I do think people need to stop thinking about death as "a punishment" and start thinking about it as a potentially interesting game feature.

[JWideman]

The reason that death seems like a punishment is because it is. It's a way of telling players to be more careful. If nothing happened when they died, they'd just go on doing what it was that got them killed.
And even if you eliminate the harsher penalties for dying, you're still going to have SOME sort of penalty. If it takes 2 hours of fighting through beast after beast, and death only sends you back to recall, then it's still going to suck to die.
On the flip side, you can make death be rewarding for others who can resurrect the fallen character, who may avoid some - or all - of the penalties. The problem with that is that there is potential for abuse.

[KaVir]

[Kjartan]

Death can have a big penalty associated with it for reasons other than "It's my mud and I enjoy penalizing": the risk of the penalty makes life more interesting, and when you DON'T die and thus don't get penalized you feel like you've accomplished something.

We've found that, because of the way people view risk, a small random chance of a penalty is comparably effective to the certainty of a penalty. (At risk of derailing the thread, that's the theory behind the rl death penalty too!) That way we have less people actually being penalized; and we aren't particularly interested in everybody working full-time to recover from when they died, so that's a good outcome.

[#endgame]

I've been thinking about a death system for a potential sci-fi mud. Throughout the game world, set up cloning facilities. At these facilities, players can pay to have an imprint of themselves stored (for a price, either static or increasing with power or frequence of use). The imprint would store base stats of the character and when the character dies, a fairly short scripted sequence would be run whereby the character wakes up in a cloning vat with the stats of their imprint, which can be used an unlimited number of times.

Large loss of stats from forgetting to imprint could be averted if you take the corpse back to the cloning lab. Give the character a bonus of 1/2 the difference in each stat or something.

I suppose it's fairly cliche, but it seems to me that it'd work.

EDIT: Hooray, someone already posted this on page one. Maybe I'd better read the whole thread next time.

[JWideman]

[Tyche]

[Kelson]

[KaVir]

[JWideman]

[elanthis]