Favorite Death Penalty Systems?

I know/hope that there's a decent diversity of penalties for getting killed in LitRPG. Which ones do you like to read about? Which ones are good, and which ones do you dislike? Which ones would you like to see in a story?

My favorite so far is "Death disqualifies from this PvP conflict and has sub-penalties, but isn't permanent." In a war, you die, you're out of the game, but your protagonist is still there for the next conflict, if there is a next conflict. It means that you can kill them, and make their entire faction fall because of your failure, and other nasty stakes, while allowing me to not go "like you would really do it".

One I dislike is "Death is permanent" in a gameverse. There's potential for fun, there, but it tends to make me go "like you'd really do it". Combat is a big part of an MMO, if there's no doubt that our protagonist either wins or runs away, I'm going to be less worried about the cost. Teammates dying is a concern, and sometimes it's done well, but there's a reason why having a "revive with penalties" makes me more, not less, worried for characters in the less gritty works- because the author can let them lose worse than they otherwise would. It's good if you play with gritty, but if you want me to enjoy a lighthearted work, it's a bad choice, and if you want your protagonist to really lose fights, other penalties feel like they work better.

I'd like to read about a- I want to say Jedi situation, but can't find the source to tell for sure which one it was. Basically, in some star wars MMO or other, there was a class that could be acquired by killing it's holder, but could be lost by being killed. At least, that's the story I heard. (I don't know how the original instances were distributed.) It was horrible game design- it left players afraid to enter the town areas or they'd get mobbed by people seeking the class. It left them refusing to log in on that character, wasting the class entirely, because it was too good to risk losing. But bad game design can be good story.

Doing it with any boon tossed at a protagonist would be interesting. If you add a time limit and/or other reasons why the system wouldn't be gamed, made it so that players could actively search for the holders of this boon, and maybe added a few other safeguards so that the protagonist doesn't get jumped right out of the gate- then you've got conflict, a reason to progress, and a character who keeps moving forwards and getting stronger.

It might not be fun, but it's interesting. It would provide a conflict for a chunk of the plot until the protagonist finally gets brought down- but by then they've got levels and gear to show for it, and a nemesis they want to bring down again to regain the boon.

Even if they never get the boon back, it would get them started on their journey and make the early levels interesting- and meteoric growth much more reasonable.

What are your tastes?

 

My game system is nominally based on WoW, with a "death causes big repair bills and an inconvenient corpse run"...normally. But there's a glitch, and the characters quickly notice that death means, "none of these bodies are despawning so the players can respawn, and we can't log out, and we really don't want to test it and see if death means disconnection from the game, being trapped in an avatar with zero health, or actually dying IRL."

 

Believe it or not, I lived this situation back during Star Wars Galaxies during what I called the First Jedi hunt. The Jedi was a rare, one in a million (or higher) slot that opened at random when you first created a character or after random skill levels were levels to a point. There were more ways to get it, but the most prevalent way was killing another Jedi and getting a holocron. So many kills would unlock a Jedi for you, and delete the Jedi for the other if they died enough times. They became reclusive and very few revealed themselves for fear of being kills. Eventually, things changed, but I had stopped right around the first Jedi revealing himself.

God, I miss it.

 

It does, though I didn't realize people added permadeath to it. I had assumed the jedi skills were lost and they were either back to whatever they were before or something. Even if it's not mechanically fun- which it might not be, if it turned into "dogpile the jedi" it's interesting storywise. (I read somewhere that one of the proposals for how jedi would work in that game, before what it eventually became, is that the base force sensitivity skill would be granted to all characters, but players lost it, and it's derivatives, completely on any death. Then, if someone saw you use the force skills, they could report you to the empire, setting off a sequence of bounty hunters, escalating to named-in-EU and named-in-canon characters, until eventually you got to fight vader himself- where you would have inevitably lost, because that wasn't supposed to be a winnable fight.)

 

Best one in Litrpg :-

1- In the Travis books. Awaken online. The death penalty is time, you are forced to re-live your death over and over for about 20 minutes studying it from all angles.

I bit cruel to trap someone in limbo and force mental torture on them but it made for a unique plotline and since the players can move about the scene it sets it up so this might come into play in later books.

2- 1/2 prince manga. published in 2005 before litrpg was even named let alone a sub genre this manga used the death penalty more than once as a plot point.

Once dead you are locked out of the game for a period of time (extends the closer the deaths are to each other) and you lose 10% of your total exp causing a level drop each time.

This is effect in raids as dead players are usually out until the raid ends and high level players are afraid of death since exp gain slows down to a crawl the higher up you go.

I still remember when the MC made a wager for a rare pet. If he won he'd get the other player's prize pet, since he had no pet to wager he put his sword up to his throat and wagered his own progress. If he lost then he'd kill himself each re-birth until he was down from level 100 to level 1 and they can film him if they want. ten years and that still stuck out to me.

Worst Penalty

- Deleted the character and start over with nothing. Fire emblem style. Quite a few new books use this and I found it cheap and opens the VR company to litigation more so when RL money was spent on the account.

- Pain, just pain. The player suffers 10% of the total pain related to his death then regenerates at their last save point... booo, just boo!!!! If it was the full thing I'd understand but making it a plot point that they don't suffer means the stakes have never been lower for them.

- lock the player in limbo until he can regenerate. Yes the same one from awaken online. That's just a lawsuit waiting to happen. Let's not torture people. If they had option to log out whenever but can't re-use that character until the penalty was over I'd be ok with it.

 

If Blizzard did this, there would be nothing left but NPCs...

 

OK
1) loss of identity/self ok so by this i mean when death causes you to have to change names and bodys and perhaps a trait about you this one feels especialy harsh

2) This is by far my favorite and its done all to rarely little to no penaltys with certan circumstances in which you die a perma death the only two books ive seen that have done this were alterworld in which capture meant tourture until death or Undying mercenaries in which weather or not you get revived can be determined either before or after you die and you dont know how long youll stay dead but otherwise death had few pentaltys

3) ok this one needs to be written in by the author but any penalty in which dieing actualy means the MC suffers personal sorrow for dieing wether that be loseing a friend or an important oppertunity

What I think is important in all of these is that characters die a few times in 2 i think they need to die incredibly often but rarely permadie

Least favorite

1 ) pain obvously this ones just terrible i cant feel the pain especialy if its supposed to be unimaginable and it dosent effect the characters behavior so what effect does it have other then just saying it happend

2) "fake penaltys" when the MC is supposed to have died and failed but right before managed to grab the magical dragon egg and so they got what they want whats the point in them dieing

3 permadeath Ok this one might aswell be no death because noones gonna kill off there MC if they did i would be fine with that but they never do heck even kill off the second most important character my other problem with this is if your gonna have permadeath thats one less thing that makes your book interesting 99% of books have permadeath why not just write a fantasy book something else

 

I'd like to see this done right- where the person is permanently traumatized, in a setting where that's plausible. If it permanently makes a character change their approach-...

 

I actually remembered one that's being implemented in an actual MMO. I think the game is still in the kickstarter stage but the mechanics were unique.

Death is permanent. You lose your character's progress. All of his belongings get divided among his family with his heir getting the lion's share.

Here is the interesting part. After death your spirit has a choice. It can:-

1. move to higher plain (aka die and start over from zero stats)
2. reincarnate in your heir.

your heir must be a family member (son, grandson, nephew...etc you pick them) and reincarnating means you take over that npc and his stats get a boost equal to your "spirit" power.

If they are still in the child stage then you can go ahead and be whatever you want. If he is an adult then he would already have a class so unless you want a class change best stick to the ones that match your previous class.

You can start a family with an NPC or another player. The kids and extended family members will always be NPCs so you will always have someone. the face, body type maybe even race might differ each time like with real family members but it means you get a fresh start with your "inheritance".

Starting a family with an actual player gives you better genes to add to your pool and of course the inheritance thing is a shared aspect.

 

found it. wow 2016! I'm old XD

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/

here is the kickstarter vid that explains the system.

 

I really dislike when there are no penalties or if there are any it is very slight. There should be more incentive to not die. The reliving is interesting, though that could be pretty traumatic. The pain is terrible. Significant penalties and maybe even gear loss is good.

 

I am strongly of the opinion that if your LitRPG system is an actual MMO designed to be played by humans, then it should actually be fun to play. MMORPGs clearly designed around being read about rather than actually played mainly gets me agitated at the incompetence of the designers, and there's a good reason why a lot of MMOs punish death either with a relatively small cash or sometimes XP penalty (mostly nominal so long as you don't get yourself killed eighteen times bashing your skull against one dungeon or whatever) or else by just respawning you back in town. While it's frequently helpful to the plot to have high stakes for death, the world building shouldn't be contorting itself in service of the plot, and in any case if you really need a threat of defeat, it's rarely that difficult to come up with a reason why dying right now would be catastrophic even if it isn't usually a big deal. Permadeath or even just significant loss of money, XP, or gear on death only ever crops up in niche, hardcore modes, servers, or smaller games that can afford to cater to a niche audience, and the standard on Royal Road and Book Brawl very much seems to be massive AAA games cut in the mold of World of Warcraft or the games that sought to compete with it. Games that cost a ton of money to produce are going to be designed to catch a wide audience, not a small, hardcore crowd.

If it's a portal fantasy or fantasy-fantasy, just with the conceit that the world happens to run like an MMORPG, then you can just have people die when they are killed

 

Well, there's a third option: The game is war by other means, or has real world stakes. In "the gam3", the death penalty is pretty small- relatively speaking (a few levels, a skill rollback to the point you were at X units of time ago, but your actual knowledge of how to get/improve remains)- but the point is that it's an intergalactic society's substitute for war. It's not designed to be truly fun, for all the protagonist is addicted to it, a lot of the civilizations seem to consider it more like a job. If it's being played for real-world rewards for some reason... Of course, then you need a reason why that matters. Why is someone offering real world rewards?

Plus, there was a period where the XP penalties were nontrivial in MMOs. It's not today, but the future might involve them again. You'd design it for less grinding and more exp scales to the challenge, maybe with exponential exp gain as enemies get stronger and exponential exp requirements both, so that proper-for-leveling fights would take maybe thirty minutes of actually winning or less to gain a level. Add an unlosable progress mechanic beside the XP penalties- if you lose lots of XP on death, gear and gold are either safe, or "safe" [unless you're a PKer, who suffers penalties as a result.] If gold+gear is lost, XP is safe. Maybe a skill leveling system besides "improve skills by leveling up" that's safe from losses as well.

 

The era when MMOs had major penalties for death was the era when MMOs had smaller subscriber counts and less competition. Some players put up with them because there were no alternatives. Others just didn't bother playing MMOs at all. It was never actually popular, and there's basically no plausible worldbuilding that could lead to an MMO with harsh death penalties outperforming ones without unless it's phenomenally superior to the alternatives in other regards. There's also not many stories that benefit from this kind of contrived worldbuilding in the first place - just make it a niche MMO with "only" a few hundred thousand players and the problem disappears.