GNSmud

The currently used xp loss on death table may have originally been written for a much lower level limit. Currently it is graded, up to char level 16, then 1/2 xp from then on.
It is a big jump for a level 50 limit game. Perhaps something more gradual is in order.

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Levels  1-10     10%
levels 11-20     20%
levels 21-30     30%
levels 31-40     40%
levels 41-50     50%


I think your idea is smart but I will argue the numbers should be flip-flopped.

Using Mage as a baseline, let's first look at levels 1-10. You need a total of 350,000 XP. to hit level 10 as a mage or 35,000 average per level. The average monster kill xp reward for a someone leveling 1-10 is 5k. That means, on average, a death would cost the newbie 17.5k xp or an equivalent of 3.25 extra monsters to kill to make up the death.

Now let's compare a level 50 mage who requires 80,000,000 XP. The average XP of of killing a high level mob let's say is 125,000. That is 640 kills worth of XP. If the Mage died to a drain at level 50 they would be reduced to level 49 and would need close to 40,000,000 XP to level back up. This would equate to needing to kill 320 monsters to make up the death.

The XP death penalty on a high level character is way too high.

The poor man's fix? Just remove the -1 con punishment from the resurrect spell and perhaps replace it with the 100k cost adding another gold sink.

That actually sounds pretty fantastic. Resurrection is almost never used because of the con loss. If that was removed and it cost money it would be used all the time. Might not be too terrible to code either.

Yep, add me to those who like Scalamoosh's suggested change to rez. Just give me time to get a cleric with 100k to my corpse before it dissolves

The listed xp loss table was put into place some time in 2014.
The death loss is pretty harsh, and more harsh than most games.
It is also one of the few games that require a full on corpse retrieval to occur to regain your gear.
The gradation was to make it easier for people learning new classes.
I think that these points are some of the reasons why people keep returning to this type of mud.
It is hard. Much harder than most modern games.

Maxum wrote:The listed xp loss table was put into place some time in 2014.
The death loss is pretty harsh, and more harsh than most games.
It is also one of the few games that require a full on corpse retrieval to occur to regain your gear.
The gradation was to make it easier for people learning new classes.
I think that these points are some of the reasons why people keep returning to this type of mud.
It is hard. Much harder than most modern games.

My question is what is the design purpose of this? Is the intention merely difficulty?

The two means of Resurrection (via taking a xp hit or by taking a CON penalty) are very different. An xp hit is a very temporary measure, whether it represents 4 kills or 4000 it will eventually be overcome. These penalties also represent very different things. A permanent CON penalty is a strong deterrent to dying, as you can only die (CON score) times, while an xp penalty is a weaker one (you will be mildly inconvenienced by your death). Losing gear is another issue altogether.

Gear in MUDs is handled altogether differently than I am used to. We have to pay rent to keep it on logout, and it all stays with our corpse if we die. When we are resurrected we are left with nothing, and potentially a really difficult path back to our body. To top it off, lack of anything like secure storage means we can't even have backup gear to go get our original stuff. Most of the time spent in MMOs for me revolved around, ultimately, getting gear, and the same is true for D&D. I think gear loss is the worse of the penalties of death currently (though less harsh than a CON penalty).

I liked the way SWG handled death, frankly (at least while I was playing it, it may have changed at some point). You could "clone" yourself at a facility, paying a small fee, and then if you died, you appeared at that facility. Your equipment took some damage (10% durability I believe), but you could also insure that equipment for a fee (depending on the equipment's rarity) so that it would only take 1% damage instead. If you did not "clone" yourself, and died, you would appear at the nearest facility when you died, but you would have wounds in all your ability scores (think ability score damage in D&D) that would have to be healed by a medic.

This accomplished several things: 1. Those not prepared (not cloned and insured) had a hefty penalty to death (wounds ended up being around 1/4 to 1/8 of your max overall stats, and stacked with each death). 2. Those prepared still had a penalty upon death (item decay, and being transported to the cloning facility). Since cloning reset upon death, you had to be sure to reclone when leaving the facility, and reinsure (an overall currency sink).

There are also alternate ways to handle death. Maybe if you rez at town you suffer a "spirit weakening" that reduces your combat ability for a little bit, but you can also choose to "spirit walk" back to your body and resurrect there without the spirit weakening, but you rez at low hp and will have to rest, eat and drink.

IMHO, the way I would handle it, keeping difficulty highish, would be to allow you to keep what you have equipped (presumably the gear you use) but it takes a significant durability hit (understandably, some items have no durability, perhaps these are destroyed/left on the body?) except containers. Everything else stays on your corpse. Alternatively, mark a certain number of items as "bound" to you, that follow your spirit when you die. Perhaps you could also take temporary attribute damage that would have to be healed (with a gold cost, so we couldn't just have a heal bot that would mitigate all the challenge).