limit respawns with "lives"

[n00m]

On creation, a character gets a random number of lives.  This is how many times the character can respawn before they are considered permadead unless raised.

All too often I find people dont really let characters die naturally, they just respawn after death then grow tired of the concept and instead of retiring it in game they stop playing it entirely.

I find this bothersome and would welcome some sort of hard limit to the number of times people can (ab)use respawning characters.

Yes it sucks to loose your character but death is a part of life and when I have died recently I find people are amazed when I refuse to respawn and ask for a raise or at least an attempt at one.

After dying Ive yet to meet anyone who can tell me with tells how much it costs even if they were to raise my corpse.  Not that I have to get a raise even, I dont mind staying dead, but noone even knows!

All  I  know is it used to be under a K from Tobar but now its more probably.  Still, does noone except high level looted out faction PCs really have enough money and or knowledge and patience for raises?  

The permadeath nature of the Underdark PCs who survived sounded great to me, I was actualy hoping the whole server would turn that way come EFUA.

Come on death can be fun!  

As a side note, perhapse not every quest could have this but certain ones could.  Or maybe a random chance that this time, the Troglodytes mean buisness, and arnt just "knocking people out" but are out for blood, removing heads and asking questions later.  A quest could have a 50% chance of being respawnless or something similar.

[Zymnarkmar]

I like this idea ALOT!  Although I think it should be a set number like 5 or 10.  Seems to fit the awesome hardcore EFU:A setting nicely. Something like...

IN RIGHT TEXT WINDOW:

[  has already respawned 5 times.  You can progress no further at this time. From this point forward you must be raised or reincarnated by other means.]

This would allow for alot more RP opportunities and make dying all the more real. (YES I know the XP loss sucks enough as it is, but...)

[Vlaid]

No thanks. It seems silly to set a hard limit on how long a character may be played. Random perma deaths on quests isn't all that fun, and most of the time just leads to "yay extra loot".

The server death system is great because it caters to aspects of being very difficult, and not ending characters due to lag/random occurence by NPC's.

Just my take, but I would be extremely against setting a hard limit on the number of times you can "die" to NPC's. I like how it plays more like near death experiences personally.

[n00m]

Thats my issue though, no one ever actually dies.  The fantastically rare "near death experience" is what always happens while questing.

Every time!  Unless for some reason its a PC raming the spear through your head instead of an orc.

I mean I know people put a lot of time into concepts and lag is a bitch, but every time?

[Vlaid]

I believe you hold a belief that death on random quests should end PC's that most would not share.

Sorry, I don't want to have to think up a new concept, persona, and backstory everytime I randomly get crit for 50 on a quest. Such deaths are not meaningful, and, in my opinion, scripting it so you are forced to retire your PC under such circumstances is far from adding much to the server.

Not everyone is a quest smashing monster powerhouse. It only punishes people who already struggle.

[Luke Danger]

Highly against, for the same reasons as Vlaid.

[Zymnarkmar]

Well, I still think the idea of getting a character raised is awesome for RP and if having to be raised was the norm, awesome RP could ensue.  It would make quests all the more harrowing!  PCs would have to be even more careful or quest in larger numbers and include more players.  But why get raised when you can just re-spawn an re-spam low lvl quests and try to max out those HP rolls.  I'm not saying I'm not guilty of this, I'm just sayin'...

[Raposa_Fox]

Maybe you could have an option when creating a character, if you wanna go for the limited times respawn, which could be con modifier x5, for instance. Then if you choose the limited you get a small (very small) perk. (Just brainstorming ...)

[Caddies]

If DMs put this in everyone would have a massive cry about it after it got implemented.

[ExileStrife]

This has historically been a heated issue among the DMs.  :(

I don't think a set, fixed limit would be good.  However, I'm personally a supporter of some type of more 'significant' death system to thwart those characters who are continually dieing and respawning without even taking a breath.

My wish is for some sort of "trauma-like" system.  For instance, imagine starting from a clean-slate and it's your first death.  You can respawn immediately, but it adds some sort of internal "trauma" to the character that takes time to fade away.  If they immediately die again (say like within a day) and try to respawn again, they are not able to.  In order to respawn now, you'd have to wait a certain amount of time, related to the amount of trauma you had when you died, AND, while you're waiting, the original trauma amount is not going down and will increase once again if you respawn (making it so you'd have to wait even longer if you die again in a short period of time).  You can always get a raise, and the raise might even take your trauma away.  Obviously, there could be some tweaks here and there, but that's my general suggestion that I stand for.

I really do think this is a best-of-both-worlds suggestion, where it puts a little more meaning in death, but doesn't stop a character from coming back to life before they've played out their story.

[Underbard]

A set amount as proposed by Zymnarkmar might be a good change.  It sets no actual limit on how long a PC can be played and there would be nothing random about it.  As far as  how long a PC is played, with a set number of respawns, perhaps more people would consider the option of RP over power questing?