More Interesting and Impactful Death Penalty

[gilt-kutabe]

The current death penalty is quite bland, and can be very annoying. The loss of nutrition levels is insignificant both early on, when you only have a few food groups to fill up on, and late game, when you likely have a lot of good stored up. The lowered satiation is also not very impactful - if you are early on in the game, food is quite plentiful (assuming you didn’t start in an extremely hostile climate). In the late game, this has almost no impact due to having good stored up. These two features are here to make the final part of the death penalty - dropping your items - more difficult to recover from. You have lowered HP from loss of nutrition, and half satiation to recover your items with. While the other two factors tend to be inconvenient at most, dropping your items can be extremely punishing (particularly if you die many thousands of blocks away) and is just plain annoying and frustrating. I think the game would benefit greatly if death was, if not exactly fun, more interesting while having a greater impact on gameplay. Assuming the current death mechanics are completely removed, here are some ideas.

- Loss of durability on equipment. Ideally, the amount could be customized in the world settings. Higher tier items (like iron and steel) would take less damage than lower tier items (like copper) as they take more time and effort to make, and are just more durable anyway. Equipment wouldn’t be able to be destroyed by this, though. Perhaps not being damaged if already below x% durability. Players would still need to be careful, and try to take only what they need into potentially fatal situations. They’d still need to expend resources to repair or replace equipment sooner than anticipated, but death wouldn’t be as much all or nothing depending on their ability to recover lost items. 
 

- Ability to retrieve lost items from traders. I don’t think this would be enough on its own, especially with Homo Sapiens being a thing. If the mechanic of dropping all items on death was kept, these items could be retrieved from a trader as well as from the death site, potentially for a price (gears or otherwise). This would prevent the loss of items due to location or distance, but would still leave the player vulnerable for a time. In the event of multiple deaths, the old inventory being held wouldn’t be replaced, just added on to. Potentially, the player would need to craft a unique item to trade for their inventory back. In HS, the player would have an option to activate said item independent of traders. This could be something like a charm carved out of bone - something simple to make, but still requiring some effort from the player. It could also be made in advance and stockpiled so as not to be a huge inconvenience. However, this could also fall under ‘annoying’ rather than interesting.

 

- I think the current loss of nutrition could be interesting, and is in theme with being weakened by death, but I don’t think it is significant enough on its own. It works with the other penalties currently in place, but I think it needs to be refocused from simply making it harder to grab your corpse. I just don’t have any ideas that complement it other than adding it on top of other penalties.

Edited December 14, 2024 by gilt-kutabe

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

The loss of nutrition levels is insignificant both early on, when you only have a few food groups to fill up on, and late game, when you likely have a lot of good stored up. The lowered satiation is also not very impactful - if you are early on in the game, food is quite plentiful (assuming you didn’t start in an extremely hostile climate). In the late game, this has almost no impact due to having good stored up.

Disagree here. I used to know someone in the other block game who, instead of eating food to replenish stamina, would just kill his character to reset the stamina meter instead. As a result, he never had to set up any kind of food source either. I'm pretty sure this is one of the main reasons that there is both a nutrition and stamina penalty in Vintage Story; it's a much more challenging game, and resetting the stamina meter every time one dies doesn't really encourage securing good food sources.

As for the health penalty...a few extra hitpoints can sometimes be the difference between life and death, especially early on when the player lacks good equipment. The main idea is to avoid death in the first place, even with the standard unlimited lives, and penalizing the nutrition bonuses on death helps prevent the player from using that as a convenient way to heal to full health. As for restoring lost nutrition--no, it's not terribly hard, but nutrition bonuses can only be earned by eating food when you're hungry, so it does take some time to fill the bars again. Especially after multiple deaths in a row.

2 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

These two features are here to make the final part of the death penalty - dropping your items - more difficult to recover from. You have lowered HP from loss of nutrition, and half satiation to recover your items with. While the other two factors tend to be inconvenient at most, dropping your items can be extremely punishing (particularly if you die many thousands of blocks away) and is just plain annoying and frustrating. I think the game would benefit greatly if death was, if not exactly fun, more interesting while having a greater impact on gameplay. Assuming the current death mechanics are completely removed, here are some ideas.

There is a game rule to keep inventory on death, which can be enabled or disabled at any time. Aside from that, potential loss of items is a very good incentive to avoid dying to begin with. I will also note that not all items are lost either; clothing and armor is retained on death, though it suffers a penalty to remaining durability.

If you're going far afield, it's a good idea to make sure you're properly geared for the outing by equipping armor, packing bandages, or even bringing along a temporal gear to reset your spawn if you expect to be doing something very dangerous(use wisely!) Aside from that, you can also craft backup equipment, if you have the resources, and for a late game option you can also utilize the terminus teleporter in order to teleport to your last point of death.

2 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

- Loss of durability on equipment. Ideally, the amount could be customized in the world settings. Higher tier items (like iron and steel) would take less damage than lower tier items (like copper) as they take more time and effort to make, and are just more durable anyway. Equipment wouldn’t be able to be destroyed by this, though. Perhaps not being damaged if already below x% durability. Players would still need to be careful, and try to take only what they need into potentially fatal situations. They’d still need to expend resources to repair or replace equipment sooner than anticipated, but death wouldn’t be as much all or nothing depending on their ability to recover lost items. 

As I mentioned previously, this is already a feature for clothing and armor. Those stay with you through death, though they will take damage should you die. I don't think applying the same rules to all items though would discourage players from dying; if anything it would do the opposite. For those who really don't want to risk losing their stuff, "keep inventory on death" is already an option. I don't like losing my stuff either, but personally I play with the "keep inventory" rule turned off, as I've found playing with it turned on causes me to be a lot more reckless with my gameplay.

2 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

- Ability to retrieve lost items from traders. I don’t think this would be enough on its own, especially with Homo Sapiens being a thing. If the mechanic of dropping all items on death was kept, these items could be retrieved from a trader as well as from the death site, potentially for a price (gears or otherwise). This would prevent the loss of items due to location or distance, but would still leave the player vulnerable for a time. In the event of multiple deaths, the old inventory being held wouldn’t be replaced, just added on to. Potentially, the player would need to craft a unique item to trade for their inventory back. In HS, the player would have an option to activate said item independent of traders. This could be something like a charm carved out of bone - something simple to make, but still requiring some effort from the player. It could also be made in advance and stockpiled so as not to be a huge inconvenience. However, this could also fall under ‘annoying’ rather than interesting.

I'll make a counter-offer: instead of buying stuff back from traders, have a tool/weapon upgrade utilizing Jonas tech, that allows that item to remain on your person should you die. The main drawback though is that the item will still eventually break, and there's currently no way for players to repair tools and weapons themselves(although there is a repair method in the game). Now you could add an "unbreakable" functionality with that upgrade, and simply require the player to recharge the item with a temporal gear to restore its function once all durability has been exhausted. However, I'm not really a fan of that idea, as I'm not really sure it fits with the overall theme of the game.

2 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

- I think the current loss of nutrition could be interesting, and is in theme with being weakened by death, but I don’t think it is significant enough on its own. It works with the other penalties currently in place, but I think it needs to be refocused from simply making it harder to grab your corpse. I just don’t have any ideas that complement it other than adding it on top of other penalties.

I think it's fine as-is. Late game it's not really much of a factor, since as you noted earlier, the player has their food supply well taken care of. However, I would also argue that a lot of things that were challenging in the early game aren't much of a challenge in the late game, provided that one doesn't get complacent. And as you've noted here, the nutrition penalty isn't much of a drawback by itself, but when combined with the other factors such as stamina and item loss, it becomes a bigger setback. It can be punishing, yes, but the idea is to plan ahead and avoid situations that could lead to dealing with those consequences, if you can.

[Thorfinn]

The nutrition bonus is much more important in Wilderness., It's pretty quick to get at least the first 10 bonus HP, doubling your HP. You have to be a good measure into your third nutrition bar to survive two wolf bites, but only halfway through the first in Standard. With all 4 easily filled bars mostly filled a Standard character survives 3 bites, while it is never possible for Wilderness.

Similarly, a Standard character can survive a brown bear attack straight out of the box, and will ultimately have the HP to survive 2, whole the Wilderness player needs one bar almost filled to survive one attack, and will never have enough HP to survive 2.

[gilt-kutabe]

I should probably clarify: Nutritional values and satiation as death punishments weren't the point of this suggestion. The point was that dropping items on death is not interesting, and is more frustrating than anything. Nutrition and satiation aren't problems on their own, but greatly exacerbate the difficulty in retrieving dropped items (and aren't enough on their own, as important as they are). Yes, it serves a purpose in Wilderness, which is centered around not immediately getting your stuff back and needing to rebuild. Eventually, you have enough infrastructure that you can find where you are. In most games, you make a mistake and you learn from it, and you suffer some penalty. Usually loosing easily replaceable, non-unique items, like currency. Here, you have the potential to lose your items (that you spent a fair amount of time on) to an enemy you couldn't beat at full strength, or simply falling down a pit. It punishes reckless play harshly, but catches up more experimental play as well. Leaving all your gear at home and running into a cave with just your clothes to explore shouldn't be so much less punishing potentially in case of death than gearing up as intended. And in the end, you're likely going back in with little more than your clothes to retrieve your items due to inventory space and not wanting to lose more items. It shouldn't be so all or nothing. Yeah, you're more likely to be able to get your items back than not, but in the event you don't, you've lost a whole lot of items you put a lot of time into making. Death doesn't need to be fun, but leaving room for the player to experiment or to be able to focus on fixing what they did wrong rather than getting their stuff back would make it a smoother experience. Whenever I die, it's always: how far away was it, and can I replace the items I dropped, or do I have to run for it? Will it be dark before I get there? If I bring food or extra spears, will I have enough room for the items I dropped? There's no: this is what I did wrong, this is how I'm going to recover from it, this is what I'm going to do next time, at least until much later. There are so many more options to make death something more engaging, I think, than dropping items.

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

Here, you have the potential to lose your items (that you spent a fair amount of time on) to an enemy you couldn't beat at full strength, or simply falling down a pit. It punishes reckless play harshly, but catches up more experimental play as well. Leaving all your gear at home and running into a cave with just your clothes to explore shouldn't be so much less punishing potentially in case of death than gearing up as intended. And in the end, you're likely going back in with little more than your clothes to retrieve your items due to inventory space and not wanting to lose more items.

As I said before, you keep any clothing items on death--that includes armor. So you really shouldn't be running into caves unarmored if you died in one, unless you ventured in unarmored to begin with(which really isn't a good idea). I do agree though, it does punish reckless play, as it should. In some cases it punishes experimental play as well, but I would argue that it depends on what kind of experimenting you're doing too. I'd also point out that experimentation also usually carries additional risks(risks of the unknown, if nothing else), which the player will need to take into account before they dive into whatever they're wanting to test.

8 hours ago, gilt-kutabe said:

It shouldn't be so all or nothing. Yeah, you're more likely to be able to get your items back than not, but in the event you don't, you've lost a whole lot of items you put a lot of time into making. Death doesn't need to be fun, but leaving room for the player to experiment or to be able to focus on fixing what they did wrong rather than getting their stuff back would make it a smoother experience. Whenever I die, it's always: how far away was it, and can I replace the items I dropped, or do I have to run for it? Will it be dark before I get there? If I bring food or extra spears, will I have enough room for the items I dropped? There's no: this is what I did wrong, this is how I'm going to recover from it, this is what I'm going to do next time, at least until much later. There are so many more options to make death something more engaging, I think, than dropping items.

Which is why it's good to be cautious when doing risky things, and consider resetting your spawn if far from home. And while it's true that other games don't have potentially lost items as a death penalty, those games also aren't trying to do the same things Vintage Story is and the death mechanics in them typically feels ignorable.

One alternate mechanic that I've seen to losing items, that operates more on "currency" if you will...the way World of Warcraft handles(or used to handle, anyway) death. If you ran back to your corpse, you could respawn at that location with a sliver of health, no penalty except lose of some equipment durability. If you died in a spot that you couldn't escape from, for whatever reason, then you could revive for free at the graveyard(with equipment durability loss)...but suffer a steep one-hour penalty to health and damage, which generally left you twiddling your thumbs until it wore off.

I don't think that kind of mechanic really fits in Vintage Story, both for lore reasons, and that it doesn't really make dying any less frustrating. Sure, you keep your stuff, but you're still going to potentially need to use more time returning to your corpse(perhaps multiple times), or waiting around for a debuff to wear off before you can think about doing anything other than basic chores around your base. The best option, in my opinion, is what the game already gives us to deal with item loss on death--turn "keep inventory on death" to true, which you can do at any time in a singleplayer world. That way you keep your stuff when you die, and the hardest penalty you'll have to deal with is just backtracking to your point of death should you want to continue whatever it was you were doing.

[Maripop]

After seeing the latest update video, i feel like it could be interesting being sent to the shadow realm and having to escape.
I know its not an exceptionally hard punishment since dying wouldn't do much since you're already dead, but no matter what setting you're on the punishment boils down to your time no matter the outcome.
I do like the idea of having merchants steal your items to sell back to you, however only if you die near one.