Dynamic Death Penalty Ideas

[EtherealVan]

Below is my attempt to make death meaningful and punishing without introducing too many exploits. I'd love to hear alterations/improvements.

 

Player Death -

    Place Grave/Corpse with items to gather. Player's max health is lowered on respawn until sleeps or fully healed.

Death Reason to Penalty - 

Starvation (Player can't have been in combat within a certain amount of time while starving) -

    Causes player damage in combat and tool effectiveness to be lowered until a full meal is eaten.

 

(For both of the following the effects can be lessened with higher tier armor/gear)

Death by Combat -

     Healing is slowed down until fully healed or sleep.

Death by falling damage -

    Movement speed is slowed until certain time passes or sleep. A potentially new splint item (made with 2 ropes and 2 sticks) can alleviate this issue until effect wears off (using splint will consume it)

Death by extreme temps - 

    Hypothermia -  Lowered tool and weapon effectiveness until player eats a warm meal and/or near a fire for a few in-game minutes. (Simulate weakness in hands)

    Hyperthermia - Slower movement until player takes a dip into water for a few in-game minutes. (Simulate cooling down the character)

 

Player grave/corpse additional idea: Perhaps if player doesn't retrieve corpse in a certain amount of time OR if there is a Temporal Storm when a grave/corpse is created and some time passes, the corpse is reanimated into a permanent enemy with all items. The player would have to fight that enemy to get the items back. However, that enemy will be using the best weapon that was left on the corpse. I'm thinking that it would maybe stay permanently until it's killed so the player can always get items back OR super punishing is that once the storm is over the enemy vanishes and the items are lost to force player to decide on whether they want to go through the trouble or not.

[LadyWYT]

Interesting ideas, but I think the current penalty to health is enough, as well as potential item loss and having to backtrack to your point of death. These ideas would be better as mods so they can be optional challenges for players that want such, but for the vanilla game there's too much potential for soft-locking the player out of the game due to getting stuck in a death loop. 

[EtherealVan]

Yeah, that soft lock is present for sure.
Mostly my current issue is I'm in winter and there is low food, because we were not good at getting prepared, but me and my buddy just don't eat and can just die and respawn in base. Seems too easy to get through winter that way with really no harsh punishment. I'm trying to think of a more meaningful punishment that doesn't ruin the fun especially for winter time, but that difficult without rewriting some systems to allow for more meaningful de-buffs.

Any ideas would be great!

 

Also, thank you for the response.

Edited February 4 by EtherealVan

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, EtherealVan said:

Mostly my current issue is I'm in winter and there is low food, because we were not good at getting prepared, but me and my buddy just don't eat and can just die and respawn in base. Seems too easy to get through winter that way with really no harsh punishment. I'm trying to think of a more meaningful punishment that doesn't ruin the fun especially for winter time, but that difficult without rewriting some systems to allow for more meaningful de-buffs.

Honestly, the starvation penalties are already enough, at least in my opinion. Do keep in mind that nutrition is halved on death; multiple deaths in a row will quickly wipe out any health bonuses received from nutrition. Temporal gear respawns are limited as well by default, so unless the player settled close to spawn or has a lot of gears at their disposal, it's not ideal to rack up multiple deaths within a short time. Additionally, the player will only respawn with their hunger bar half-filled; that's not really enough satiety to do anything productive other than acquire some food. There's also the potential to lose items if keep inventory isn't enabled.

Basically, same advice I gave recently in a different thread--without an established food supply, you're limiting yourself to a small area around spawn, and locking yourself out of most gameplay loops. In your particular situation, I recommend focusing on hunting. It will be tougher in winter, but hunting is your best chance at survival in this case. If there are mushrooms or berries to forage(you can find these in newly generated chunks) those can help as well, but hunting is what will keep you alive until the spring thaw. Once it's warm enough to start farming, I recommend making sure you have several shelves of sealed crocks stored in your cellar before next winter arrives.

[EtherealVan]

Ah we have the bed spawn (we are super newbs haha)...welp that's why it feels too easy in that aspect. Hmm, so if we turned that off we would just be spawning at world spawn over and over? That would be quite concerning. I'll have to convince him to have that turned off. Thanks for the info!!

[LadyWYT]

9 minutes ago, EtherealVan said:

Ah we have the bed spawn (we are super newbs haha)...welp that's why it feels too easy in that aspect. Hmm, so if we turned that off we would just be spawning at world spawn over and over? That would be quite concerning. I'll have to convince him to have that turned off. Thanks for the info!!

Oh yeah, for sure. I will also note that on the default Standard difficulty, the respawn radius from world spawn is also 50 blocks. You might consider increasing that radius to further discourage deliberate deaths, since there's a rather big difference between spawning in a small general area and potentially spawning a few hundred/thousand blocks away from anything familiar.

Other mods you might consider:

XSkills adds some progression to your character for doing various things in the game. The Survival skill tree is particularly powerful, but you only earn experience in that skill by staying alive. If you die, the progress toward the next level resets. https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/247

A mod that overhauls hunger can also encourage players to avoid death by starvation. Tasshroom's Bodyfat will allow players to build fat reserves that can be used to stave off starvation for a time; the fat burns faster than it's stored. A mod like Max's Simple Starvation implements the concept of bodyweight, and will apply bonuses and penalties depending on the player's diet. Expanded Stomach(shameless self-plug) is similar, in that hunger system is overhauled to be more complex; going without food will incur no benefits, eating too much can result in drawbacks over time, and the config can be tweaked for harsher penalties on death.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/tasshroombodyfat

https://mods.vintagestory.at/simplestarvation

https://mods.vintagestory.at/expandedstomach

[EtherealVan]

Can we add the Xskills at anytime?
Those sound good! I'll look into them.

Thanks again!

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, EtherealVan said:

Can we add the Xskills at anytime?
Those sound good! I'll look into them.

Thanks again!

You should be able to, yes. For the hunger overhaul mods, I would say those are more a case of pick one. 

I do recommend trying the mods out on a test world first though to make sure that you like them, before you go adding them to an established world. Likewise, it's a good idea to make a backup of an established world prior to making mod changes, just in case something goes wrong.

[programmer-S12]

Something that I often wonder about is a "partial-inventory-drop" option.

Instead of dropping your whole inventory, tools may be damaged instead of dropped, and a fraction of items in each item stack are dropped.

I wonder if something like that could make for more interesting gameplay.