investigation of the impact of victory

Previously, we began our investigation of the impact of victory (and defeat) in gaming. When a player is victorious in battle, the positive benefits are practical and expected: greater wealth, experience, and reputation. This realism, however, does not extend to the faction that actually bestowed the quest. Any gains that the quest giver receives are transitory, if they occur at all.
But what happens when a player is killed? Obviously, the first issue is what to do with the body. This simple dilemma has led to widespread debate and a variety of solutions. In early games like AC, you were propelled back to a "Lifestone" with a 5% "vitae" skill penalty while a handful of your best items were left behind on the corpse. In PvP situations, that corpse was lootable by your killer. This dynamic led to the interesting phenomena of players carrying a large number of very expensive but very light and worthless items in their packs so those would drop instead of their prized armor and weapons. But even these "drop items" couldn't always prevent the random loss of particular valuables. Furthermore, though the drop items aren't intrinsically valuable, they do cost money and time to gather. Few players care to leave them needlessly behind. This led to the inevitable corpse recovery mission which, while often prone to occur at the most inopportune moments, nevertheless provided me with some of the most enjoyable challenges of the game. But alas, I do recall the loss of several suits of armor, such as one decomposed in the acid pits of the Halls of Metos.
Recognizing the problems with corpse recovery, especially in heavily guarded and more heavily lagged areas, later games like WoW streamlined their death systems. Instead of items dropping with your corpse, your "soul" (and curiously all of its equipment) separate from the body to reappear at the nearest graveyard. From there, the choice is either to be resurrected at the cost of severe item degradation or to trek back as a disembodied spirit to site of your ultimate demise and return to life at about half health. Though this is often an onerous run, you don't lose all the work you put in fighting to get to where you died (assuming you aren't swarmed as soon as you resuscitate).
More recently, LOTRO evolved this method still further by launching you (in the same old style) to their newest iteration of the lifestone, a stone circle. The only penalty suffered is a heavy dose of dread (temporary reduction in health) and the need to fight back to where you were (assuming you want to continue whatever adventure you were on). All in all, I can't help but wonder if the concept of dying has been nerfed so far as to make it rather absurd. While it is easy to carry on from such a fatal disaster (and I'm a big proponent of not having my game time consumed by tedium), the repercussions are so fleeting as to make the occurrence laughable.
Regardless of the specific death penalties, games for the most part do adhere to the concept that it is the reverse of player victory. Instead of new equipment being gained, the old gear is either lost or degraded. The battleground is lost (remember Clausewitz's second definition of triumph), either temporarily in the case of WoW or permanently in systems like AC and LOTRO. The only aspect not mimicked is the loss of experience which most gamers (myself included) would consider too severe. Of these examples, AC probably came the closest to employing experience "loss" successfully with their vitae penalties that could only be worked off through experience gain.


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