Introductory Rant:There are many ways to structure the server, many ways to handle elements in play that may cater to a side of the playerside, and shun the other. There's no true system that is perfect and fully inclussive, there are better mechanics, there are worse.
The Thing:PvP as a whole is a basic of the game. It is a violent expression of conflict. That by itself is fine. However, the current set of tools that Arelith presents seems to make it too easy to take a lazy, easy route to conclude RP, to put a dot to a paragraph that could have been more. Killbashing is a mechanic that has no true use in Arelith, and I've never seen applied in any meaningful way, not in PvP, nor in PvE.
I've said it too many times already: To bash a corpse is a wasted opportunity, and the more I play in Arelith, the more I wondered, "is this really a necessary function? What good is it for?", and beyond simply making sure somebody stays down in PvP, I don't really have any answer myself.
Currently, when you bash a player you are forcing a period on the bench on that character. You are giving them a slight XP cost, 20 minutes in the Fugue, and a number of hours depending their level of IC crippling. I do not think that this mechanic enforces correctly the "meaning" of death. I don't think that any mechanic may ever replace the willingness of the players to give true meaning to the death in a narrative standpoint, that is truly what most of us are here for.
HOWEVER:
I think that we can do is to better organize our mechanics in order to allow more versatility, to offer options that could potentially replace simply killing a character, and facing the awkward that is waving to the same character 20 minutes later. I think that it is important to always have options.
The Suggestions:Now, in order:
Dying no longer takes you to the Fugue, but instead, you simply remain at -10 HP "dead" on the spot where you died. This allows you to:RP your dying moments, last words, or flatly dead character.
Remain part of the game even when you are done.
From here, after a few minutes, you may -expire in order for your soul to abandon entirely your body and go to the Fugue.
Remove killbashing. It's no longer an option, flatly. No more of that, no more waving skulls and showing them to the respawned character later, no more selling corpses and putting them in display in the shops. You may carry dead characters. Introducing to the modules craftable/lootable soul binds, you can take the bodies of fallen PCs in wisp shape and carry them as Lassoed creatures. The wisped character may use a command similar to -unrelent to refuse to be bound and expire, but cannot free themselves once bound. The character holding the bond may conclude it at any time to have the dead PC return to the normal shape. You may apply Damage to the dead character, but doing so also starts a slow auto-resurrection timer. Damage is a tailored mechanical penalty that you can choose to inflict on the character based on your class, and the dead character classes. For example:You can inflict "Torn Spellbook" to a Wizard, and said wizard would be unable to cast level 7+ spells and lose half spell slots. If you are a Shadowdancer, you may do something like "Steal Shadow" and block the character from entering the Shadowplane, and take 1d6 damage every tick. If you are a hexer-sort-of-mage, you may "Curse" to make the character say something 5 IG hours. Wild Mages could impose a "Wild magic curse", etc, etc. Depending your PvP death counter, the penalties may escalate higher.
A Damaged character will suffer the impairement for twice as long as the normal respawn penalties would have, BUT they may seek a specific kind of character Other than themselves that may address and mend the Damage. A monk could help a divine character with something like "Severed Divine Connection" to refocus. A wizard could seek another character with higher spellcraft to help them repair their damaged book, priests and character with extremely high Heal score may put their backward arm back in place. I think that these options, inspired after Durvayas' post, allow for a more interesting range of options of consequences that may be applied beyond simply killing a character. This is the in-between ground of true, roleplayed consequence, and plain respawning, that is just a narrative final dot that doesn't lead to more.
The concept and basic idea behind what Consequence and Damage stands for, is to always allow a narrative dynamic, a back and forth in the conflict. You aren't just killing somebody and giving them a cooldown timer, you are propagating RP and inviting the character to seek other characters that may assist them IF THEY WANT TO.
Could anything of this even work for Arelith? Would it work for you?
