Heres a few quick features on the game to help yolu understand where I'm coming from:

Sandbox

Non-combat based

RPG

Large magic presense in game world

Gods and Deity system(granting gifts and bonuses in exchange for worship)

Not a traditional leveling system

Player focus more on "family unit" and "family legacy" as opposed to single character

Anywho, death. Lets say you're strolling along a long way from home when you happen upon a bear cave. Well lots of fire later, you conclude it was not in fact a bear cave, but a dragon nest. But seeing as you're dead, there's not much you can do about that dragon. Right? Well, I have a few ideas on how to treat death to simutaniously punish and reward them depending on their goals.

Upon death, you get transported to another world, it almost mirrors the main one, but with a few differences. The way you view the death world depends on the main deity that you follow, and those that follow other deities who are also dead would appear hazy and distant to you, like a shadow. The only beings you would meet here are all dead.

From the spot where you died, there is a very clear and safe path(though not straight, more windy) leading to the deity's closest alter where you can be resurrected. However this death world is robust. There are many spirits here that can offer you items and abilities not usually found in the normal world. Some items may even just be lying around *just* off the beaten path. Maybe there is a spirit nearby that can help you get revenge on that dragon... in exchange for a price that is. However dying here would mean permanant death.

Not to worry though! If you've had a kid at some point, your deity would come to them and transfer your knowledge to them in exchange for your service to them, but not your on-hand belongings which can now be lost either in the death world or on your body dpending on the deity. Children would need to level up abilities, but would have an easier time doing so. Leveling in this game is closer to say, raising your strength skill to be able to pick up and swing the sword the way you know it should be done. Leveling the body to it's "limit" would only take 20hs or so, so a casual player a month or so to do and a hardcore player a weekend. Just enough to hurt, not enough to discourage play. The kid would also get bonuses depending on the life and death of the character both in skills, and from NPC's(hey I knew your father, great man, have this free thing on me).

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My hope is that a system like this would cause death to be annoying enough to make those far from home be careful about their explorations, but interesting enough to make the risk of "permadeath" worth it. As well as add an entirely new element to the game, which would fit well into the world if done well.

My worry is that people will form too close of an attachment to their characters and not risk the exploration, though i am trying to make the focus less on the individual character you main, but on the family as a whole. (all of your "alts" can be in the same family, stays at home as NPC's when not being played and semi-controlable(hey brother, take these supplies, can you make X for me?). I know people are going to have multiple characters, and I want to incorporate that somehow into the main game to help the idea of letting go of a character to permadeath.

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Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Does this seem doable with some work?

How about removing the permanent but instead the time you spend in death world is based upon the amount of possessions you want to give to your diety when you die.

In ancient egypt the dead went to the afterlife with their possessions so they believed and in ancient Greece they would place coins on the eyes of the dead as payment for passage to the afterlife.

This is similar, you make payment for resurrection, and if you die in death world you could be carrying near nothing making your stay a very long one indeed... :)

Based on what I've heard, if you don't want the player to get attached to something, you should either give them more of that object, make it less customizable, or make.it easy to replace. I think if you encouraged players (offered some sort of bonus) to create a sizable initial pool of characters with a little less customization than they're used to, it would send the message.

Rogue legacy did something similar though they made the iteration of a new family member instanateous upon death with minimal customization. And allowed only 1 character at a time (to my knowledge).

I would reference Minecraft for this; it's kinda special when you get that first diamond pick in thr game - you never forget it at home. But then later when you have 20 of the things or a full stack of diamonds lying around, you're willing to peak aroundthat corner at 1 heart to see if that was indeed a creeper you saw.

I like the idea of going to a death plane, which has been done several times before - infact, one of the very first MORPGs had one, though very limited from what they originally wanted. They originally wanted you to get teleported into hell and have fight your way back out, with hell being a labyrinth maze, but I think the final result was much much smaller. (I haven't played the game myself).

I like that, instead of having a whole different area, you use the same world, but make it a shadow-version of itself. That'd save alot on content-creation - a few special shaders, but using the exact same geometry, maybe toggle some gates so you are forced to take different routes (and have access to some special areas) when in the shadow realm.

I think it also opens up some potential for some fun stuff: Imagine it actually was a bear cave. There's five bears, and you kill three of them before the other two maul you. Okay great, so now you are in the shadow realm and need to get out of the cave and back to a gateway to the living realm, so you start exiting the cave but the three bears you just killed are now also in the shadow realm.

Or, after killing a boss, several weeks later you get killed during a dungeon raid and as you're walking through the shadow realm back to an exit, you find that boss sitting there (his shadow-version anyway), waiting for you, waiting for revenge, and this time you're on your own bud - except it's not as strong as it was last-time. Since this is an unasked for and unexpected surprise challenge, it shouldn't actually be too challenging, existing more for the experience than the challenge. (Random game-design thought I just had: Have experiences hunt out players, but let players hunt for challenges on their own schedule).

I think there should be some other odd gameplay tweaks to the shadow realm. Maybe make everything move slightly slower, as if moving through water, but not too annoyingly slow (just ~0.9 of the normal speed) with a slight motion blur to exaggerate it, weird sound modifications as if hearing everything from a distance even when they are right infront of you, maybe slightly less gravity so you can jump higher (accessing new areas while in the shadow realm), and some other more combat-specific changes.

There should be dungeons only accessible in the shadow realm. And some more advanced dungeons would require players to have friends going simultaneously through the shadow version of that dungeon, while they're going through the regular version, affecting things across both realms, and fighting some bosses that simultaneously exist in both planes (necromancers or giant skeletons or wraiths or something else that makes thematic sense with the living but also dead. Or just ignore it, and leave it to fridgelogic) - it'd make for interesting guild-raids if you have to split your guild ahead-of-time into two separate parties in separate realms/dimensions/planes-of-existence.

I'd cut out the permadeath stuff though, unless a player deliberately is playing with Permadeath enabled at account creation, after having already maxed leveled at least one character. The biggest killer in MMOs, in my limited experience, is lag. Permadeath due to lag equals ragequit. Unless your entire game is designed around permadeath, I'd avoid it.

Instead, I'd do some other costly, but limited, punishment. One of your items gets destroyed, or your stats all take a -1 hit (up to a max of -5) that costs you alot of gold at a temple to undo. (But then I guess the question is, why do you want a punishment for death, especially when death isn't always directly the player's fault? Do we want players to take death seriously, simple because "they should!" because death is serious in real-life, or is there some game-design reason why players should be punished for failures? But that's a huge topic for another time, and I'm honestly not sure where I stand on that myself - I also feel death should have consequences, but I'm not sure why, or how much, so it definitely needs more thought on my part)

Unless the multiple different deities has some other gameplay-related benefit, I'd just have stonehenge-like "death gates" in the real-world that nobody can enter (they are exit-only one-way gates), but in the shadow realm players can enter them to return to the living world. And I'd have, in the shadow realm only, big bursts of energy come out of the gates and reach to the skies with light and life, so players can visually see and spot the nearest locations.

Because players occasionally want to enter the shadow realm (for specific dungeons, items, special bosses (bone dragon?), or whatever), some type of magi class could force open the death gates for players wanting to enter without committing suicide.

The shadow realm could even be a form of quick-travel: instead of moving slower in the shadow realm, the player could move significantly faster (which would also explain the jumping higher), so players could enter one death gate, and run lightning fast to another death gate, travelling several miles in a very quick time.