People are always complaining about various forms of conflict: village influence (although not so much anymore) and Faethorn being the primary ones right now, perhaps a little Nil/Celestia. It seems like the primary problem with these endeavors is that there is no way to inflict lasting punishment on the other person. If you kill someone, they usually just pop back to life a second or two later, at the very worst they have to wait maybe 7 minutes to pray and then re-def. (Note that I don't know how long it takes to pray. That's just a guess.)

What if there was something you could do that would take people out of commission for an extended period of time? What if, upon death, you actually stayed dead for a substantial length of time. Perhaps you couldn't log back into the game for 12 hours. Maybe we could have some form of hostage taking, where you could knock people out, frisk them for spores, and throw them into a dungeon cell. They would be held pending a length of time/money or until someone came and killed the guards.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a while, but I can't figure out exactly how to make it work. I understand that the admin will almost certainly never implement anything like this, if only because of the sheer amount of whining people would do on the forums. Just imagine people having 12 hours with nothing to do but scamper about and flame. On the other hand, consider it an intellectual excercise. How could we do this so that defeat in combat actually means something without completely killing any enjoyment whatsoever?

Edit: Added emphasis for the people that don't like to read longish posts.

Um ..no

I'd get so entirely bored I'd never leave Glomdoring again. Death on Imperian is bad enough.

It probably goes without saying that I would love the hostage idea.. *inno*

But not all of us are quite as perverted, dear.

*ducks*

more bad requests for changes that make no sense and have no justification

just ask kaervas or eiru or someone else with a high level how much it hurts them to have to pray, or even die with vitae up? Its a damn pain in the ass.

Death is fine, no changes needed at all.

I also disagree on the 'lasting punishment' of individuals. It's just ASKING for ways to grief.

Now what I WOULD like to see are ways to perform lasting punishment upon orginazations: make it possible to 'permanently' (of course quests/events could change it) weaken/destroy/take over/expand/blowupwithanff7stylemeteor a nation. Of course, not by one quick strike, but once everyone is saying "yup, they are toast" then toast they should be. Is it true that I heard that Mag softened up on it's attacks on Celest because they felt the attacks didn't do anything long term? BLAH!

Yes, it's probably hated by all, but I'll still advertize it.

PLus nerfing death would screw of vitae and li.. no, I won't say the word, lest I spawn another three thousand threads.

Stop posting.

At least on this subject. Go play Imperian for a little while, die there a few times, and come back and tell us you want death to be anymore than it already is.

yeah.. that death thing is why I stopped playing Imperian. Drove me freaking nuts.

I prefer the death thing there better than the death thing here. (Except that you lose the experience even if you get rezzed, which is highly lame. But the point is that you can get out in like 30 seconds flat.)

Ah, but you still have the death scene first, which takes just about as long.

It takes like a minute, not the 5 the praying sequence seems to take.

Ahh, it's bad enough. And you STILL have to sit with Charon for a bit. It takes just as long and a bit more effort.

Point one, this is not really a request for changes. I specifically said that this was just an idea that I had been noodling for quite some time, and was wondering if it was possible to create something like this without making the entire population of Lusternia come to my house to lynch me. If we could somehow come up with a brilliant solution, then maybe we could ask the administration to review it, but that isn't going to happen so it doesn't matter. Again, this is not a request for a change, it's an idea.

Point two, it did indeed have justification. Firstly, as an idea for an addition it doesn't necessarily require justification beyond "this might be cool." Granted it would increase the likelihood of getting the idea implemented, but it isn't needed; and at worst you don't need to read the thread.

Secondly, the reasoning behind my suggestion was that there is no way to actually prevent someone from doing something. Killing someone usually only deters them for a few seconds. The longest it can take is ~6-7 minutes before they come back.

Point three, I understand that the experience loss acts as a deterent and is severe at high levels. I furthermore acknowledge that it can take hours of bashing to make up the lost experience. However these hours occur after the raid is over, so it doesn't do much in terms of the actual event.

Point four, my idea doesn't even need to be for death. A lot of people are saying that Imperian's death is bad (I have played it and I far prefered their death sequence to ours) and thus so is this idea. But what if it was just one archetype and they could only do it on a highway?

Now back to the original topic, I know that in terms of actually putting this in the game it is a bad idea. I understand. I'm just wondering if hypothetically speaking anyone finds the idea even slightly intriguing.

In Imperian the Idras have the ability to take hostages. Does anyone know how this works and how it effects the game?

Instead of thinking about increasing the strength of death, try more along the lines of taking hostages or imprisoning people.

Something more what I was think of looked like this. Two or three of the Assassin archetype (for lack of a better name) lurk on the highway and wait for the target. Together they kill him and carve a mark onto his forhead. The mark binds his soul to his body, so the Fates can not place him into a new one. They check his body for spores and hermit cards and then quickly rush off to the friendly Magnagoran dungeon, where they give his body to the jail keeper. The keeper puts his body into a cell a locks the door. After he finishes praying for salvation, the poor sap returns to his body that is still located in the dungeon, where he must remain for a day or his buddies come along, kill the keeper, and unlock the door.

Such as how Nejii turned me into a toad during the stewartsville influencing, which since he hadn't been able to kill me (though he was extremely close), and my little toad self hopped off I was unable to do anything but hop around and ribbit for a fair bit before I returned to my normal self sans defenses?

But besides more things along those lines keeping people out of action for a bit, I personally don't think there needs to be anything worse for death then we have. And anything that would take someone out of the game for 12 hours *especially* if thats otherworldly hours, is overkill.

I think the OP has a valid point that is lost in the flurry of people reacting in near-panic to the "make death worse!" bit. I don't think this has to even be about making it worse, just different. Something that's more interesting and more of a disincentive, while at the same time perhaps being less of a "punishment".

Most people have no ability whatsoever to influence anyone else to do or not do anything, at all. If someone is raiding too much, or draining your pet node, or whatever else, you just can't stop them. Because what can you do? In 95%+ of cases, you have a grand total of 1 option: kill them (or get some friends to kill them, if you're not up to the task).

But killing them does almost nothing to act as a disincentive to anything. Most people will recover from the XP loss in no time, particularly since more than half of the kills will have conglutinate-or-less XP losses, between lich, vitae, conglutinate, resurgem, resurrect, etc. By and large, the threat of being killed is easily overwhelmed by the anger of having been killed, so killing someone will almost always make them do whatever it is even more, and probably spend some time making you miserable on the side.

Net result: an endless spiral of increasing hostility, just like we so often see.

Maybe it'd be better if PK deaths caused an entirely different kind of penalty from other kinds of deaths. There's no reason they have to be the same or even related. Make PK deaths have some impact that is more interesting to roleplay and more of a disincentive to the victim. Also make it give no benefit to the killer; better yet, make it cost the killer something as well.

I'd present examples of the kinds of penalties that'd make sense here, and achieve the desired effect -- making it so killing someone is a serious matter for both parties -- but people would latch onto the examples and not the idea. And besides, this is all pie-in-the-sky anyway. The IRE model of PK is way too ingrained to be changed, and I have no delusions about the esteem in which my ideas are held anyway. Better to keep this a theoretical discussion for the enjoyment of the discussion, because it's not going to ever be anything else.