Death can be easy enough to avoid - making it really any easier removes any value it would have. It's a penalty of sorts - making it too easy to avoid renders it rather obsolete.

A minor exp loss buffer for finding your thread, rather than praying, yes.

I'd prefer if it was, say, floating alongside the tapestry, trying to hunt down your thread and defeat the weevils/insects/moths/evil abominations that gnaw at the tapestry. Veyda would, inherently, reject any journey to the cosmic planes. Any version of this that involves going to a cosmic plane is city-centric. And for clarification - there are multiple cosmic planes, not one big one with different locales.

If Verithrax means what I think he means, then I agree with him. It's a strain to suspension of disbelief to talk about death as if it were "death" and then not realize that everyone, essentially everyone, comes back from it every time. Lusternia mitigates this a lot by providing a lot of abilities that give a good IC explanation why death can be cheated, but every time someone has to pray, we still have the strain of pretending they might not come back, in spite of a million counterexamples.

But "cheating death" doesn't have to mean that you avoid penalties of losing a fight. It just happens to be that in Lusternia, every means of ensuring that you don't have a chance of having your thread cut is also a means of avoiding or reducing experience loss.

Imagine a world where everyone comes back for some good reason that you can rely upon. Maybe it's just part of the cosmology, that rebirth is just how things work. Even better, so that death still has some place in mythology, it's an effect of whatever process turns people into adventurers (e.g., "passing through the Portal of Fate" or equivalent), though then you have to explain why denizens come back too, or code some system that lets some of them not come back but be replaced by other people. Or something like that. Just remove the hollow pretense that death might be permanent.

But you could still have that process of rebirth or whatever involve whatever penalties (XP loss, for instance) you like.

Absolutely, it always annoyed me.
"You died, for real. But I guess we will give you yet another, millionth chance. Consider yourself lucky, it might be the last one though!"
I'm sorry for saying that, but that's so lame.

Also, I'm not fond of the original idea of this thread.

I do love at how many people want to deal out criticism, but seem completely unwilling to point out ways that an idea may work. I would personally enjoy a place where the dead could go. Imperian's death system isn't really all that bad in the long run, and it adds a bit of enjoyable RP to dying.

Now, to me it doesn't make sense to have the realm of the dead as a cosmic plane. The cosmic planes are (at least I think) supposed to be the places where the Divine were born and formed. And like Veyda said, some people would rather just pray for salvation than go to a cosmic plane. So, instead of a cosmic plane, why not a plane like the Ethereal Plane. Instead of being an alien place, it can be more of a reflection of the physical world. And to address the reincarnation aspect of the game, I suppose you could make the land of the dead more like the Summerlands where the spirits wait and rest before being reincarnated. Place a few quests that only the dead could do, put a few guardians of Death there, maybe have the tapestry quest you guys were talking about in there and have to talk to the Fates about returning to your life, and you do kill the creatures for them in exchange for them not cutting your thread.

Add more ideas to make this work. It would be nice for death to be more than just a break from typing. And even more, if someone wanted a break from the game, they wouldn't just have to "slumber". They could die and stay on that plane for a bit to rest, then do a quest or something to return when they were ready to come back.

More ideas!

IDEEEEAAAAAS!