The Mechanic Killing Games Before They Start | Design Delve

[dreadlordmrson]

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My comment:

Alternatively you can try designing a game without death at all.
I'm trying to make a text-based exploratory RPG... thing. Where the player absolutely cannot die. There's other punishments for failing challenges. Debuffs. Lost resources. Ticking off romanceable characters and losing paths on their story tree. Literally going into debt and needing to make monthly payments.
It does create the nasty effect where if you're struggling, you can get stuck in a failure spiral where the game just keeps getting harder and more miserable. But for the experience I'm aiming for? That's not a complete negative. And it means there's not really an interruption of play like death usually causes in a game. You never stop, you're never forced to rewind to a previous point. You're always moving forward. Just... sometimes worse off than others.

"Does this game even need a death mechanic" is a valuable question for devs working on a new project.

ETA:
Actually thinking about it, the game I play nearly all the time. Pretty much every day. Minecraft. I absolutely do not like its death mechanic. It's not how it handles respawning, that's fine. It's not the dropping your items on death, that's okay. It's the TIME LIMIT dropping your items causes. You have 5 minutes to pick everything up (if it's loaded) or it's gone forever.

I normally put keep inventory on rather than deal with every death causing a time crunch. However, when I play modpacks that add a gravestone mechanic where all your items are safe in your gravestone waiting for you? Keep inventory goes back off. I don't mind the run to regather my stuff, as long as that time limit is gone.

I've excavated a grave stone 8 blocks down in a lava lake and that was actually a cool experience, the project of working hard to get my stuff back. I like the challenge of trying to fetch my things again, at least sometimes. I just hate the idea of oops took a little too long to find the right cave path and was hung up fighting a zombie and now all my good stuff is deleted.

(Before anyone suggests a gravestone datapack for vanilla, I've already been thinking about it.)