From a practical point of view I advise against such system.

Dying is a failure, a punishment, a thing the player is to avoid. If it's a good thing then what is the punishment? Being healed and at a full health (but that can be fixed easily, by dying )? The thing is, an advantage must be something that is HARD to obtain, dying is trivial to obtain (enter the dragon's cave and do nothing).

I suggest to look at it from the point of view what could be the main punishment (instead of dying).

Note: I have seen one game where dying was good that worked, so it's doable but... it was not impressive.

Dying wouldn't be universally rewarded - it generally represents time wasted, or progress toward the end of the game lost and those would still be true even if there are benefits to dying. I agree that beneficial death could make a game way too easy if it were designed wrong; the player should not be able to gain more and more benefits from, for example, repeatedly completing the starter area and committing suicide. The proposed rewards of death aren't literally rewards for dying, they are actually rewards of what the player accomplished in life before dying; thus accomplishing the same thing again would not increase the reward, and the reward would mainly allow the player to avoid the grinding that was necessary to accomplish that goal the first time. My design goal isn't to give the player a reason to do boring things, and both too-easy play and repetition are boring things. I just think time is a dimension of life which has a lot of untapped potential for game-ification. And philosophically the idea of being able to re-live a life and perfect or evolve it is very interesting to me.

Now I want to make a game where dying is rewarded, but it's really hard to die It would probably be far too sadistic, but I think with enough humor you could make it pretty great. Put your character through the ringer over and over

You could have dying (and transmigration) as the only way to change your class, where the way you act/think determines your rebirth. If you act monstrously, you're reborn as a monster class; if you act animalistically, you're reborn as an animal class; if you act kindly, you're reborn as a priestly class; if you act bravely, you're reborn as a warrior class; if you act greedily, you're reborn as a merchant or beggar, etc. Dying could still be a big setback (even losing all your progress and starting from scratch) while also coming with a potentially big reward (getting a different class to play with).

One thing to keep in mind would be to design it so there are a lot of possible interactions with the world. (If you automatically loot corpse gold there's no decision to make; if you're given the choice that's a choice that can affect your karma. Likewise if all animals fight to the death you don't really get a choice to kill them; if they try to slink away when wounded that's a karma choice for you. If you absolutely have to use money to progress, there's no choice, but maybe there's an amazing monk class you can get if you've never handled money in your previous life.)

And as a second thing, to try to make it so that classes don't necessarily lead to the behavior that leads to that same class. If you become a medic because you used a lot of healing, and the medic just heals, then you're leading the player to a repetitive game. You could manipulate things like story line, or manipulate drops, manipulate pricing, etc. so that a player is more likely to play in a different way and get a different birth the next time.

I came across this on steam this morning and it made me think of this thread:

Life Goes On is a comically-morbid platformer where you guide heroic knights to their demise and use their dead bodies to solve puzzles. On your quest to find the Cup of Life, you will summon knight after knight to be brutally sacrificed. Impale knights on spikes to create a safe path. Catch a knight on a saw blade (ouch!) to strategically land the body on a button. Freeze your knights into blocks of ice to reach higher ground. As you journey through treacherous and trap-ridden worlds, you’ll show no mercy to solve each challenging puzzle.

In Life Goes On, death is not a setback. It is the only means to success.

It's not quite along the lines of what the original poster was thinking, but it made me smile :)

The time-travel mechanic is superbly demonstrated in the movie Edge of Tomorrow. I saw it. It's worth seeing once.

Otherwise, if you want a persistent world without time-travel, then you have either legacy-play or resurrection-play.

I'd lean towards resurrection play like how it's done in GTA. If you get too much heat, let the cops kill you and the heat goes away.

For the story, I'd make the world very superstitious that everything needs to be buried to pass on to the next life. But the PC is cursed to not pass on but to reanimate a day after dying. The PC's main quest is to break this curse so they can go to their blessed afterlife. The benefits of death would be (at least until the NPC's catch on) that enemies would think they beat the character. If they encounter the character again after a death, perhaps they would be terrified of the vengeful spirit that is coming for them. Maybe after breaking into a hard area, not to loot, but to plant an item in a place, pull a sacred lever, talk to someone who is being held captive, etc... the PC can choose to fight their way out, or take some lumps and die whereon they are then buried in the graveyard outside of town. (Hey! Free teleport-ish mechanism!) Of course, dead bodies get stripped and looted unless you incorporate a superstition that anything that is in the possession of someone who dies is "unclean" and will keep the person from passing on to the next life. Anyway, a banking / storage system would be useful to re-equip if necessary. Maybe some not-so-superstitious brigands could loot the PC's corpse (including quest items) whereby the PC would then need to re-equip, track the brigands to their hideout and reclaim all the equipment (and probably more stuff that the brigands also have stolen).

OK. I'm just rambling now. But I clearly see some ways that death can be used strategically and beneficially if designed properly in the game.

Dying wouldn't be universally rewarded - it generally represents time wasted, or progress toward the end of the game lost and those would still be true even if there are benefits to dying.

Yeah, I know what you mean... I think you should rephrase it (and therefore think about it different way). At the moment it's: dying=punishment, how to reward dying = how to reward being punished, which makes no sense (or low sense) :) Leave out the dying part. It's not about dying, it's about achieving as many things as you can before the deadline (dying being one of them).

The ultimate goal is to finish the game without dying and you get a full reward next time you play. But if you die early you get a partial reward.

The game needs to be rather short for it to work and with randomly generated content.

There was PS3 game I had called Way of the Samurai 4 where at key events you could cause various business to open or close in future playthroughs. If you ensure the language school is open at the start of a game you can understand the british characters in the city. Likewise different endings required certain business to be open or closed at the start of a playthrough.

I always thought that metrodvania, or rogue like game where death played a key part would be interesting. If the game had a dynasty system where you acquire treasure, relics, and unlock new areas to explore during each life. It could be a lot of fun. The key would be that each death should advance you in some way even if its only a little. Unlocking a new piece of starting gear, a couple extra inital xp or gold. But at the same time significant gains can only be made through achievement. Fully explore the pyramid and you can start with anything from the ancient egypt gear set, kill the mummified Pharaoh +1 starting level or +1 hp. Find all the hidden treasures in the pyramid and gain the mummy class to play as.

Treasure would allow you to upgrade your base. Relics would provide you with new powers and bonuses.

There could even be dead man switches that you have to die in order to open new areas like in order to get passed a volcano you have to break a wall in an underground cave that causes the lava to fill the cave.It would rather amusing to have some kind trap palace filled with death traps and switches and the only way to get through is to sacrifice countless characters.

As a premise you could be a scientist sending out mini clones into alternate dimensions and time periods. Clones can't move from one area to another but you can change things in one area from another. Stop a volcano from erupting in prehistoric times and it adds atlantis to the ancient world but causes parts of ancient egypt to be flooded.

Dying wouldn't be universally rewarded - it generally represents time wasted, or progress toward the end of the game lost and those would still be true even if there are benefits to dying.

Yeah, I know what you mean... I think you should rephrase it (and therefore think about it different way). At the moment it's: dying=punishment, how to reward dying = how to reward being punished, which makes no sense (or low sense) Leave out the dying part. It's not about dying, it's about achieving as many things as you can before the deadline (dying being one of them).

The ultimate goal is to finish the game without dying and you get a full reward next time you play. But if you die early you get a partial reward.

The game needs to be rather short for it to work and with randomly generated content.

Except, that's not really what I want to do either. I'm interested in games which are not possible to finish on the first playthrough. I don't want dying to feel like a deadline, or the player to feel like they have a deadline of any kind; just the opposite, since the ability to go back in time repeatedly means they have pretty much all the time in the world to discover all the intricacies of that world and what cool things they can accomplish within it. I want dying to be a valid strategic maneuver they player won't feel resentful about using as a necessary step to unlock all the things in the world. This would be an interactive story game aimed at completist players. If there was randomly generated content at all it would be limited to monster spawning areas.

But yeah, I agree that the interesting concept here isn't completely centered on dying. The idea of dying (or a substitute like time travel or reincarnation) as something which has useful results and minimal penalties to induce the player to do it intentionally and repeatedly - that was the spark idea, but it's not a whole game concept. I'm glad you're pushing me to clarify what kind of game I'm imagining, it's helpful.

Probably difficult in an RPG. Eternal Darkness had you playing different characters who all died at the end of each chapter, the real character was reading a book about them and picked up runes which carried over to the next character in the next chapter. You should play that anyway it was interesting what with all the insanity effects ;) It was on the GameCube.

Except, that's not really what I want to do either.

Then you have a problem :)

I recall one game where die for reward was OK, it was a small game where you descended to hell and was dying and getting stronger while traversing it. It was thematic, it made sense there. But... I pretty sure it's not the kind of game *YOU* wanted to make :D

Get rid of the "die" part, rename it, rebrand it, hide it, whatever. It's not compatibe with the mood you are after.

Also, you are a breeding freak, so why not go somewhere that route (going after ones strengths is always a smart move when designing, at least to my experience)? Make some generations, older ones retire and new ones take place. The young build on the old and are better because of the ancestors.

I'm glad you're pushing me to clarify what kind of game I'm imagining, it's helpful.

Yeah, I love when people do this to me too. When I'm under the fire of these annoying questions I quite frequently redesign and realize I actually wanted something different than what I said I wanted. Usually with the benefit to the game I was making.