Death Penalty

Related topics: Game Mechanics

"When you are slain, you'll resurrect at the last lifestone to which you attuned your character, having lost one or more valuable items, half your pyreals, if any, and a percentage of your "vitae," or life force. All your skills are decreased by the percentage of your vitae loss and so are the maximum values of your secondary attributes -- Health, Stamina, and Mana."

Corpse Location

Upon death you will drop a number of items on your corpse. Your corpse appears at the place where you died, or if you are in the process of portalling it may appear elsewhere:

• If casting Portal Recall, Primary Portal Recall or Secondary Portal Recall your corpse may be at the portal drop point.
• If casting Lifestone Recall your corpse may be at the lifestone you are tied to (note this is the Item Enchantment spell and not the /lifestone command).
  

Upon death there is a notification in your chat dialog stating what items you dropped, and your corpse location (if on the landscape). If you died on the landscape, you can get the location of your corpse later by using the /corpse or /cor commands.

Item Loss

See the Death Item article for information on item loss and how to protect your valuables and equipment.

Vitae Penalty

Players receive a reduction on their life force, called vitae penalty, upon each death. Each death adds 5% vitae penalty, with a maximum penalty of 40%. Your vitae penalty reduces your health, stamina, mana, and all your skills by the given percent.

To recover your vitae you must earn experience. No experience is actually lost upon death, nor do you lose the experience needed to recover your vitae. Your vitae is simply recovered as you earn more experience. The amount of experience required to recover 1% of vitae varies by level and is influenced by your number of deaths. Only experience you earn yourself goes towards recovery - allegiance pass-up does not help.

Note that while technically you lose vitae on death and need to recover it, many players will say they have gained vitae upon death. Players will often refer to vitae recovery as burning vitae. Common abbreviations for vitae penalty are vitae, VP, and vit.

Your experience has reduced your Vitae penalty!

Vitae penalty has expired.

Corpse Decay

Corpses decay at a rate of your current level times 5 in minutes, with a minimum length of 1 hour. After a corpse decays, all of the items it contained are placed on the ground. Once on the ground, the items are subject to the normal decay timers for any item placed on the ground.

While player corpse lifespans may be short, this time may be greatly increased depending on the location of the body. The corpse decay timer is only active when the landblock it is located within is also active. Because of this, corpses can exist for a long time, even for months or years, if they are located in a rarely visited spot.

Corpse Permissions

Your corpse is "locked" when you die and may not be looted without your permission unless you are designated as a Player Killer. You may choose to grant other players the ability to loot your corpse using the @permit command. Note that this command only grants permission to loot one corpse. If you have multiple corpses, you will have to issue the command for each one. You may only give permission to players that are currently logged on. This means you cannot permit one of your own characters on the same account.

See Death and Corpse Commands for all commands relating to permissions.

Notes

• In A Reign of Stone, corpse permission commands were added.
• In The Changing of the Ways, players are now given the coordinates of their characters' corpses when they die.
• In Hidden Vein, a number of changes were made to the way item loss on death works. See the Letter to the Players for details.
• In the Throne of Destiny expansion, the formula used for working out how many items a character drops was updated. For details on the old formula how it changed see here.