dsmith77

As a newcomer with a technology background let me point out another point for your consideration: Whatever is decided has to be programmable. Some things are easy to implement (any kind of respawn debuff), some are hard (an RPG experience system), some are frustrating (any kind of ban), and some are ludicrously impossible (see below). I'm of course not saying that a more difficult solution shouldn't be implemented over a simple one, but Occam's Razor can apply. One idea that is impossible to program - impossible! - is the idea of the player losing their items. Think it through. On single player it's fairly easy to implement: the player loses their inventory. A more extreme version: empty all chests and tool racks and erase all entities from the game world. Either way, simple and done. On SMP however, is it fair for a player's items to just disappear? What if they were part of a community and they had the community pickaxe on their person at the time of death? Is that fair? In the extreme version, what constitutes ownership? The last chest that player opened? Griefers will abuse it. All the chests that player created? Then community chests created by the player will be emptied and the community punished. Plus, since community members can move items to their personal inventory, you'd have to erase all of *their* inventories to be "fair". And this sort of tit-for-tat keeps going on. The ways to abuse this are nearly endless. Again, this is just impossible to program. Not technically impossible, but *ethically* impossible. It can never be "fair". Here's the best question to ask: Q: Why are we having this discussion? A: Because player death is being abused. Q: How is this being abused? What benefit or trade-off does the player incur? A: Fast travel. The players put their items in a chest and die to teleport back to spawn or their bed. So eliminate this benefit - the fast travel - and the problem disappears. Simply have players respawn within a few blocks of their death (just in case it's in lava). No debuff required. Now, while the above should eliminate the abuse it doesn't make death undesirable. So, I rather like the idea of the player respawning with half health and half hunger or some other temporary inconvenience. Three seconds of blindness followed by three more seconds of nausea seems fitting. It's a weakened restart position and that's probably enough. Any more gets into the realm of frustration. As a consequence, beds lose one of their only functions in-game: setting a new respawn location. So, give them a new one: How about when players sleep in a bed they gain a few seconds of regeneration, basically the equivalent of eating a lesser golden apple in vanilla. And since it can only be done once per night it can't be abused. So, obviously, my vote would be for the previously mentioned Unconsciousness suggestion or something similar to end the abuse *and* make death undesirable.