What about the character death – how does it work? *
Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes will employ a variation on the traditional corpse retrieval death penalty – you die, you return to your bind point but leave a corpse behind and that corpse contains the items and coin you had in your possession. You will generally need to return to that corpse and loot it to regain the items and coin.
Here’s why: a CR (character corpse retrieval) with experience loss has two components: a static penalty based on your level or some such (the experience loss), and a dynamic penalty relative to where you died.
The trick with the static penalty is to balance it such that it stings but doesn't overly frustrate (easier said than done, yes). Death is part of the game -- it means the player is taking risks, entering new areas, exploring, etc. We don't want to over-penalize that and discourage exploration. But, then, if there is no penalty, it's not a risk. By the way, as you all know, there are a couple of approaches to this: conventional exp loss, exp debts, not allowing levels to be lost, etc. Regardless of the precise implementation, we think experience 'loss' is better than losing an item or your skills -- to us, that's too harsh.
The dynamic death penalty is something we feel is very important. If you die on a hill outside the city and someone else dies in the depths of a dungeon, your two CRs will vary significantly in both difficulty and time invested. And they should. That hill outside isn't supposed to be a risky area, and the rewards are set accordingly. The bottom of a dungeon, however, is a nasty, scary place with awesome treasure. In other words, the CR helps us control risk vs. reward. As a side benefit, it can also help community by creating interdependence as one often requires assistance to get their corpse back from those depths.
What we don't like is newbies losing their corpses. Fighting to get to your corpse is fine, but not knowing where it is at all is a problem. In this and in other areas, the CR style death penalty will vary a bit from the more traditional approach -- more on this later.
From the Official Vanguard FAQ (original entry).
Will my corpse rot?
Corpses with items on them will not rot.