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[Shadowlord]

Young people are an interesting case. They typically are more likely to have never experienced a serious injury. They also have less experience in general, meaning they have witnessed fewer accidents. When they get injured, the injury is probably less serious than an older person would suffer in the same place (because the younger person is lighter, more athletic, springier, etc.) and also to recover from the injury much faster. So the experience of being injured is more forgiving for young people. In total, they have plenty of reasons to underappreciate the probability and severity of accidents, leading them to take on greater risks. I don't think I make any surprising statement there.

I don't know about the less experience. I mean, you'll know someone who broke a bone or got into a car accident (or died of cancer), or you see in the news stuff about people dying skydiving and in car accidents, etc. It doesn't have to happen to you personally for you to be paranoid about it, or to be paranoid about it forever.

I think the Kool Aid Man would piss red drink into your chest cavity. Going back to Shadowlord's description of Empire of the East and the Valkyries, the book said the process was frequently a little off, and there were people who came back heavily scarred or misshapen. That would be an interesting take on resurrection limits. I've also seen a D&D blogger post something about the journey to death and back being spiritually scarring and wrote out a table of possible side effects (some positive, some mixed, most negative).

Personally I think both sound like they could be cool for something like D&D. Video games might be more difficult since the tendency now is to either make things punishingly difficult or super easy, but to me, anything is preferable to roguelikes: "you died, start the game from the beginning ha ha. What do you mean you miss "CONTINUE?" screens? Git gud."

I did like the resurrection booths in System Shock 2, and I like how you don't have to reload (and can't) if you die in Shadow of Mordor, because death is part of the game.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Speaking of rez booths, and clones in general: Shadowlord mentioned Car Wars but didn't give the pert deets:

Making a clone costs money which you might have spent on your car. Because your car is your main way to succeed and make money, cars are important! If your car is destroyed it might be Game Over because you probably don't have a second car or the savings to buy and outfit a new one. The way to start from "rags to riches" is to participate in weird local events where the arena owner has a stable of terrible cars and the winning competitor gets to keep his heap. The rest of the cars get hosed down and patched up for next weekend. You take your crappy car and work your way up from there.

Anyway, your character also has skill points. They're very rare and valuable, like Gunner +1 skill giving you a +1 to hit on a roll that uses 2d6 for a 2-12 result curve. And you might need a 7 or 8 on that roll, in total, to hit an enemy car. So +1 is big hot shit. You can possibly start with a single skill at +2 but you know how to do nothing else. And other skills besides Gunner are amazingly important, such as Driver (without which you probably end up flipping your car doing crazy stunts), Mechanic (without which looting is impossible, and is so important that it has special restrictions on learning it), Bodybuilder (giving you bonus Hit Points in a game where your car might have 20 points of armor in one location and you are injured at 1 damage, unconscious at 2, and dead at 3 - and vehicular machine guns do 1d6 or 2d6 damage with +1 per die for special ammo), and many others. So if you get your Car Warrior (I don't remember what they called your character) up to a +3 Driver or something, that was amazing. Definitely worth spending some cash to make a clone.

The problem is your clone has memories and skills up to the point where it was grown. If you make a clone when you have Driver +1, and later you learn all the way up to Driver +3, and die, your clone wakes up with Driver +1. If you want to upload newer, updated skills you must pay again (though not as much as for growing a clone) to make a newer "save point".

This mechanic, where you can save by spending resources that could be used elsewhere, could be extremely cool and worthwhile.

The closest I've ever seen are the consumable Save Crystals in Tomb Raider (1996) where the save point is in a certain location but you can choose to use it right away or else pass it and return later to save. But you can use each one only once. Do you save and lock in your previous progress, or try again and hope to arrive with more consumable resources remaining? Will you press on into unexplored territory and risk losing your previous progress too if you die? The Save Crystals are very infrequent and typically placed directly after a really difficult and deadly segment that you probably don't want to repeat but which has sapped your health and ammo, making you vulnerable for the next segment. A design that was probably prompted mainly by the small storage space of the memory cards in the PS1 turned out to be very interesting.

EDIT: Upon seeing some gameplay again, it looks like maybe in later sequels the Save Crystal is a pickup and you can use it wherever?

Anyway, imagine a situation where you're rewarded for longer "ironman" stretches, which are self-imposed and organically mold to the players' tastes and moods because they're in control of their saving. On the downside, this could be viewed as a tax on short game sessions - but the format of some games will already require more dedicated gaming time. Another downside is the possibility that someone will someday create a game that's otherwise good enough to want to play but sells save points through microtransactions. Such a villain would surely be struck down immediately by the townsfolk and his possessions scattered and burned, the fruit of his unclean loins sold into foreign service, his mark expunged forever from the earth.

[MrRoboto75]

Some of the older Resident Evils did that too.  You saved by the character using typewriters, which required ink to use.