I feel a lot more comfortable with my latest release. It's not a huge mod, but it completely changes how you feel and play the game. Give it a try, you'll be amazed at the increase in tension.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11137

Overview:
The purpose of this mod is to make dying much worse than the short wait to reload a save file. Every death of your character is saved, and whenever you load a savegame with that character, penalties are applied according to the total number of deaths that character has received.


Details:
There are 4 configurable options, they can be as benign or serious as you desire. The default value is 0 health, 2 skills, 2% of your gold, and 50 gold

Permanently lose health - Every death permanently reduces your health by this amount.

Unlevel skills - Every death reduces the level of this many random skills. Skills will never be reduced below 1. The skill reduced is random but weighted towards the higher skills. The mod never reduces your level or perks, so you could end up with much lower skills than your level would indicate. This also means that you can level above the default level cap.

Percentage of gold - Every death takes away a percentage of gold. This percentage is calculated before the fixed gold cost taken.

Fixed amount of gold - Every death takes away this amount of gold.

I loved Kuertee's "Alternatives to Death and Reload" in Oblivion. This sounds like a similar idea and if it's half as fun as that mod was I'm sure I will enjoy your mod as well. Thank you for doing this! I'm off to download.

oooooo this sounds kinda neat! Be a great counterpart to any dark souls inspired combat mods. Good work.

Hey this is great! I'm just using the gold reduction though.. kind of afraid with the permanent stat decrease

Are you planning to add any other consequence later?

perhaps make all armors / weapons we equip lost when we died, or remove some random spell the PC knows?

or even add some debuff penalty until we pray to a shrine / sleep / drink some kind of restoration potion

I'm thinking about things. Still not sure how to go about things like that. Maybe monday when I'm bored at work I'll spend some more time programming it.

Cool. I always like mods that give consequences. Perhaps I can add to the ideas if you're interested. I made a thread about my idea on the Morrowind forum. It basically makes use of companions, allowing them to save you right before you die (you go unconcious instead) and they have to carry you and escape. They have to leave your belongings there because they need to escape with you quickly so you'd have to return there to collect your stuff. The http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1206601-a-death-consequence-mod/page__fromsearch__1 if you care to hear more about it.

This looks fantastic! I'll endorse ASAP. Can you also add options to permanently reduce Fatigue and Magicka as well? Ideally, I would like all stats to reduce by 2 on death.

If I was playing a game that _permanently_ reduced my stats on death I would just reload manually. I really liked the idea in Guild Wars. On every death, you received a penalty (up to 60% total) on health and mana, and to get rid of it you either had to return to a safe town (would be "sleep in a bed" in Skyrim) or kill monsters (would be "kill monsters" in Skyrim).

In an addition to this, it would be REALLY cool that when you die, you actually don't "die" but you'll be unconscious and taken away by the enemy.
And when you finally wake up, you wake up in a prison cell somewhere as you have been sold by the enemy. Or something like that.

I always thought that an awesome mod would be one that would make it so that if you die, you die permanently. It would be like a hardcoe mode of skyrim. When you die, it would gather all your accomplishments and stats and such and display these when you tried to load the character rather than letting you play (it would be like a memorium of sorts to your dead character).

I was thinking about it if a mod could make player "essential" and then detect when the health gets too low.

A "fate" aspect might be a cool optional aspect too. Like every time you cheat death it increases your "bad luck" (ie: npc finishers on you, loot rarity, etc.)

Another possibility being vengeful shades trying to kill you because you cheated death. better yet have daedric princes who have a claim on your soul send very powerful beings after you; like Hircine would send the Wild Hunt, Nocturnal would send a more subtle type creature that only appears after sleeping or kulling powerful boss enemy. After "dying" enough times Sithis itself might take interest and send a vastly overpowered and invincible creature after you.

Most of the physical threats to you could be killed with the exception of Sithis, but you could also temporarily stop them from pursuing you by getting blessing from one of the altars. Could also have the option of making deaths by these harbingers be a permnent hardcoe mode type death.

let me guess: Ala Prince of Persia 2? Escape the unkillable beast to survive another day while Godsmack blares on as out of place as can be in the background?

The only convincing consequence for dying would be to erase all saves related to that character... even on your backup-partition... and your usb-stick.

Permentantly? I dont really like the idea of that at all tbh, as for me it cause chaos with autoaves or saving and loading and updating the mod stuff like that if "actuall" values are reduced.

So there fore i beg the question, is there no way to just have a "permenant" deduction that can be recovered if you rest, eat, or get back to safety/out of the wilderness? Losing gold great, PERMENANT reductions in health and skills, really dont like especially with what im playing with.

Is there no way to make it more like a "debuff"? for example...rather than say reducing one handed from 90-88 for example....could it not just be % based debuff? so it still says "90" but in reality it just has a little RED MINUS GUI element to it that indicates its taking a % based reduction? say 5%/15%/35%/70% deduction, (for health/ magicka, and stamina) so basically how a desease would work, but a "death" based RPG debuff, loss of gold etc, and maybe even something that decreases effectiveness of armor and weapons and magic would be cool too!

Then if you get to safety, you can recover your self back to normal, either: For a cost in gold by a "healer" or w/e. By lots of sleep and eating good food/drink for a little while, or some combination of both that only when you get back to safety, it last for say a certain number of hours per severity, so the worst, 70% lasts 8 hours, 35% lasts 6 15% last 4 and 5% 2 or something like that, maybe a way to make it so sleep/waiting doesnt have any effect on the countdown?

Just some ideas, i love the premise! But a permenant, none refundable way of skill/health etc deduction would for me, personally, make it too too severe and punishing, so just some ideas for you, i love the premise like i said, but id love even more a different way to go about it, like above or better! Just so it isnt permenant.

As there definately needs to be "punishment" for death, but me atm yours is too severe with permenancies on skill reductions, possible?

Great idea, but unfortunately this has some more work to be done to it

was just testing with a new character who has never died, exited to take a look at the nexus, reloaded and was hit with a stat and a money penalty?

too bad, and I hope the author gets this up to snuff soon, because I love the idea of some serious punishment for death

thanks for the effort so far

I suggest the following as alternatives or extra options:
1) Temporary attributes/skills debuff (as opposed to permanent)
2) Temporary slower exp gain

I updated it to add options for permanent reductions to stamina and magicka.
It now waits until after you have the Helgen keep key before making any changes. For people who don't use the default intro, just add one to your inventory. It then takes two saves before it begins making changes. I also fixed the bug where deaths from one character would get applied to another. Unfortunately the only way to fix the problem is to get rid of every helgen's keep key in your inventory but 1.

If anyone knows any other way for me to identify a unique character from script, i'd be happy to hear about it.

I don't know how to apply custom magical effects to the player from Script Dragon. And this mod isn't possible without it.

The skill loss is only permanent such that you have to relevel the skill. If I made use of another key, I could work on restoring stats after time. Maybe I'll look into it tomorrow while I"m at work.

I like the idea of losing your equipment (but not quest critical stuff) + some percentage of gold (let's say 20%). It's sort of like RPing getting badly hurt/unconscious and then looted. Not so crazy about permanent stat loss.

Would be cool if you add a mode that if the player die, his corpse and equipment would be lootable by the player after he spawned at a previous fixed position. Fixing position must be bought before.
That was a great feature in the beta and the early days of star wars galaxies. Liked the tension.

I really like this idea, I would love the ability to customizing how harsh Death can be, I would personally like to see 10-15 deaths before a permanent death., It would make it all the more nail biting knowing you only have 10 deaths total before permanent death. I would take each fight 100% seriously, using potions, buffs everything to get the win.

To add on this, each Death gives you some type of death/resurrection sickness, meaning all of your stats are cut in half for one day... you can roleplay in taverns during that time, tradeskill.. sleep in your bed for a day... just something with a Day or two lasting effect (damn maybe even a week), before gaining your full strength.


*edit

I was thinking more about the idea of permanent death, and how it would TOTALLY change my play style.. In short, I think it would make Skyrim 100% more exciting.

Every fight - serious [censored], you have to treat each fight as if its your last!

Every treasure chest - More value, looting items to aid you in your overall survival.

Potions and other buff spells etc.. would have SOO much more meaning and value.

Armor/Defense spells would be so much more critical.

Stealth skills and spells would have SOO much more value.

The main deal is, you wouldnt run in with guns blazing every time you see a Monster or Dragon, actually you would run for cover and make sure you're ready to fight something that badass.

I'm requesting and begging to make this possible!

So this mod wouldn't work if you, like I do, have the practice of completely shutting down and restarting the game if you die? A long time ago (I think playing Fallout 3) I adopted that practice because I was advised that I should never load a game if I already had a game loaded because it could result in save corruption as info from the previous loaded game could carry over into the newly loaded game. I assumed this also applied to the game autoloading your last save when you died, so if I died I would kill my game altogether and load it again fresh. Was never even positive it worked, but I never seemed to get the save game corruption issues others complained about.

Excellent mod! And very clever use of keys. I'll be using this for the gold penalties.


You can actually write to a file with Script Dragon like in normal C++ code. That's what I do for my Extra Hotkeys script (although my file-writing code is very poor and hack-ish due to not remembering C++ as well as I should).

That way you could forgo all the key-based bugs, as well as identify separate characters (I believe there is a GetPlayerName function).

There isn't a GetPlayerName function. But it's more difficult than that, because there are multiple saves. And I can't tell what changes have been made to the character for each save. I am keeping track of all this information on the disk though. I work in c++ all day, and I actually wrote the entire first version of this mod one day while I was at work. Nobody could tell I wasn't working. :0

While it's theoretically possible for me to delete save files from peoples hard disks, thats not something I'm at all interested in doing, for lots of reasons. And regardless there would be work arounds for it. So a permadeath option is sort of pointless. If someone wants to consider it permadeath, they can do it themselves, you can even use your embershard mine keys to keep track of how many times you've died. I can however add support for progressively worse penalties. Unfortunately I can't modify game settings. I had this whole new feature implemented before I realized I couldn't set the game setting to modify xp rates.

I'm not sure if it would be possible for me to remove stuff from a character and put it on the ground in another location. I'm not even sure if it would matter much since people likely saved moments before the died. So at worst it would probably just be inconvenient.

I did add a feature to display the cumulative level loss you've attained. It isn't backwards compatible though, and I realized I can figure that out after a level gain. Once I get that in I'll re update. I might also add the progressively worsening penalties as well.

As far as I can tell, I also cannot add custom magic effects to the player from script dragon. I don't think I can even add custom items. I only have access to things bethesda added. While it's theoretically possible for me to communicate to a custom game script, thats really a lot further than I wanted to take this mod.

I just realized I'm using your hotkeys mod. Although, I was actually considering writing my own, but I'll make a request. It would be awesome if we could assign the last equipped bow, sword, shield to a key. So for example, I assign bow to "b", then every time I hit the B key, it equips the last bow I used. If I go into my inventory and equip a new bow. That bow is now the key assigned. There also appears to be a bug where rapidly clicking the two keys to equip shield and sword frequently doesn't equip one of them.