Idea for some variant or other: fallback mode

[Therem Harth]

It's an idea for a replacement for Cheat Death mode. Think of it as a compromise between Cheat Death and normal play. If you die, your savefile will not be marked as dead; you can open it and return to the last save point, and then try to fix wherever you screwed up, as you would in e.g. the Avernum series.

As with Cheat Death, the score would be nullified, but I think newbies would appreciate it more since it could actually get them used to "normal" gameplay to some extent; and also veteran players, since let's face it, character deaths can be quite a pain if you're playing for fun. Also, if you played stupidly it would still be possible to get in an unrecoverable situation in fallback mode. (Think saving while surrounded with high undead.)

Basically it would give newbies (or people who don't like permadeath) a way to have fun with the game, without bringing in the full debug cheesiness of Cheat Death mode. Which IMHO is a good idea... But I'd be willing to hear the flip side of it too.

[Atarlost]

Absolutely yes. The current cheat death removes you from the situation that caused your death preventing you from learning if there were other courses of action you could have taken that would have prevented your death.

I've always hated the way roguelikes define cheat death as magical resurrection instead of the normal save and restore mode of gameplay used by nearly every other CRPG ever written (as well as the single player modes of TBSs, RTSs and many FPSs). If there's going to be a way to turn off permadeath it really should make the game act like nearly every non-permadeath game ever written in any genre.

[PowerDiver]

That would be simple enough to code. Simply exit without writing the savefile upon death. Then you restart with the previous save. Currently V autosaves upon entering a new level, so you would be hosed if you landed in an insta-death situation, but otherwise it would seem to be an improvement.

I suppose you could be prompted at death whether to revert to previous savepoint or to be resurrected in town.