The death penalty of various MMORPGs is a topic of interest to many people – I’ve seen a number of thought provoking posts, and what is a more cheerful topic than death of your virtual avatar. Yesterday Damien Schubert made a great post about this issue on the official Star Wars: the old republic forums. In summary, the death penalty of a game is a powerful tool which strongly influences how much risk the players are willing to take. Theoretically you could make a game with permadeath, where when your character dies, you need to roll a new one. Obviously in such a game you would see people not even daring to attack to bunny without a group. Given how many fights you do in a MMORPG, even a 1 in 1000 chance to die would be far too dangerous. In games with corpse runs and lots of xp loss,…