I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!

[wwwhhattt]

4. The "dungeons" you go into are asteroids or other large ships involved in a war that doesn't concern you, but that is in the area.  This is certain.

I love games where you aren't important - just there!

So there aren't any enemies specifically out to get you, you're just perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time?

[Tridus]

Whoa, I had no idea about that with WoW.  Thanks for the context.  And what do you mean about its downfall?  I was under the impression it was still having tons of players.  I must be out of the loop.  Although I would not be surprised if the numbers were not near their peak -- how could anything stay like that so very long.

Well, the last expansion pushed them up to 10 million subscribers. 6 months later they were down to 5.6 million (nine year low). It hasn't really grown in years, but that is a massive plunge. It'll get lower too, as they haven't got another expansion coming out for quite a while. My point wasn't really about that as much as it was about how much the genre has changed while still being called a MMORPG.

WoW is the worst offender, but it isn't the only one. Lots of other ones have gone into matchmaking systems and more instanced content. FFXIV and Wildstar both have forced single player quests, in a genre where 'multiplayer' is literally in the name. That would be totally unthinkable to people in the early days, but they didn't invent a new genre name for it.

Roguelike is the same thing. It doesn't mean today the same thing that it meant when Angband was new. I had a surprising number of arugments over if FTL qualified based on various ridiculous criteria, and it mostly showed how goofy people can be about this trivial stuff.

[gnosis]

1. The bad thing about rogue lecacy was the time you needed to farm gold upgrades to your health. I was burned by it and stopped playing.

2. The genre has plenty of room for innovation! Fire away!

3.  Perhaps the pilot retires or he dies from radiation poisoning even after he finishes a run, and he is a mercenary working for his family, so his craft and loot gets liquidated for permenent upgrades? science points? And the next guy just starts with the basic upgraded stuff that you fed into the bases economy.

4. As for wow they are way below the 1/2 of their historical peak-player-base and most of those players are from asia anyway. They are now in their content-winter-phase until the next xpac so expect an even bigger drop to be reported in 2 months. Their bigger competitors are their other titles that you can play without a sub. Finally most of the mmo market turned free to play, like wildstar. The pinnacle of that is guildwars 2: handing out game access without even a box purchase *before* launching their new xpac.

[dfinlay]

So I see where everyone is coming from about me being a stuffy old guy who is complaining about the evolution of a genre .

My point, though, was more that the term is beginning to lose meaning as something that is useful for a customer looking for or trying to sort through games to find ones of a certain style of gameplay (what I feel genre names are for).

Terraria, Binding of Isaac, FTL, RogueLegacy and Angband all being classified as the same genre is silly. These are games that have completely different styles of gameplay, appeal to completely different segments of the market and other than all being sort of "indie" are pretty close to opposite corners of the design space of gaming and yet all of them are considered Roguelikes. Terms evolving isn't bad, but terms evolving to be no longer useful is.

[Draco18s]

As long as we don't have to pay for an upgrade to give us a mute button or better interface.

1. The bad thing about rogue lecacy was the time you needed to farm gold upgrades to your health. I was burned by it and stopped playing.

Anyway, yeah, there were bits about Rogue Legacy I didn't like much, e.g. some upgrades are so god damn expensive I can't pay for them even though the game has become a largely non-challenge (I think I'm on New Game +3 and I noticed that nothing got any significant increase from New Game +2) and looting the castle is more of an endurance challenge than anything.  I'll admit that the dungeons still kinda scare me, but that's more to do with having not spent much time in them in my first go-around and getting lucky finding the boss room (and then the boss not actually being that hard).  Some enemies in the tower are difficult to kill simply because the tactics required to take them out tend towards suicidal (depending on other threats and room layout) to "plink it for 2 damage from safety for a minute."  Main castle area and the gardens are a joke to me at this point (the gardens I'd been afraid of when I first got to them, but quickly found them to be "about as dangerous").

Risk of Rain though I still find myself coming back to once in a while and just murdering things for shits and giggles, not even caring if I win or not (and often have some of the artifacts turned on that just make the game more painful).  Back when I was still pretty good and playing regularly I could be like "Monsoon?  All artifacts?  One hour in?  Sure, lets do another map for the lolz."  I swear, having 35 barbed wire is foxing amazing.  It's like having the Chargefiled Generator with 8 kills just all the time just walking around* (yeah, I played a game where almost every common I picked up I chose** barbed wire).

I like shumps, I like roguelikes, I like cumulative progression.

Now if I could only remember the name of this one arcade shmup where one of the ships you could select had a special weapon that was a beam of arcing electrical discharge that would coil around the screen and just hit whatever (the beam was always the same length and had a limited curve radius, but it could attack any point on the screen within that maximum radius from your ship).  Man, that one was so much fun to use.

I guess the moral of this post is that I like super amazing overpowered bullshit, even when I get punched in the face by something just as amazingly super powered and ridiculous.  Memorable Loss over Forgettable Victory, but at least make it mean something.  I kind of give up on most shmups and bullet hells and roguelikes (be them traditional or lite or any other variety) because there's either no consequence to death (other than frustration over a single troublesome point) or everything is lost (mv save.sav /bin/null).

*To give an idea of the radius increase, the radius of 18 Barbed Wire stacks are equivalent to the area of one warbanner.
**The crown of command is amazing and super cheating.

[Tridus]

Terraria, Binding of Isaac, FTL, RogueLegacy and Angband all being classified as the same genre is silly. These are games that have completely different styles of gameplay, appeal to completely different segments of the market and other than all being sort of "indie" are pretty close to opposite corners of the design space of gaming and yet all of them are considered Roguelikes. Terms evolving isn't bad, but terms evolving to be no longer useful is.

Doom, Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Prop Hunt are all technically First Person Shooters featuring guns. They have virtually nothing else in common.

Genre names are not specific enough to tell you what you want if you want a specific style of gameplay.

[x4000]

4. The "dungeons" you go into are asteroids or other large ships involved in a war that doesn't concern you, but that is in the area.  This is certain.

I love games where you aren't important - just there!

So there aren't any enemies specifically out to get you, you're just perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Well, you're basically stuck in a warzone and other stuff is moving past you.  Guys pass you and sometimes think "ooh, loot!"  The rest of the time they ignore you.  But then YOU go into their ships, thinking "ooh, loot!" and then of course they're out to get you because you're inside their ship.  But until you went in there they didn't give a flip.  And it's not like you're the menace of the war to them or whatever.

The war is definitely just the backdrop, and your actions have no impact whatsoever on the course of it, and it's still going on when you win the game (if you do).  You're just there, as you say.   I've always been a fan of that sort of thing, too!

Well, the last expansion pushed them up to 10 million subscribers. 6 months later they were down to 5.6 million (nine year low). It hasn't really grown in years, but that is a massive plunge. It'll get lower too, as they haven't got another expansion coming out for quite a while. My point wasn't really about that as much as it was about how much the genre has changed while still being called a MMORPG.

Eek!  That's quite a drop, yeah.  But I imagine they're still doing okay financially.  And yeah, point taken on both genre labels.

1. The bad thing about rogue lecacy was the time you needed to farm gold upgrades to your health. I was burned by it and stopped playing.

2. The genre has plenty of room for innovation! Fire away!

3.  Perhaps the pilot retires or he dies from radiation poisoning even after he finishes a run, and he is a mercenary working for his family, so his craft and loot gets liquidated for permenent upgrades? science points? And the next guy just starts with the basic upgraded stuff that you fed into the bases economy.

1. What difficulty were you playing on?  I was just playing on normal, so maybe that didn't impact me for that reason.  I did spend a ton of time just gathering gold, but I felt like I was accomplishing things the whole time.  Mainly because I unlocked all sorts of different things with the gold, rather than really focusing on health much.

That said, the focus on gold collection was kind of annoying and there was not nearly enough variety for my taste in terms of keeping me interested just for the sake of exploring and finding new things.  The fun of the mechanics in a bubble-wrap-popping sense was the main draw for me.

2. Thanks.

3. Well, the pilot is actually the last hydral from TLF, far far far into the future, so him dying is something I'd like to avoid.  Having something that turns his upgrades into some other form of currency or whatever is a cool idea, though.  Overall I'm really not wanting much of an economy, though -- unlike Rogue Legacy.

Terms evolving isn't bad, but terms evolving to be no longer useful is.

That I'll wholeheartedly agree with.  The problem to me seems to be that we don't want to create new terms anymore to some extent.  Instead we just stretch and stretch the old ones, or use multiple labels at once.  It's not just in games that this happens, but it's the newest medium and so I guess it stands out the most here.

I guess the moral of this post is that I like super amazing overpowered bullshit, even when I get punched in the face by something just as amazingly super powered and ridiculous.  Memorable Loss over Forgettable Victory, but at least make it mean something.  I kind of give up on most shmups and bullet hells and roguelikes (be them traditional or lite or any other variety) because there's either no consequence to death (other than frustration over a single troublesome point) or everything is lost (mv save.sav /bin/null).

I, too, tend to get frustrated with a lot of them.  Mainly because I hit a point where I feel like there's nothing interesting going on anymore.  Either I'm getting so many items and powerups that it's meaningless insane clutter, or I'm getting things so slowly that it gets very samey, or there's no reasonable goal in sight that I can progress towards without a ton of grinding.  I'm not a fan of everything being lost, although that's an option I imagine we'll put in for the masochistic among us.

For me I prefer it if there is no real consequence for death aside from the lack of progression.  A lot of the more recent ones have done that sort of thing.  There is ideally enough tension of getting close to achieving your goal in the current randomly-generated run and then having sweaty palms because you are about to lose and then none of that hard run actually pays off.  Though even there, having a few things carry over so you have the silver lining of SOME progress is good.  That's just me, though.

[Draco18s]

I, too, tend to get frustrated with a lot of them.  Mainly because I hit a point where I feel like there's nothing interesting going on anymore.  Either I'm getting so many items and powerups that it's meaningless insane clutter, or I'm getting things so slowly that it gets very samey, or there's no reasonable goal in sight that I can progress towards without a ton of grinding.  I'm not a fan of everything being lost, although that's an option I imagine we'll put in for the masochistic among us.

The "insane clutter" problem only happens to me in Zelda games. :\

For me I prefer it if there is no real consequence for death aside from the lack of progression.  A lot of the more recent ones have done that sort of thing.  There is ideally enough tension of getting close to achieving your goal in the current randomly-generated run and then having sweaty palms because you are about to lose and then none of that hard run actually pays off.  Though even there, having a few things carry over so you have the silver lining of SOME progress is good.  That's just me, though.

Agreed.  There does need to be some tension to it, death does need to have meaning.  I just feel that a lot of those "blank slate new game" games tend to put in too many "Oh by the way, you're dead. There was no way you'd have figured this out" style traps in them.  Dungeons of Dreadmore did that with the monster rooms.  Step on a trap, a section of wall falls away, have 30 out-of-depth monsters.  Two of those was enough for me to go "f-- this."  Other than that, Dreadmore was pretty slick and had some neat ideas.  But that kind of "and you're dead now" thing is only really appropriate for a game with some level of game-to-game progress.

[nas1m]

So upgrades come from your base that you upgrade after your run? What is the base piece? A space station? An armada? A star system? A planet?

Do you have to be destroyed for the next cycle, or can you retreat/withdraw?

Bear in mind that these particular aspects, some of them still need to survive the prototype gauntlet of the next week or so.  But:

1. Your upgrades come from what you do during a run (this is certain).

2. SOME upgrades you will start with from your base based on successes in past runs (this is almost certain).

3. Your base is your mothership/starship/not-sure-the-name-yet larger vessel that you were traveling in, but which is now damaged.  It's your Star Destroyer that you're trying to repair while you fly around in your Tie Fighter, to use an analogy.  I'm not sure on our terminology yet, it wasn't important to me before now.  This is certain.

4. The "dungeons" you go into are asteroids or other large ships involved in a war that doesn't concern you, but that is in the area.  This is certain.

5. You'll probably have multiple dungeons to choose from in your home base area, with different rewards and difficulties associated with them.  This is not certain, but extremely likely.  So the difficulty of your run gets determined partly from this.

6. You almost certainly will not be able to exit a run once you start it.  That would remove all tension in my opinion.  What exactly you lose when you lose a run is not yet something I've decided.  Most likely it will be "you don't progress, and you lose that particular run's seed."

7. If you complete a run, then that helps to repair your broken mothership-thing, which gets you closer to victory.  This is certain, although it won't apply to all runs.  Some runs will be easier ones that you take, knowing full well that you won't get a mothership piece out of it, but you need an easier run for some personal buffs to your tie fighter or whatever.  This is highly likely, but not certain.

8. When you complete a run, some or all of your passive buffs will probably stay with you.  Orbitals, consumables, special weapons, and upgraded weapons probably will not stay with you.  The exact nature of all this is kind of fuzzy to me right now.  I know how the upgrade system will work, but I'm unsure how much I want to let the player carry over between runs.  Too much and the power creep starts to get crazy.  And I want the runs to be sufficiently varied.  Rogue Legacy had a pretty good system for this I thought, where you were making progress in your personal stats between runs but not in great bounding leaps.  Something with that feel is probably what I'll go for, but the specifics there are not nailed down yet.  I know how I want it to feel during a run, and how the mechanics work during a run, but I have not fully reconciled that yet with exactly what can carry over to outside of runs.  At any rate, most likely whatever it is would either only carry over if you win the run, or only the best stuff would if you win the run, or something along those lines.

9. If you don't get destroyed, why don't you get to keep everything from your prior run?  Good question, me.  I'm not sure.  Possibly we will let you keep everything, and the next run becomes kind of a continuation run -- a streak, so to speak.  And then when you die you revert to the starting state, but plus some stats.  We'd then have to creep the run difficulty for each streak you get through, but that might be fun in that it's like "going deeper" in a traditional roguelike sense, but instead you're going into progressively more challenging runs of roughly equal length.  That might be exploitable, though.  At any rate, this sort of question is tangential to the main gameplay and goals, which makes me oh so happy.   We can experiment with that some without having to go back to the drawing board on the prototype or something.  I know how the in-run stuff works pretty completely, and that makes me happy.

.
Oh my. You have done it again.
I am excited .

[x4000]

I, too, tend to get frustrated with a lot of them.  Mainly because I hit a point where I feel like there's nothing interesting going on anymore.  Either I'm getting so many items and powerups that it's meaningless insane clutter, or I'm getting things so slowly that it gets very samey, or there's no reasonable goal in sight that I can progress towards without a ton of grinding.  I'm not a fan of everything being lost, although that's an option I imagine we'll put in for the masochistic among us.

The "insane clutter" problem only happens to me in Zelda games. :\

...Zelda games?  The items you get there are really spaced apart, and all of them are very useful (depending on the game).  Zelda 1 had a few duds, and some of the spells in the later part of Zelda 2 were useless.  Link To The Past is awesome, but has probably the largest number of useless items in it -- all late-game optional stuff that are fun goodies to find, though.  OOT stays pretty darn useful with everything, masks aside.  I guess Majora's Mask did have a ton of crud in it, Masks-wise in particular.  I don't recall any fluff in TP, but it's been a while.  Skyward Sword had cruft at the market, and all those billion collectables, which was definitely annoying.  Trying to go MMORPG it felt like.  But most of that could be ignored, and the core items were good.  Windwaker had a really tight design on the items, a very few exceptions later on.  The Wii U version is incredibly superior because of the lack of stupidity in wind controls.  Oh, and then there's the Link Between Worlds recent game on 3DS, which is probably the best Zelda game ever at this point.  That one had absolutely zero cruft.

Then there's a lot of handheld Zelda titles we won't discuss.   Particularly ones made by a third party.

Anyway, I'm genuinely curious about that, though.  The items thing was something that got me in Risk of Rain and Terraria more than anything else.

For me I prefer it if there is no real consequence for death aside from the lack of progression.  A lot of the more recent ones have done that sort of thing.  There is ideally enough tension of getting close to achieving your goal in the current randomly-generated run and then having sweaty palms because you are about to lose and then none of that hard run actually pays off.  Though even there, having a few things carry over so you have the silver lining of SOME progress is good.  That's just me, though.

Agreed.  There does need to be some tension to it, death does need to have meaning.  I just feel that a lot of those "blank slate new game" games tend to put in too many "Oh by the way, you're dead. There was no way you'd have figured this out" style traps in them.  Dungeons of Dreadmore did that with the monster rooms.  Step on a trap, a section of wall falls away, have 30 out-of-depth monsters.  Two of those was enough for me to go "f-- this."  Other than that, Dreadmore was pretty slick and had some neat ideas.  But that kind of "and you're dead now" thing is only really appropriate for a game with some level of game-to-game progress.

Yeah, agreed on that. Dredmore did a lot of things really well, but honestly I just never could really get into it.  I prefer the more action-y roguelikes.  Ironic given Bionic Dues, but then again I often try to make stuff in areas I want to like, but don't.

Oh my. You have done it again.
I am excited .

 

[Misery]

The bit about what you lose or do not lose on progression, I think, is going to be entirely dependent on how the "items" found in a run work.

Most games of this sort do them in pretty much the same way that Isaac does:  They are what powers you up over the course of that run specifically, so that you are able to progress from the easy parts of that run, to the harder parts of that same run.  Just imagine though if ANY of the stuff in that game actually carried over from one run to the next!  The way that game's items work, it'd be a disaster.

Now that being said, I have a couple of ideas as to how this could work, so bear with me here...

Firstly, in the email I just sent to you, I mention a particular game as an example of certain things, but that game is also an example of this.  There are things outside of your run that you unlock, sort of like in Rogue Legacy but not all grindy.  But at the same time, there's ALSO the items like the ones in Isaac, which DONT carry over.  So you have something that does, and something that doesnt.  Rogue Legacy didn't do any of that second bit; you had what you brought with you, and that was pretty much it.  And honestly, I think that created a good deal of problems with that game.

But there's a couple of other ways to do it too.

One of my favorite roguelike-ish games, and one of my favorite games of all time, Baroque (found on the PS2, Wii, and for some baffling reason iOS) has a very unique way of dealing with this.  When you die in that game, you lose everything on you.  Everything.  BUT.  There are two mechanics in place that can allow you to hold a few things over ANYWAY, yet without doing so in a way that's all sorts of broken.  Method number 1 is the ability to "transfer" items back to town/base/whatever that main area coiuld be called.   Basically, there were certain set points in each run (in that game, they were always on the exact same floors every time), and when you reached one, you could send exactly ONE item through it.  Any item of any type that you want, you just chuck it in, and it vanishes and it sent back.  Back in the town, a character there receives these, but has a limited inventory (I think it was about 20 slots in that game).  Once you're dead, you start back in the town, and before you actually head to the tower to begin your run, you can stop by and talk to that guy and grab anything from him that you sent there.  This allows you to plan out your next run, giving yourself a bit of a head start based on what is going on in your CURRENT run.  It actually makes for a bit of a great "tough decision" sort of thing, which I find is a really, really good thing in this type of game.  You can only send ONE item through per transfer point in the dungeon, so you have to choose carefully.  And you can only hold so many items in that special inventory... you cant just give yourself every item ever over time, to pick from.  And of course, any item that you then take from there into the dungeon, you have a chance of losing if you die.... unless you transfer it again.   And of course, transferring something means you cannot use it on the rest of that particular run.  I, personally, love this system; I've seen a couple of other games do something similar, but not many.

Method number 2 though is.... hmm, I"m not sure what to call it.  In that game, there are these things called "brands" that you can use on basically.... anything.  You stick one onto an item, and it does something, and is stuck on that item; only one brand at a time.  There's a specific one that when stuck to something, causes the item to NOT vanish if you die.  It isnt sent back to the town though either; instead, that item (with it's exact stats, whatever those are) is guaranteed to appear on the very first floor of the tower when you begin another run.  The catch: once it does this, that brand "breaks", yet is still stuck on there.  So it wont do that again, and you cant just re-brand it, you need an item to remove the effect (and that's a whole other confusing explanation).  But that particular mechanic can make for a GREAT insurance policy for items you're finding to be really good at the time, and the item that actually does the branding is extremely satisfying to find.  It's like a "Heck yeah!  THIS thing!" sort of moment, pretty fun.   It's less fun when I accidentally launch the damn thing at a monster instead of using it, but that's another story....


Also:  I think RL's "progression by gold" system isnt a bad idea, but the biggest problem is that you always always always use or lose *all* of it between runs.  Well, I mean, you can cause small bits of it not to be lost by a certain upgrade, but for the most part, you're resetting that amount.   I think something like how currency worked in BD is better; even if half of your team is all smashed up, you're taking all that money with you and such.  So you ALWAYS get a chance to do something like that between dungeons, or just hoard it if you want.  I think that works really well.


Anyway, just some thoughts on that.

[crazyroosterman]

quote. 3. Well, the pilot is actually the last hydral from TLF, far far far into the future, so him dying is something I'd like to avoid.  Having something that turns his upgrades into some other form of currency or whatever is a cool idea, though.  Overall I'm really not wanting much of an economy, though -- unlike Rogue Legacy.





hey so I don't really having anything to contribute since the only roguelike/lite game I've really played is ftl which wasn't very much any way since I never felt I was really getting any were but what you just said there caught my eye I've been wanting to know what happened to the hydral for so freaking long(since you put up that lore questions topic for that other game basically) when I saw you mention I had a bit of a moment also pointless rambling aside were exactly is this game in the time line in regards to the other games?.

[Draco18s]

...Zelda games?  The items you get there are really spaced apart, and all of them are very useful (depending on the game).  Zelda 1 had a few duds, and some of the spells in the later part of Zelda 2 were useless.  Link To The Past is awesome, but has probably the largest number of useless items in it -- all late-game optional stuff that are fun goodies to find, though.  OOT stays pretty darn useful with everything, masks aside.  I guess Majora's Mask did have a ton of crud in it, Masks-wise in particular.  I don't recall any fluff in TP, but it's been a while.  Skyward Sword had cruft at the market, and all those billion collectables, which was definitely annoying.  Trying to go MMORPG it felt like.  But most of that could be ignored, and the core items were good.  Windwaker had a really tight design on the items, a very few exceptions later on.  The Wii U version is incredibly superior because of the lack of stupidity in wind controls.  Oh, and then there's the Link Between Worlds recent game on 3DS, which is probably the best Zelda game ever at this point.  That one had absolutely zero cruft.

Then there's a lot of handheld Zelda titles we won't discuss.   Particularly ones made by a third party.

Was more a problem of "hey a new enemy, ok its immune to that, ok its immune to that, ok its immune to that, ok its immune to that, ok its immune to that...ugh I have twenty more things to try."  It wasn't so much dud items but more that each enemy had a handful of specific items that were potentially useful against them and unless you'd been playing every title that ever existed up until that point you didn't understand the traditional connections back to the game where that enemy was originally introduced.

The items thing was something that got me in Risk of Rain and Terraria more than anything else.

The items thing in RoR is amazing.  I feel that they don't give the player enough choices up front, as the commando class is one of the harder ones to play "well" as a new player.  My guide for people I tell about the game is "just buy drones every time you find one.  Don't worry about dying, you're going to die a lot.  Just focus on buying those drones, because eventually you'll have bought 50 of them and it'll unlock the engineer class, which is way easier to play."  Engineer having three ways to attack stuff he's running away from compared to the commando's zero.

[Captain Jack]

Then there's a lot of handheld Zelda titles we won't discuss.   Particularly ones made by a third party.

I feel the need to point out that the Capcom Zelda team that worked on Ages and Seasons is now the main Zelda team at Nintendo. Ages/Seasons get no respect. 

You know Chris, you could make it so that ships from successful runs get converted to turrets for use during the invasions. Call it an efficiency thing; you've got the resources to make the shells but it's easier to just print a new one than it is to refuel one you already have. Turrets created like this have the bullet pattern and passive effects you have when you make it through a dungeon, while the active abilities get turned into resources/research units. Those r-things can be put towards building your own welcoming committee, studying permanent unlocks (based on things you brought back), or one-time dungeon buffs.

[steelwing]

For me I prefer it if there is no real consequence for death aside from the lack of progression.  A lot of the more recent ones have done that sort of thing.  There is ideally enough tension of getting close to achieving your goal in the current randomly-generated run and then having sweaty palms because you are about to lose and then none of that hard run actually pays off.  Though even there, having a few things carry over so you have the silver lining of SOME progress is good.  That's just me, though.

Agreed.  There does need to be some tension to it, death does need to have meaning.  I just feel that a lot of those "blank slate new game" games tend to put in too many "Oh by the way, you're dead. There was no way you'd have figured this out" style traps in them.  Dungeons of Dreadmore did that with the monster rooms.  Step on a trap, a section of wall falls away, have 30 out-of-depth monsters.  Two of those was enough for me to go "f-- this."  Other than that, Dreadmore was pretty slick and had some neat ideas.  But that kind of "and you're dead now" thing is only really appropriate for a game with some level of game-to-game progress.

I feel like Torchlight does this really well.  If your character does end up getting killed in a dungeon, you get three options:  Return to town and lose nothing; or pay x gold/xp to be sent back to the start of the current level/floor; or pay y gold/xp to stay where you are.  You don't lose any of your gear, which to me is a big deal.
The Last Federation and Bionic Dues are also both great models for what should happen when you lose a mission/"run", but they're both rather different games from what this proposes to be.  Of the two, Bionic Dues comes closest:  You go out on a mission; either you fail or succeed; you come back.  In BD, failure happens when you lose all your exos before reaching the mission RP.