As it is now, it's impossible for me to make sense of the DR roleplay wise, and I don't see a way how a deathrealm could ever work. If someone dies, should we be shocked? If someone returnes from the death, should we be amazed? If so, then how often should we be shocked or amazed? Even if only heroes are supposed to be able to escape the DR, in practice there always will be so many "heroes" that it will be impossible to keep acting like it's something rare. Should we talk about every regular player as if it was a mystical genius who has come back from the deathrealm over ten times?
Being able to take your stuff to the deathrealm and sell it there and bring back the trias makes it even stranger.
I understand that the deathrealm is planned to become much larger, to become a fully fledged alternative world in which "evil" characters could reside. However, I don't see how that would change anything though. There will always be people, who want to get back to their friends in the world of the living as soon as possible. If we would make the DR very big, and escaping it very time consuming, the positive thing would be that it would make people less riskless and make dying and returning from the death less common. On the flip side, this is a game, besides realistic it also has to be fun. IMO keeping people for a longer period of time in places where they don't want to be simply insn't fun. Especially for new players who tend to die more often because they yet have to find the limits of what their character can handle, and are usually more clumsy with falling from steep slopes.
Right now, new players easily can spend two hours in the DR to find the exit from a place where they don't chose to be in the first place. Some are even making new chars each time they die. If you consider that, we can only guess how many new players will even stop playing PS because of the deathrealm if it becomes much larger.
My suggestion would be to change the deathrealm into a coma-realm. People who "die" don't die but get into a coma instead, and have to fight a mental battle which is finding the exit of the coma-realm. When you find the exit, you should get back to the place where you "died", rather then to a fixed spawn point. Everything done and said in the coma-realm should be forgotten by the char, and to other characters it would be like you didn't even die but just escaped death by an inch. We are all heroes, we don't ever die, but our chars don't know that on before hand and should fear death in a normal way. More or less like movie heroes do. This system also leaves possibilities for others to cast spells on the "death" body, either to bring it back to life instantly with a minimum amount of hps, or to give him more strength so he can progress through the deathrealm with more speed or something like that. That way it can be RPd as if your life has been saved by a friend, which is fun.
The contradiction Zanzibar found gives me the feeling that the devs don't have a detailed, flashed out idea about what the DR should become and how it should work. I hope they find a creative solution.
