This is actually part of a much larger design issue... darn gonna need to think about this for a bit.
OK think I\'ve got some stuff, and just to clear things up, when I say \"dungeon\" that just means an area with hostile creatures.
OK lets just throw out a few points then, firstly a player should not be able to manually log out when in combat or when they are inside a dungeon. So perhaps there would be certain sacred areas that were basically \"save points\" you could log out at and set as a spawn point. Such points could also be setup by players in the world, although probably not in a hostile area.
So basically if you got very far in a dungeon and had to leave, youl\'d be screwed. If the areas are numerous enought though, that you would never have to be in an area for more than maybe an hour or two with out being able to reach one, that might be fair thought, since you would never lose that much progress. The other option though, is having items or spells that let you teleport back to a save point. If such things only let you return to the last point you recorded at, I think that is pretty fair, but I haven\'t thought out all the issues surrounding that.
As for the game crashing or you getting booted by the server, I assume the game could tell the difference between that and someone logging off. In that case you should probably just come back right where you were, if that keeps a monster from killing you, just chalk it up to good luck. I guess you could manually crash the game, but if that can be detected as something different from the game crashing on its own or a server kick, maybe the game could tell and just leave the player there just standing idle until they log back on, and whatever happens to them happens.
Hmmmm, now that I think of it though that might be the best way to handle death as well. When you die, you just simply return to the last point you saved with all your items and stats reset to when you saved there, like in any normal single-player RPG game. I\'m not trying to think of any logic to go along with that, but I just think it\'s a very fair way to do things as opposed to all those complications of taking experience and item losses when you die and stuff. Of course though I still don\'t remember if that suggestion about having to travel through a realm of the dead to return to life was something the devs were thinking about using, but I\'m pretty sure that could still work here.
