Death loses all impact...

...if you treat it as just another monster.  Or Fear of the Unknown.

Whilst this post rubs shoulders with some of my recent posts about death mechanics its not really about that.

I've been playing a smattering of Alan Wake recently.  Nice game.  One of the thing it does well (admittedly I've not finished it yet) is to not explain too much about the Darkness that possesses all the people and turns them evil.  And one of the thing a lot of dRPGs do badly is turning all the evil undead creatures into just another mob.

Think of WoW.  IIRC pretty much the entire backstory hinged upon the Lich King and his army of undead.  You had zombies and skeletons to fight and all manner of other undeads.  But in reality they were just another mob.  By explaining too much, by fitting them into the overt parameters of a NPC character sheet, with their hit points and DoT attacks and such, fighting an undead - the great evil in the world - often felt little different to fighting anything else.  A rabid bear for example.

If my intended dRPG is to be any different, I think I'll be borrowing a little from - or at least tipping my hat to - Alan Wake.

Having some dark foreboding evil present in the shadows, always looking to claim your soul would work well in a game where I intend to have interesting and unusual mechanics to cover death.  These could be portrayed graphically in an interesting way too - as you get low on health the shadows loom and writhe and reach out to claim you.  As a ghost you may be more vulnerable to some of these deathly aspects and the corporeal members of your party may have to take measures to protect their spectral assistants.

It's just a thought.

Creeping shadows and a sense of foreboding, that's what you want.  Don't explain too much or you lose all the mystery.