   Leveling Via Gear Means Deleveling Possible
In a single player RPG, if gear and property were the only way to level and these could be lost, destroyed or taken away, would this be a disincentive to level?The single player RPG I've been thinking of has some rather unconventional stats, such as Ingenuity and Motivation along with more conventional ones like Strength and Intelligence. As in many RPGs, stats provide the basis for skills. If stats go up or down, skills adjust accordingly.I've been looking for ways to bind the player more firmly to the world around them. One thought is that gear and property (and possibly NPC relationships) provide direct bonuses to stats. Power armor might boost strength, for instance, which relate to combat skills, but owning a home might directly improve a stat like Motivation, which relates to a bunch of money making skills.This seems fine until I think about losing them. If you lose your armor, your Strength goes down. If you lose your home, your Motivation suffers. While this MIGHT motivate you to protect the ace armorsmith who maintains/repairs your gear and protect your country from invasions that would harm your home, it could also mean repetition to regain any losses.Is the fear of going down in "level" and having to rebuild a powerful enough disincentive to outweigh the benefit of binding the player to the world they inhabit?   
  It becomes a real disincentive if the player can lose everything. Players can deal with small even moderate losses, but if it is a huge loss that they put lot of time and effort into then it is not only a disincentive it becomes something to discourage them from playing the game altogether. A lot of the fun people have with RPG's is the building up of the character's power, if you take that power away, they lose the fun. You could adjust this by having only recent properties be lost or parts of a property be lost. But if you just bulldoze their houses down and melt their weapons and armor you basically just said your work in the last 2 to 40 hours or something meant absolutely nothing. At which point they find the install disk, break it in half, go to the game's forum and try to rip you a new one with a very colorful forum post about how much your games sucks and how much you as a developer and designer suck and that they'll never buy your games again...until your next one;).   ;  I'm not sure I fully understand the question, as I don't see a disincentive to collecting items even if items are the only form of power enhancement, whether or not those items can be lost/destroyed.  I'll give my thoughts.Losing power is not necessarily a bad thing.  Players lose power in games all the time, without realizing it.  When a player runs of out ammunition for a rocket launcher, he has to switch back to his machine gun, which isn't as powerful.  If a member of your squad dies, or is incapacitated, you've lost the power that the squad member provided.  If some protective spell or power-up fades, you've lost power.The difference between these examples and what I saw from your example is the way these methods of power are framed.  Power-ups are seen as temporary.  Ammunition is seen as mutable and ever changing.  Reduction in squad sizes due to attrition/incapacitation is seen as, natural and temporary ("I'll revive him/hire more guys later,").Focus on making the things that will effect your player's action naturally mutable.  Power armor might boost strength by some moderate, fixed amount, and offer an even bigger increase in strength while it maintains a healthy supply of some fuel.  The fuel could be refillable, or not.  Since the concept of acquiring an item is generally viewed as a fixed reward (people don't like item degradation), the power armor itself remains in the player's possession, but the player has 'de-leveled' by running out of the fuel to power its special enhancements.Realize that this type of behavior will likely encourage scavenging gameplay.  Fallout 3 is an example of this in action.  Weapons and armor degrade with each use.  In addition to finding ammunition for weapons, players must scavenge copies of weapons and armor from defeated foes, and use them to 'repair' the wear and tear.  Degraded weapons do noticeably less damage.Anyway, I think the issue of how much "power" a character has is only relevant when compared to the power of things around him.  It is not uncommon for a twist of the story to have the player controlling a weaker protagonist, or to have the protagonist undergo a change, and have the game start anew at level 1.  It has happened before, and worked well.  Dragon Warrior 4 had this occur several times, once with each chapter.  The player is happily dealing 500 damage per hit to monsters with 10,000hp, then the story says *ZAP* and now the player is dealing 50 damage to monsters with 1,000hp.  As long as that *ZAP* was an interesting story arc, and I know I wont be grinding for the same abilities I had previously (note: grinding assumes there won't be interesting story segments pushing my progress along), then I don't see a problem.  I'm playing a single-player RPG for the story more so than the chance to get an uber level 500 wizard/warrior/thief/mechanic/god.   ;  I agree with Edge and Kru.I think that as long as a big loss in gear/money/power still means progression in the story/gameplay, then it is fine. But if you lose all your power then have to repeat what you have already done just to get back to the same spot, then that is bad/boring and I would definately be one of the people Kru describes.   ;  If the only way to increase your power is by getting items which can be destroyed, then the system will require it to be either very easy to get new items, which will, to a certain extent, make the item less important/meaningful to the player, or very hard to destroy items. You could also give 'ghost bonuses', so even though your house has been destroyed, you now have a little more motivation, because you want to get the house back. This bonus would be replaced by getting any new house, but the bigger the house you had, the bigger the bonus. So it isn't a total loss.;  Make sure there are always backups.  When the player gets a level 10 armor he can store the level 9 armor away and eventually pick up extra level 10 armor.  Now when equipment is lost, not everything is lost.You probably will have to balance likelihood of loosing equipment vs the availability.  Possibly increase the danger as the value of the item increases...   