The system I was “raised on” back when I was a MUDder was: DEATH LEAVES YOUR CORPSE WITH YOUR GEAR

Basically in that system, your corpse remained where you died. You had basically 3 options:
1) Get a resurrection of your corpse at place of death, or drag corpse to a different place and get resurrected – which resulted in minor/no xp loss and all your gear back
2) Get the corpse, which means getting your gear back, but major xp loss without ressurection
3) Leave your corpse, take the xp loss and lose all your gear

Positives of this system is the challenge it takes to get your corpse at times and incentive for resurrection and not dying.
Negatives of this system is the problem if you can’t get your corpse for whatever reason (busy RL or whatnot)… This can somewhat be alleviated by having insane corpse-decay times. Which creates the negative of having tons of player corpses laying across the world for large amounts of time. Kinda messy 😛

Thoughts? Ideas? Criticism?