on extra lives in general: if extra lives aren't needed to win, they're a crutch for bad play, but if they are, I'm not sure they're feasible at all without huge variance in trivial/unwinnable games.
considering this:
general lives improvement idea:
to make life loss important, what if it had a nasty permanent effect on the character?
mild death/strict lives version:
- less total lives
- extra lives are not capped (a cap means that losing a life from the cap and then gaining it again means pretty much no loss); desired caps should apply to the total potential lives.
- no grinding for more lives (I said pretty much no loss because in the current system there is a permanent loss, but it only matters if the player goes for virtual levels over 27, since that lets players get ungotten lives)
nasty death/lax lives version:
- each death makes the game substantially harder to play, by heavy item loss or putting a nasty multiplier on maxhp
- a lives counter is unnecessary if, by the chosen death penalty, within a few deaths, the player will naturally permadie
alternatively, what if, to smooth out the variance in trivial/unwinnable games, death had some, or was purely restricted to, tactical effects?
This may also be coupled with extra lives and the above, but if not, it should come with enough felid changes to require deaths in normal play, but give the player enough leeway to escape, limited by skill, some degree of luck, escape items, how badly the player screwed up, and whatnot, ending up about the same as escape from normal catastrophic failure.
Failure to escape means death, of course, but I'm not quite sure how to exactly do this.
I can't think of anything good for this; sorry.