Rare, please do not do a death tax until combat has been greatly enhanced. If you tax for death I won't likely bother with skeleton forts anymore. It's one thing to be equally gimped when fighting other players, it's quite another in pve.
Currently swinging your sword feels like an exercise in frustration. Three very sluggish swings followed by some amount of time being locked out of combat while skeletons are, as someone put it, 360-no-scoping you. A charge time on the sword lunge that more often than not gives at least one skeleton the chance to interrupt you.
The feeling I get in combat is that I'm fighting the controls more than I'm fighting the NPCs. I dunno how to perfectly describe it, but it's just absolutely frustrating and immersion breaking combat. Every swing of my sword and every constant forced break in the action reminds me that I'm not a pirate, just a frustrated player.
This combined with not being able to switch while running and sometimes not being able to run till your character is long done with doing whatever action you just did really frustrates the experience.
When I have to run away and hope my character properly switches to a banana and hope they eat it fast enough to not be blown to pieces it just really starts to wear you down.
With the game in its current state, the reward of the skeleton fort outdoes the frustration of constantly dying and feeling like there wasn't much you could do to not die besides never engage the fort in the first place, so we do them and despite the frustrating combat mechanics basically enjoy them. If you add a death tax on top of things as they are you are going to induce a storm of rage quits from this game.
TLDR: I'm not opposed to a death tax per se, but if it's even remotely significant in times where my death is not truly under my control, I will quickly lose interest in this game. It already takes a very long time to earn gold, I'm uncertain why we already need a gold sink.