The Problem with Death
By Bricu | September 24, 2009
Death isn’t permanent in Azeroth. Except when it is permanent (Fordring’s child, for instance). How do we handle “dying” in an instance versus “dying” in an RP story? How do any protagonists or villains in our stories stay dead when any two bit paladin, priest, shaman or druid can resurrect them?
I’ll be honest, we skip this issue. We let the people of our RP group decide when one of their characters are “finally dead” or just “mostly dead.” This extends to foils too. The person in control of the story determines what happened to the NPC. This is not a perfect solution by any means; however, it works for us.
How do other RP communities handle the question of death in WoW?
4 Comments
Yva on September 24, 2009 at 2:38 pm.
I handle death in instances as knocked out, incapacitated, or a forced retreat, myself. It doesn’t seem to work otherwise.
Itanya Blade on September 24, 2009 at 3:17 pm.
What she said.
Omega2 on September 24, 2009 at 3:50 pm.
Same as Yva, yeah. When things get tough, everybody is assumed to have hauled ass somewhere safe, explaining the run back through the instance.
As for RP deaths… someone will die when they have to. When we’re doing events and someone gets knocked to 0HP, we’ll assume they have been knocked unconscious and will come back to their senses eventually, even faster if someone helps them out (read: corpse run or rez). If their death is intentional within the RP, then yeah… they’re dead. No coming back unless it was all merely a setback.
Corise on September 24, 2009 at 3:56 pm.
Mostly what they said, but once in a while, I’ve had a compelling reason to RP out an actual death and resurrection in an instance. The example that springs to mind was when Jenive was level 30 or so. Her friend (now life-partner) Imble was running her through Gnomeregan IC-ly. Everything went fine until the very end, when Jenive got separated from Imble and overrun by those awful Dark Iron mobs. Predictably, bitty mage went splat before Imble could do anything about it.
After finishing off the Dark Irons, Imble pulled out her goblin jumper cables and… nothing happened. Rather than release spirit and run back, I saw an opportunity for some serious RP and had Jenive just stay down. Cue Imble freaking out and begging for help via buzzbox. Ultimately, one of the Boomstick Gang’s priests came out and cast a resurrection spell, and Jenive was okay — but the experience left both girls extremely shaken, and after working through the angst, they became closer as a result. (We played it as Imble’s jumper cables keeping Jenive’s heart beating long enough for Ettine to get there in time to heal her properly — more of a clinical death than anything, but plenty scary for Imble.)
Basically, I just play it by ear. If RPing an actual death would make for good drama or character development, I go for it. Otherwise, I just assume that my character/party has taken a pretty good beating, but they’ll be okay once they regroup, get healing, etc.
I think the most annoying aspect of death in RP is trying to figure out how to treat the deaths of instance bosses and major quest/lore figures. My RP circle tends to just gloss over that kind of thing, but it can lead to minor confusion at times.