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Scared of Death
Talked to a guy that said "I die a lot it's no big deal I just embrace
and get back to killing stuff and eventually die again." So I went on to
explain to him that one of these days Lord Thoth is just going to get
tired of sending him back and tell him to pull up a chair he will be
there for awhile. Then I wondered if that has ever actually happened, and now i'm refusing to ever die again.
6
Comments
The truth may also lie somewhere inbetween: IC characters may well be aware that it's very likely that they will be brought back to life after dying, since that is an observable phenomenon, but they have no guarantee, so there remains some uncertainty - particularly since there are also known cases of permanent death (e.g. the destruction of Thera etc.).
I think you can both RP someone who is rather careless about death and fully expects to come back to life, as well as someone who fears that his next death may well be permanent. Both seem to be credible character choices to me.
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It's also hard to see how someone who has died a dozen times, who is around hundreds of other people who have died hundreds of times, would still be afraid. That's like being afraid that the sun might not come up in the morning - it might not, you have no way of knowing for certain, but if you met someone who seemed very seriously worried about the possibility, you would probably think they were delusional.
Of course, that also presents a problem since death being cheap somewhat limits the degree to which anyone can claim meaningful victory or defeat. The usual "We stomped all over you, take that!" immediately followed by "Whatever! You didn't do any lasting damage! We're too resilient" (read: the game mechanics preclude lasting damage) already gets really tiresome, but death being cheap seems to make it even worse. So I can understand that desire to act like death is more meaningful than a reasonable adventurer in Achaea would probably consider it.
Also, regarding the "no guarantee" - adventurers do seem to have a guarantee, and the "adventurer" designator does seem to be canonical, not just an OOC thing. When large-scale destruction happens, for instance, it often does kill adventurers in the area too, but they come back, even when other people involved (denizens and the nameless multitudes contained in room descriptions) don't.
The only really plausible IC justification I can think of is maybe characters assume that the adventurers of players who go dormant actually died and didn't come back - or died and took a lot longer to come back than usual?
No matter if it was Sarapis, Maya, or Thoth being the master of ceremonies in the death ritual, this element of judgement was always there.
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Perhaps the distinction between adventurers and denizens is the concept of a concrete soul. It's a fact that adventurers have one, as we can talk and communicate with them, and while as a soul removed from a corporeal body, adventurers seem to retain all their faculties. The souls are aware of what's happened to them, know where they are, are capable of communication, and most of the time have a general idea of how to remedy their lack of body. "Life after death" in this case is a concrete, observable thing. The body isn't a necessity and may be reforged around the soul.
On the other hand, we never see the souls of the guards slain in a raid wandering around, bodiless. That may be why adventurers have the guarantee and the rest do not - somewhere along the line the adventurers acquired a soul that matured to the point where bodies became expendable and easily remade through whatever magic remakes them, be it the Flame or otherwise. The rest weren't so lucky and so can be compared to our real life selves: the body isn't expendable and may very well be the only one we get, depending on what you believe.
But unfortunately we don't know that, so we're stuck with the belief of an overly benevolent god of death. And that's if we even have to see the guy, which in most cases we don't. Immolation is a thing and it's possible to enter the Flame and be granted a new body without ever entering those halls. Why take the chance for the guilty verdict, however small it may be, if you can just bypass the process entirely and use a "get out of jail free" card?
I look back at it and see it as young druid has epic battles with a few deers and bunnies and loses everytime, eventually Lord Thoth looks at the young druid and says "Little one you fail at life, your wasting everyone's time including yours, and your not goin' back this time."
Hence I now have a fear of death too many repeated deaths right after each other I feel I have failed at life and suicide myself and now i'm more careful than I was before because I don't want to rage quit and lose all the progress I had
I personally like to think of it as that Adventurers are noticeably "special" in some sense and can noticeably resurrect themselves, but that there are many others who are born, live and die because their time is up. Including denizens that get bashed - rather than making their own journey and resurrecting, it's just that more "step out" from those background multitudes. Except for named characters, perhaps.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
A similar thing can be said for the whole adventurer/denizen separation. There are good reasons to believe that the distinction between the two is indeed an IC fact, but at the same time, we have to concede that where exactly the distinction lies and how pronounced it is is very much left open by the game.
These are questions that probably don't have a single correct answer and I think that's a good thing. Lore and transparency are great, but there should also be room for some mysterious corners within the game that remain vague.
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That quality is what my character believes to be the reason as to why they come back so easily - anyone who has that strong a sense of self has a greater destiny, something like another Bal'met thing in the future since they're -also- invariably incredibly skilled at burning entire villages to the ground.
It's a pretty nice way to pass off the blase attention to death, and also neatly explains why some things come back but others don't.
Putting it even more simply:
The body is a soul's version of clothes. A zombie is what happens when you don't do your laundry in god damn ages.
Denizen Kills Your Deaths
Slain : 11728 To Adventurers : 2 (both for reincarnation purposes)
Levels : 627430 To Denizens : 0
Avg Level: 53 To Misadventure: 0
(Killed way too many gnolls <60, else my avg level would be alot higher
SUGGESTION: Every time you die, you suffer a 1 point loss to each stat for X amount of time before it will go back to the original value. The time is not based on "online" time, but time spent actively doing something.
Should I have posted this elsewhere?
- How do you determine "actively doing something"? Is it time spend off-balance, because then people are just going to AFK with a trigger to writhe over and over. And a ton of activities in the game (especially RP-focused activities) don't have any balance loss or anything similar to use as a metric.
- This means that there's pretty much no coming back from a failed engagement in a raid - every time you lose, it becomes even harder to overcome people who beat you when you didn't have a disadvantage.
- This essentially just amounts to time that can't be spent playing the game since no one is going to want to fight at a big disadvantage.
- It's weird in that it would mean that people who fight a lot (and consequently die more frequently) pretty swiftly become killable by relatively weak characters.
- If somehow you did find a way to enforce "actively doing something", you would be punishing people who play primarily for combat, who don't have other things to be doing. Their only option would be to do something they don't want to do or to go fight at a disadvantage, die, and accrue a worse penalty.
The only time I've seen wounds systems like this work is when there was some way to mitigate the wounds relatively quickly and that mitigation method was used as a way to drive players into closer proximity with one another - specifically in Star Wars Galaxies where you had to go visit a cantina and listen to musicians (other players) to heal the wounds. I don't know how well that would work in Achaea though and even in SWG, mostly people just walked into cantinas and walked back out a minute later with no interaction, and most of the musicians were just bots.Just figured it made more sense than:
LOL i died LOL lets go back and die again LOL because i might get our experience back LOL i am such a brave badass LOL i fear nothing LOL
Average adventurer kill level I consider slightly more significant, at least to a certain degree, since it does actually point out pure newbie-killers.
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