[OOC] Death in Ultima Online

[WarderDragon]

How do the roleplayers and storytellers on your shard confront the issue of death? How do you reconcile the permanent deaths of storyline and player RPCs with the ease of ressurection and the vast availability of Wandering Healers?

I thought this would be a worthy topic for discussion.

 

[WarderDragon]

I am copying this from another thread. This is the interpretation I and several roleplayers on Baja have chosen to adopt.

Our shard confronts death in a unique manner.

We tend to interpret the death of a character (with some minor exceptions) as being 'knocked out' or 'near death.' You've experienced such a threshold of pain that the characters soul is severed from the flesh and is allowed to escape from what is otherwise a living human form. If the soul is rescued (ressurected) before the body dies (decays) it can return to reinhabit the body and live to fight another day. We tend to interpret those wearing death robes as souls (non-combatants) in RPvP Situations. Corpses are seen as comatose. The act of looting the corpse (body disappears) is interpreted as the character awakening.

If the characters form is killed (i.e. Casca or a killed RPC) it would take much more power to bring back that soul and clothe it in new flesh. Difficult but not impossible.

This interpretation allowed for us to have real death be possible in our fiction without death as a game mechanic becoming trivial or ignored. I remember being assassinated IC and being a witness at my own murder trial a month later. So I thought up this solution and have been using it since.

 

[GalenKnighthawke]

I am copying this from another thread. This is the interpretation I and several roleplayers on Baja have chosen to adopt.

I've always done the same thing; considered death to be "unconsciousness" unless there was some specific reason to treat it different. For example, on Great Lakes, one of the evil guilds is established as being extremely necromantric in nature, so their deaths are literal deaths, and their resurrections are, if not resurrections per se, at least being put into a state of conscious undeath.

Galen, interestingly, is returned from the dead himself, through means and for a reason which were never specified. (This was a way to get around having killed him off during a period when I wasn't playing. Sadly, I lack the ability to effectively RP another character, it seems, at least to RP another character full-time.)

The implication is that in the UO universe, coming back from the dead isn't unknown, but isn't easy or common.

-Galen's player

 

[sablestorm]

We do much the same, having a resurrection be a powerful healing spell cast to save a person's life. Sometimes we'll take it a bit further for story purposes where a character that returns in this manner requires a further cure. Thus we create new adventures where other heroes must seek rare ingredients in order to fully restore a character.