Roleplaying Through Death: Ideas and Challenge Modes (Long)

[Porchdrinker]

As a die-hard roleplayer, I've experimented with different rules, restrictions, and challenges regarding in-game death. When I first got into in-game roleplaying, I noticed two basic opposite mindsets behind dealing with character death consequences: "dead-is-dead" mode (start a new character if your current character dies) and the "ignore and reload" mindset (or "death-is-unavoidable"). After reading many discussions about character death on these forums and other sites, I decided to compile a list of creative ways to address death and add some challenge for immersive roleplayers. Some of these are my own creation, some have been paraphrased/borrowed from people more creative than I am.

Based on my research and brainstorming, there are four additional ways to build roleplay scenarios and challenges around character death: coming up with restrictions to limit the number of "allowable" deaths (as a survival challenge); imposing punishments for death outcomes; establishing a level or event after which death becomes final; or creating "head canon" to explain death or immortality within the context of a character's story. I've listed ideas for various iterations of these below.

Limited Number of Deaths -

The Eight or the Nine: your character has eight (or nine) lives, with each life corresponding to one of the divines.

13 Stones: your character has thirteen lives, one for each standing stone. When you lose a life, you have to activate a new standing stone before proceeding.

16 Princes: your character has 16 lives, one for each Daedric prince in the game.

Arcade Mode: your character has three lives, but earns a bonus life every five or ten levels. None of this is acknowledged in your story, but your final life turns your roleplay into dead-is-dead. It's really just a way to make survival more important without the harshness of a single life dead-is-dead approach.

Conditional Dead-Is-Dead -

Plot Climax: all deaths are forgivable until your character reaches a defining task or battle after level 20. It could be a specific quest or dungeon of your choosing, but the quest/task is bound by DID rules. Building to this moment is the key to your character's story.

Turning Point: Deaths are forgivable until a certain objective is completed in the story. For example, when your character finally chooses a side in the civil war or joins a certain guild, you shift to dead-is-dead mode.

Death by Element: deaths do not count unless it's by a certain element (fire, shock, or ice)

Death by Creature: only deaths suffered at the hand of a certain creature (dragons, hagravens, spriggans, wisp mothers, etc) is final.

Death by Situation: Death is only final in certain places or types of battle. For example, if a character obsessed with Dwarven ruins, consider a rule where death is final if it happens inside one.

Explainable Immortality -

The Gift: Prior to coming to Skyrim, your character completed a quest or interacted with an artifact that made you either permanently or temporarily immortal by your own choice.

The Curse: you were cursed by a Daedra or an immensely powerful evil wizard to never reach the afterlife.

The Quest: your character dies either courageously or accidentally, and is shocked and confused by his own resurrection. He tempts the fates again, dies, and arises once more. He then begins an endless quest for answers as to why he cannot die.

The Prophesies: your character's death was just a vision or a warning from the gods to choose a different strategy or tactic than what was planned.

The Department of Obvious: you're the dragonborn, which makes you immortal.

Punishments for Death -

Death-as-Defeat 1 (Mandatory Healing Time): instead of dying, you were wounded and left for dead. To "heal" from this, you need to drink x health or stamina potions per day, sleep a certain number of days, spend a certain amount of coin, etc.

Death-as-Defeat 2 (Tangible Loss by Theft): you were left for dead, and the nemesis that felled you has made off with your gold and or a valuable piece of equipment. Deposit these into a barrel to roleplay being looted. To avoid a situation of a bear looting you, you could only follow this rule if killed by a human.

What do you think? Are there any variations that I may have missed or that you are currently using? Should I post this in the Guides section to help other roleplayers? More importantly, how do you personally deal with death in your roleplay builds?

 

[Nocte Aeterna]

This is the sort of thing where I punch myself in the face for not coming up with it myself. You have my praise.

 

[Rand Althor]

The most hardcore version of this is to destroy your copy of the game once you die and never play it again.

 

[Xevous92]

I just started a new Dead is dead play through on expert. Still alive fortunately, I really like the standing stones Idea, as well as "the prophecies". Thanks for making my brain think!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

[Wildroses]

I once combined death by punishment with a 'no waiting' rule. Part of what I had to do when I died was head to the nearest inn and hang around there between three to seven days (depening how long it took me to find an inn). But I was only allowed to wait on that game if I had a book. It was quite interesting in a kind of boring way. When you are stuck in an inn for lots of in-game days, having books is really important, and so is making conversation with all the people who come in and out. You also tend to search the inn over very, very carefully looking for more books (Delphine has a book about dragons under the counter, and there are a surprising amount of books in the Bannered Mare if you check cupboards and under beds). On the plus side, you do find a lot of things and hear a lot of conversations you might not have otherwise if you play this way. It is also a good motivator to stay alive. "If I die, I've got to go back to an inn and wait several days! Noooo!"

I plan to make a pure mage who knows alchemy soon, and I'm thinking with her if she or her pet dog dies, she isn't allowed to use magic for three days as she has to devote it all to healing. No questing is going to happen if she isn't allowed to use her primary weapon to defend herself.

 

[Porchdrinker]

I once combined death by punishment with a 'no waiting' rule. Part of what I had to do when I died was head to the nearest inn and hang around there between three to seven days (depening how long it took me to find an inn). But I was only allowed to wait on that game if I had a book. It was quite interesting in a kind of boring way. When you are stuck in an inn for lots of in-game days, having books is really important, and so is making conversation with all the people who come in and out. You also tend to search the inn over very, very carefully looking for more books (Delphine has a book about dragons under the counter, and there are a surprising amount of books in the Bannered Mare if you check cupboards and under beds). On the plus side, you do find a lot of things and hear a lot of conversations you might not have otherwise if you play this way. It is also a good motivator to stay alive. "If I die, I've got to go back to an inn and wait several days! Noooo!"

I plan to make a pure mage who knows alchemy soon, and I'm thinking with her if she or her pet dog dies, she isn't allowed to use magic for three days as she has to devote it all to healing. No questing is going to happen if she isn't allowed to use her primary weapon to defend herself.

Great ideas. I really like the "no waiting" rule as a punishment. I abuse the sleep and wait functions when my characters are recovering, so I might give this a whirl. I have, however, spent large chunks of time in inns and shops to hear all of the dialogue, and it's absolutely true that you eventually hear things that you might not have heard if you just get in and get out. One of my characters used to cook and eat breakfast at the Riverwood Trader a few days per week, and i heard a bunch of dialogue that I hadn't heard in over 600 hours of gameplay split across six characters.

 

[Cordelia]

I started employing the "Prophecies" approach to Cordelia's in-game deaths early on; more vivid than a dream, but with the fleeting, fading transience of a dream once "reality" is re-established.

I do like the "no waiting" rule as well, though. I think it helps with the immersion aspect when you have to take the time in-game to tend to wounds and recover fully.

On my Suriah play-trough I stopped running/jogging everywhere, I fast-traveled only to drop things off or make quick sales, and made sure to sleep eight or so hours at night, camping in relatively safe zones and not traveling at night and what have you -- I feel it expands the role playing aspect exponentially, and definitely helps give a sense of the passage of time when thinking about how to parlay the adventures into prose.

 

[Porchdrinker]

I started employing the "Prophecies" approach to Cordelia's in-game deaths early on; more vivid than a dream, but with the fleeting, fading transience of a dream once "reality" is re-established.

I do like the "no waiting" rule as well, though. I think it helps with the immersion aspect when you have to take the time in-game to tend to wounds and recover fully.

On my Suriah play-trough I stopped running/jogging everywhere, I fast-traveled only to drop things off or make quick sales, and made sure to sleep eight or so hours at night, camping in relatively safe zones and not traveling at night and what have you -- I feel it expands the role playing aspect exponentially, and definitely helps give a sense of the passage of time when thinking about how to parlay the adventures into prose.

Cordelia:

Thanks for your reply. I agree that passage of time and non-questing activities are important to any immersion-based roleplay. I dislike that the vanilla game allows you to become guildmaster of various guilds within 30 or 60 days (or even fewer) of starting your adventure.

The "prophecies" approach probably makes the most sense for a new roleplayer or someone taking a step up in difficulty. The concept of "healing" is vital to anyone who wants to add realism to the game. If you almost died, and had to use potions or restoration to survive, why not give your character some time to heal from those injuries by doing non-violent, non-questing things? For those of us who use Skyrim to tell stories, I think healing rituals and passage of time are essential to adding realism to our adventures.

 

[Cordelia]

I have to confess; the main reason I chose to use the Prophecy approach was laziness. Cordelia is my "experience everything" character most in line with what I would choose, so I haven't gone thieves guild, Dark Brotherhood, or murder-innocents-for-fun-and-profit routes, but everything else I experience through her first. If I employed some of the other death ideas, I feel it would restrict the freedom element intrinsic to the character's design and use. That said, I didn't want to shatter the role playing feeling entirely with the complete ignoring of all in-game deaths, so the Prophecy aspect made it feel like little flashes of "You really -- I mean REALLY -- do not want to do that." So, it's not a relative newness to the idea of role playing that determined my choice, but a conscious decision not to use other alternatives, because an exploratory character that happens to facilitate role playing shouldn't have too many restrictions imposed. Restrictions can be saved and tailored for other characters created to facilitate other experiences.

Again I cite Suriah. She's a voracious learner obsessed with the Dwemer, and later with the ancient Nords, dragons, the dragon language, and by extension the Dragonborn. The only weapon she carries is a Dwemer dagger she picked up in her first ruin; she casts spells from scrolls and uses staves, with a taste for Conjuration to supplement scholarly skills; she collects every book she encounters everywhere, ruined or not (restoring books was her favorite activity as a child); she walks everywhere; her personality dictates no interest in fashion, and no need for armor, so she wears mage robes exclusively (though in one save she did pick up some vampire armor for the Conjuration bonus, and was fashionable for a hot Cyrodiilic second). She travels with a follower, currently Vorstag in a Skyrim shared by Cordelia during a period when Cordelia and Vorstag weren't together, but later an analog for her brother, Sebastian. Sebastian, also a playable character who will have an analog for Suriah in his files, has to wait to join his sister, having arrived in Skyrim a full five years before her. While I won't be playing five years of game time before they reunite, I will be playing a wait time of six months as he tries to catch her up.

Things like fast traveling, no armor or enchantment restrictions, instantaneous healing, no starvation, or penalties for no sleep (in vanilla) kind of break the spell cast by the potential embodied in the rest of the game; just because you CAN do something doesn't necessarily mean you should, because the game allows so many conflicting, yet simultaneous options and accommodates so many play styles. Walking, sleeping, eating meals at regular intervals whether you need them for health or not, "healing" grievous wounds over time, and avoiding Certain Death situations, I feel, preserve and encourage the ability to take on the role of the character you're playing; if you know or suspect something will kill your character, don't rush in to learn from your character's death what you shouldn't have done; avoid the fight like you have no alternative. Save those risky decisions for something really important, because it lends greater weight and emotional investment in the outcome.