In my years on AD, Character death has been very rare. Which is not a bad thing, I really enjoy it when a character passing away or being permanently injured has an emotional impact.
What are your experiences with lethality in events? How do you enjoy it being handled? Do you ever feel like you or other players don’t take threats in events seriously enough because they know they can’t be killed without player consent?
I’ve definitely noticed this when I engaged more with city RP, particularly as a grunt or guard, characters start acting in ways that I can only describe as ‘fully aware that they can only get hurt if their player types /e gets hurt’. It’s extremely unfun.
I do not, however, expect everyone to just keel over and die at my command. Instead, I’d rather see them not enter situations where grave injury or death are the most likely possible outcomes.
Generally just offing a char out of nowhere has very little weight and people won’t care all too much, I get that, it’s better reserved for impactful moments and longstanding rivalries, from a narrative standpoint. But then maybe don’t stand in the middle of orgrimmar bragging about how many grunts you’ve killed 
I expect people not to kill off each other’s characters unless prompted, and the same expected for me, in any situation. However, it does mean avoiding situations where death would happen. Even so…! I don’t believe in making someone kill off their character. Sometimes it cannot be helped that a situation escalates to death situations.
It does happen a lot where people put themselves into these situations and know people feel like this, however, and that’s bad for everybody. And these people are bleh. Shouldn’t do it! But eh. Can’t stop them.
Death can be emotional but it can also suck.
As someone whose entire guild concept was sparked by the character death of a beloved friend IC, prompting us to form a brotherhood in his name, I will admit - I wish we would see more lethality in general BUT… I totally understand that if at all, then people want their death to be meaningful IC - leave an impact maybe.
The way we deal with it during events is simple, since we use a dnd-esque system with HP and all. Whenever someone drops to 0 HP, they gain a point of fatigue that lasts for 2 weeks. And with every stacking point of fatigue, they ought to play out the condition of their character worsening. There is a red thread for it in our system, but nothing is enforced - we simply hold players accountable to know the limits of their characters and thus far it worked fine. Right now…we have two player characters actually being thrown into a coma because they got royally f’ed up in our just concluded campaign XD Love to see it as DM.
This really is the crux of the matter. We all have the right to determine our character’s fate but that doesn’t mean our choices won’t impact the enjoyment of those around us – placing your OC in a situation where death is just about the only reasonable outcome and then refusing it is a display of bad etiquette.
There’s a reason why I don’t get into roleplayed fights outside of people I know/trust, because I have no interest in killing my character off and I don’t enjoy the expectation of making my character ‘killable’.
I once had an encounter with a guy in SW who was terrible with this. Getting into fights he couldn’t win and then begrudgingly accepting defeat after being put through the ringer.
Only to then resurrect his character a few days later. Speedwagon warned him after a couple of threats, and then he didn’t understand why he got shot for charging at a man with a drawn gun.
That’s the other extreme yeah and equally uninteresting to engage with, yeah. Fortunately been a while since I experienced it, and back then i just emoted doing a tripple backflip over the shotgun blast easily and that seemingly got the message across, or at least killed the person’s interest in that kinda wacky RP
What I’ll also say is that I’m not especially fond of people who make their characters too killable. I get it, Azeroth is a dangerous place and it’s only to be expected that people die every day due to perilous circumstances. However, we’re here to tell cooperative stories together, which means developing the relationships because OCs.
If someone bins their blorbo on a whim every month or so, where’s the out of character impetus for me to invest in the next one, since I’ll have to come to assume that I won’t get anything long-term out of it.
I think that’s entirely valid as well.
Personally I do feel like once I commission art of a character, it becomes much more difficult to kill them off. Since there’s a certain monetary investment in it at that point.
Which feels kind of weird to type out, but I hope it makes sense.
Generally yes.
Now I have no qualms with people not killing their chars off, I don’t want to have mine pass.
But! So many never take hits or when the most minor ones going.
If death isn’t a threat, injury should be.
This really. I may not kill my chars off anytime soon, but I do try to take injuries in fights if it happens.
I do think that even injuries shouldn’t be taken lightly and be comunicated tho. I am really not interested in something drastic like severed hand happening to Aallal. Not the case for my DK tho, she can just sew it back X).
Shout-out to my undead who broke his spine mid-mission and had to get a transplant from the troll he murdered.
I should probaby elaborate and say, injuries that are recoverable, like stabwounds and such that do not leave permanent injury save maybe a scar here and there.
I have the fortunate experience to run with a crew who have some expendables among them.
characters who live as long as they do out of luck, and sometimes they die in our events, are we attached to them? maybe not always, does it raise the stakes and lead to a minor but funny heroic, we’ll avenge you moment? it sure does.
We also sometimes run a “un-alive-ing” squard styled event with characters who are made for the express purpose of eventually dying, and people grow really attached to these one offs, the short lived but amazing stories and bonds forged between them is something else.
I think making a character who you accept can and will die eventually makes you more attached or at least careful, since you already made up your mind that death will be final, its a mystery how long they will last and how far in their story they will come.
its a very different playstyle., but one you should decide on at the creation.
Playing with plot armor, is also fine, if there is a theme or story you want to explore with a character, and you want to roleplay that until the end, that’s also alright,
One of my Paladins took a Golem’s flamethrower to the face. She was sadly cooked alive.
Another took 3 crossbow bolts to his stomach and was killed. It was tragic as he saw it coming but chose to call upon the Light one last time to bind the wounds of another of his unit who proceeded to go ape on the twisted cultist that killed my boy.
As long as it makes sense within a defined system I don’t mind on most characters. Two of mine however won’t be subject to death for the sake of others unless it is arranged. I love them too much.
As someone who has had two characters perish “on screen” as it were (one in an epic duel to the death inside a volcano very star wars esque) and another one saving the life of another at the cost of his own body, character death needs to be meaningful.
You can injure, rend, cripple even another within reason, but going out of your way to kill another player’s character without their express consent is just one step above not being able to separate in character and out of character interactions (basically unable to rp) to me.
I’ve “retired” some characters in a more or less permanent fashion, as in not wholly killed off but they’re essentially no longer functional characters in the game world, NPCS perhaps now.
The problem these days however is since the mechanisms of death in WoW have become demystified (thanks Danuser) its entirely possible and even a vehicle for good rp to seek a resurrection arc. This is something I have also done, pre-Shadowlands of course, to great effect.
I think this is looking at the matter in a completely reductive “play to win” mode. RP is about storytelling and if the best outcome and most compelling outcome is a character being killed then yes, then a player has all the right to do so. Likewise just because literal oblivion is off the table, does not diminish the stakes of threat of something.
I think lethality only becomes an issue because a lot of people treat characters not belonging to roleplayers as not being there whatsoever. There’s this weird trend I’ve seen where people treat characters presented in storylines they’re involved with as if the characters they’re roleplaying are self-aware that they aren’t ‘real people’.
That feeling of ‘damn, nobody dies’ people get when their guild faces so many threats and nobody dies can be often attributed to the fact that non-played characters are often completely disregarded, going as far as straight up disregarding (named NPC) character deaths and goofing off in campaign deathzones during late night or early morning hours because their characters are somehow self-aware that they’re roleplay characters in a videogame in which evil only really pops up between 8:00 PM and 11:30 PM.
This often leads to another phenomenom that only increases that ‘lack of lethality’ feeling; DMs and storytellers noticing the utter lack of respect or appreciation for any NPC used as a storytelling device, so they just remove them, ending up with storylines where 10 people alone stop an entire regional threat in a head-on confrontation, with, again, 0 lethality or consequences to speak of.
My hot take: be reasonable, read the room, know your crowd and don’t start a bunch of nonsense. We’re all here for a good time.
Also, since I am fresh to AD RP, I wanna ask how are you dealing with dead characters? Just delete or you play them time to time on other ways?