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Reigen Revisits: Resurrection
#1
Hello and welcome, good people of COTH.

Something that's been on my mind for a while is what the player-base thinks of the server policies that are currently in place. With permission granted, I'm going to be doing a series of blog posts that opens discussion about what is currently in place, revisiting them so to speak, so that everyone can offer their opinions. Now, do note that this does not mean anything is going to change. Can it? Perhaps. This is mostly for my own curiosity.


Important Note: This is a DRAMA FREE ZONE. There will be no bashing of each others opinions. There will be no getting snippy. There will be no out-right posts saying 'this rule sucks'. This is a discussion. If you do not like something, discuss it, offer ideas on how it can be improved.

If I see even a little bit of drama, I will lock the post faster than @Xigo can get First Blood in LoL and promptly stop posting these discussions. Be civil.

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Resurrection

Today's topic will be on the Resurrection policy. Currently the policy is as followed:

Quote:If it happens OOCly, then it stays OOC. Otherwise, read on...
There is no limit on how often a character can be resurrected ICly. However, if the character's life is tossed away (the character kills themself, has another murder them, etc.) or they are killed by one of their own alts, then there is no resurrection. If the character is to be resurrected an IC post MUST be made in this forum. [Link not there for this post] Why? We've had some ridiculous deaths and resurrections in the past. You are not allowed to retcon a character death once the death has happened.
If we feel the resurrection is... bad, for lack of a better term, we reserve the right to deny it pending a better post.

Drawbacks
A character must be dead for one week before he can be revived. During this week you must think of what drawbacks come from the death. The drawbacks should be listed at the end of the post. If no drawbacks are posted in the RC thread it will automatically be denied.
Keep in mind that if your character was simply murdered in cold blood (No warning, etc.) you should PM a GM about it, as this is a breach of policy on the murderer's part. However, if this was done in a zone known to be dangerous, or in the threatening or harassing of a guild or player known to have a predisposition for violence, you should accept the consequences (Keep in mind that metagaming and powergaming fall under a separate rule from this.).

Resurrector & Killer
Another addition to the Resurrection post must be the addition of who the character was killed by, and who resurrected them.

Now, what do I think? [I have opinions too!]

I personally think the system is a little too lax and the drawbacks are not played out enough when a character does die. Most of the time the character in question gets up after an hour of playing out that they were alive again and start heading right back into battle. In fact, once I had a character resurrect someone who promptly jumped out of bed, started to cheer and ran off. My own character was more tired than the one who had just come back from death.

I also feel that resurrection posts ought to have a stamp of approval on them before the character can be played again and that for each constructive death that happens, the drawbacks should become worse and worse. If a character dies four times and is just peachy...that just strikes me as very odd. I wouldn't put a limit on resurrections, but I would like them to make more sense...well. Some sense.

Will I ever support 'no resurrection/one resurrection only'? No, I don't think that should be a case UNLESS the character has done something extremely stupid to earn it...like punching Deathwing in the face. I do agree that suicides should result in a perma-death, as then the character just would not want to come back. I also agree that when a player is directly involved in the death of the character, then it should result in a perma-death, though I'm willing to make an exception if approval is gotten beforehand.

Anyway, that's what I think. How about ya'll?
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#2
I'd like to see drawbacks for the person preforming the resurrection. It takes a lot out of someone to perform such a lengthy ritual. I would also like to see more NPC resurrections. [They're people too!]
The true test of his choice lies forward.
— The story of the Silithian.


See life through shades of silver.
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#3
I only had two characters die and need a resurrection post. Matthew, back before the 2011 restart, where I threw him in a wheelchair and called him the wheelchairadin for months (to the annoyance of others), and Jof'waz, who was dead for six months before I finally got off my ass and brought him back. Each time I brought back a character, a restart or time skip happened, which made Matthew's death not canon (due to the two players involved in his death doing full retcons), and Jof'waz could be finished with his non-permanent drawbacks, except for the fact that I want to continue with them for the actual six months.

Resurrections should need a stamp of approval. One or two GMs, depending on if this is your character's first resurrection or his/her third. If you're a warrior and on resurrection number four, I'm going to question your character's ability to still be a physical juggernaut when he should probably be the next in a line of wheelchairadins. It'll be great, you can add lances to them.

A limit? I'm iffy. I would support it depending on how your character died each time. Your character has the unfortunate ability to draw knives to his neck? Come back. We'll welcome you. We'll give you a notepad and gnomish pen to talk to us. Your character has managed to blow himself up and is now a rainstorm of blood and one mostly-intact finger for the third time? Let him rest. He doesn't want to come back. Trust me.
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#4
I think the current system is fine. GM approval might be cool to add on, but that is really it. It isn't perfect, but trying to sway it one direction or another is just going to set off a chain reaction of problems. What we have now is a good compromise.

Personally, I dislike the Resurrection drawbacks system myself. Res magic is all healing magic, and healing magic can literally repair any wound, so logically resurrections are the most powerful form of healing magic... so whyyyy does it leave people in such imperfect states of living? Why does it slowly whittle down their bodies? It makes no sense, if anything ressurection magic should bring them back at perfect physical health.

Now, PSYCHOLOGICAL health is another ordeal entirely, one which I feel should have MORE focus on, but it is much less quantitve than a physical drawback. Death is scary and terrible and even if you can revive from it, it will leave scars and scare you. I also think healers should be better tracked, probably even special profile'd for ressurection powers, because such high level magic is NOT accessible to every joe schmoe priest/paladin/shaman/whatever.

But again, this is just my personal feeling on the matter. I would not want to see this system implemented, nor would I be sure HOW to implement it, so yeah. Leave it be, I say 8V
Your stories will always remain...
[Image: nIapRMV.png?1]
... as will your valiant hearts.
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#5
I don't see the point in ressurection.

Some of my characters died. Some died because they were old, others because they were trying to call to the water spirit in 1001 Needles when Deathwing showed up, others because they had become raving mad, or simply outlived their character concepts. Some died in sinister silence, some others in flamboyant ways (and I'd like to thank Krilari for helping with Alanya's little mind-meld death event). Some moved the people around there, some just withered in oblivion. Whatever the reason and however they died, though, they're gone, and death has far more weight and meaning when it is, well, death. Those deadly traps, or nasty consequences, or bitter weapons, or terrible illnesses suddenly seem much more harmless when the promised death is just an extended sleep.

At such, I have to agree with Ural here...I think there needs to be drawbacks to raising a character from the grave. I'm not going to rant about how some people can't keep their characters dead, it'd be pointless and everyone has their own ways, but yes...make it harder for a character to actually cheat death, IMO. Even if I know that more people will hesitate to put their characters in danger...Which might not be so bad after all. But I also understand characters might want to resurrect so...I'd just really put a limit, and drawbacks, and a grand GM approval on resurrection. But eh, that's just my two cents here. :P
Allons-y!

[Image: awesome-mario-gif.gif]

Have you hugged a dwarf today?
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#6
As much as I rag on Prologue, they had a neat resurrection system going. I don't remember every detail, but it was a lengthy process, involving a journey for a couple special items, maybe a certain person for a clue on where to go next.

I'm not sure if the team here would be keen on handling something like that, but it's worth considering, I think.

Besides that, I'm alright with the system.
[Image: tumblr_nfm4t0FZcT1rtcd58o1_r1_500.gif]
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#7
(06-16-2013, 05:40 PM)CappnRob Wrote: Personally, I dislike the Resurrection drawbacks system myself. Res magic is all healing magic, and healing magic can literally repair any wound, so logically resurrections are the most powerful form of healing magic... so whyyyy does it leave people in such imperfect states of living? Why does it slowly whittle down their bodies? It makes no sense, if anything ressurection magic should bring them back at perfect physical health.

I completely disagree with this, honestly. While the Light is healing magic, and resurrection spells would be the pinnacle of that, they're just that: the pinnacle of healing magic. The ritual would be extremely taxing to perform for our standard characters, because none of us are Uther the Lightbringer, and we can't exactly cast Mass Resurrection on the entire battlefield. Resurrection is a hard thing to do, and an even more difficult thing to get perfect. Our average priest might be able to do it by himself, but it would be nowhere near the level of, say, five or ten priests doing it. And five or ten would be nowhere near the level of, say, the Archbishop doing it. Basically, how well the spell is done depends on the person and the amount, if you ask me.

So drawbacks make sense, to me. The person being revived is going to go through hell and back as their soul is caught, dragged back and thrust back into a body which has been dead for possibly some time. The shock of the body rebooting like that is bound to cause some physical trauma; their body might not want to function properly for some time, limbs not moving as the brain tells them to. Anything you could probably think of. Physical weakness, too.

Essentially, your mileage may vary based upon who you choose to do the resurrection. And no, not every Priest character can go, "HEY LOOK AT ME I CAN DO THIS PERFECTLY EVERYTIME."
Spoiler:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0[/youtube]
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#8
One thing I would like to have changed is that, as the policy currently stands, being to involved OoCly in your character's death is under the umbrella of "the character committing suicide."
When Flora was having a lot of psychological trouble, going through the trauma of Northwind, dying, and being resurrected by someone who really cared for her was the most accessible way for me to have her get over her issues. Yeah, it was drastic, but it takes something pretty darn drastic for a Light-loving dead woman to get over her fixation on being alive again. I feel strongly that death and resurrection can advance a character's story in WoW, especially with undead characters, so I feel like we should be able to have our own characters die and be able to be resurrected, if it was ICly an accidental death on their own part.
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#9
(06-16-2013, 06:55 PM)Dae Wrote: One thing I would like to have changed is that, as the policy currently stands, being to involved OoCly in your character's death is under the umbrella of "the character committing suicide."
When Flora was having a lot of psychological trouble, going through the trauma of Northwind, dying, and being resurrected by someone who really cared for her was the most accessible way for me to have her get over her issues. Yeah, it was drastic, but it takes something pretty darn drastic for a Light-loving dead woman to get over her fixation on being alive again. I feel strongly that death and resurrection can advance a character's story in WoW, especially with undead characters, so I feel like we should be able to have our own characters die and be able to be resurrected, if it was ICly an accidental death on their own part.

I remember very vividly why that particular clause was put into the rules. To elaborate on this, consider the following scenario:

Player has two characters, good guy paladin and evil guy warlock. He makes evil guy warlock the big villain of a plot line. Then, after several big events with evil guy warlock doing things, concludes the storyline by having his own good guy paladin to kill evil guy warlock in order to further glorify good guy paladin.

Not exactly the same situation, but something relatively close to the above has actually happened.

So, here's my two cents to this particular discussion. Death is something that, in most cases in WoW, is fairly definitively final. Lore resurrections are extremely rare, to the point where from a realistic point most characters shouldn't have access to it. If they did, I think Cairne would kind of be back from the dead now. So, rather than having resurrection as an ability inspired by lore, it's put in because of game mechanics and, for our purposes, because RP in itself is something of a game and we don't want player conflict to result in too many permanent effects that can't be bounced back from. Player conflict should be encouraged, not discouraged because of too harsh of penalties.

But what this does mean, is that I don't believe that character death should be seen as a form of character development. That's not the purpose and it shouldn't be used as a vehicle for that. Really, character death and resurrection are last resort kind of things in general. There are much better ways to develop a character than having them killed, IMO.
Have you hugged an orc today?
- I am not tech support. Please do not contact me regarding technical issues. -
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#10
(06-16-2013, 10:30 PM)Grakor456 Wrote:
(06-16-2013, 06:55 PM)Dae Wrote: One thing I would like to have changed is that, as the policy currently stands, being to involved OoCly in your character's death is under the umbrella of "the character committing suicide."
When Flora was having a lot of psychological trouble, going through the trauma of Northwind, dying, and being resurrected by someone who really cared for her was the most accessible way for me to have her get over her issues. Yeah, it was drastic, but it takes something pretty darn drastic for a Light-loving dead woman to get over her fixation on being alive again. I feel strongly that death and resurrection can advance a character's story in WoW, especially with undead characters, so I feel like we should be able to have our own characters die and be able to be resurrected, if it was ICly an accidental death on their own part.

I remember very vividly why that particular clause was put into the rules. To elaborate on this, consider the following scenario:

Player has two characters, good guy paladin and evil guy warlock. He makes evil guy warlock the big villain of a plot line. Then, after several big events with evil guy warlock doing things, concludes the storyline by having his own good guy paladin to kill evil guy warlock in order to further glorify good guy paladin.

Not exactly the same situation, but something relatively close to the above has actually happened.

So, here's my two cents to this particular discussion. Death is something that, in most cases in WoW, is fairly definitively final. Lore resurrections are extremely rare, to the point where from a realistic point most characters shouldn't have access to it. If they did, I think Cairne would kind of be back from the dead now. So, rather than having resurrection as an ability inspired by lore, it's put in because of game mechanics and, for our purposes, because RP in itself is something of a game and we don't want player conflict to result in too many permanent effects that can't be bounced back from. Player conflict should be encouraged, not discouraged because of too harsh of penalties.

But what this does mean, is that I don't believe that character death should be seen as a form of character development. That's not the purpose and it shouldn't be used as a vehicle for that. Really, character death and resurrection are last resort kind of things in general. There are much better ways to develop a character than having them killed, IMO.


I honestly wouldn't be opposed to the good guy paladin defeating their own bad guy warlock if it produced fun roleplay other players involved.
And really, what does that have to do with resurrection? If someone was abusing characters and storylines for the sake of their own ego, I really don't see why the issue lies in the resurrection policy as opposed to the player in question.

That being said, I enjoy playing Flora, and other people around here seem to enjoy her, so I suppose I made a cheap move by letting her get resurrected. If I were a writer, and CotH my own story, I'd probably have kept her dead, but as my writer's instinct was insisting, she was gonna die.
Her death was the next part in her story, and her resurrection, I suppose, was a bit of a selfish move on my part. Her story was coming to a stopping point, but I wasn't ready to stop playing her. Honestly, part of me still nags, insisting that I should have kept her dead, but in this situation, I'd consider the most important part of CotH as us all having a good time, as opposed to, say, creating the most sound piece of literature.

I'd also like to think that her death might have added a little something to Northwind, but that's not for me to say.
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#11
Much of the resurrection process tends to defy logic and established lore for the sake of punishment, so these days, I have a policy of avoiding it - for better or for worse. I usually think it's better to try and negotiate a route of survival, so long as it remains sensible. If one can't be found, then the end of a character's tale is regrettably nigh.

The one thing that I will suggest is making the week long wait purely OOC. More than a few times, characters have died and there's been one (occasionally several) priests/paladins/shaman/druids on the field who're inexplicably unable to act. I understand the wait's function and intent, but there is no conceivable reason to delay the resurrection for seven days unless you contrive one.
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#12
(06-16-2013, 11:11 PM)Dae Wrote: And really, what does that have to do with resurrection? If someone was abusing characters and storylines for the sake of their own ego, I really don't see why the issue lies in the resurrection policy as opposed to the player in question.

Because we do not wish to support bad RP habits, in short.

Edit to Delta: I believe it is already this way. People can rez the guy at any time during that week, just he'll be unconscious or something until the week is over.
Have you hugged an orc today?
- I am not tech support. Please do not contact me regarding technical issues. -
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#13
So if you get killed. You are dead. Your lifeless body can stay anywhere or someone can haul you off. Considering if your body stays somewhere you will decompose and so on. But that didn't stop people from being ressurected in some of the quests I played trough WoW during my retail time. Either way. The way I think it should be is, if there's a humanoid close to you with the ability to ressurect you. I don't see why not. Waiting a week means the body will begin to decompose. But then again from the already mentioned that isn't an issue in the world of warcraft. Warcraft is self is usually affiliated with quick ressurections in matter of seconds. It's part of the lore? I wouldn't know. But I can see the logic behind one week waiting. The current rules make sense and perhaps its best to keep them.
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#14
(06-17-2013, 01:46 AM)Dug Wrote: So if you get killed. You are dead. Your lifeless body can stay anywhere or someone can haul you off. Considering if your body stays somewhere you will decompose and so on. But that didn't stop people from being ressurected in some of the quests I played trough WoW during my retail time. Either way. The way I think it should be is, if there's a humanoid close to you with the ability to ressurect you. I don't see why not. Waiting a week means the body will begin to decompose. But then again from the already mentioned that isn't an issue in the world of warcraft. Warcraft is self is usually affiliated with quick ressurections in matter of seconds. It's part of the lore? I wouldn't know. But I can see the logic behind one week waiting. The current rules make sense and perhaps its best to keep them.

No, no, and no. Most resurrections I have seen were never about lore characters or, really -any- major characters at all. It was just for the uses of quests and game mechanics. I have rarely seen an NPC just jumping back to his feet and calling out 'I'm fine!' - if that was the case, all the heroes of the Alliance would die and get back up faster than you can say "Cheese!".

I personally however have to agree with you to think that the resurrection procedure at the moment is fine, although it would be really fun to have to go on a journey to a place, say, Blasted Lands, with a group, to gather an item required or something on the same lines.
Spoiler:
[Image: tumblr_lho5ae3Fu31qe94fqo1_400.gif]
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#15
This is the way I would personally like to see the resurrection system:

Enforce approvals. I would personally like it if we were a bit more strict about the Resurrections in that we, at the very least, make the characters who've died unplayable until such a time that the player has posted and gotten an Approval of the resurrection from a staff member. You detail in your resurrection post how you died, who resurrected you and how, and then what sorts of effects the death itself and the resurrection will have on you.

Then, leaving it up to the GM team to make every resurrection count by making sure that every character pays appropriately for having their lives back. This probably sounds worse than it really is, but... It would basically be the same system we have now, except just posting the thread won't be enough. You'd have to go through the GMs to play the character again, and they'd be able to lock your character if you're found roleplaying on it despite it not passing through the resurrection process again.

... By no means do I suggest that deaths and resurrections should ruin your character. I do believe, however, that death needs to be made into the serious matter that it, really, is. We do have spells in-gane that let you bring people back from the dead and we've explained these by fully rebuilding the body as it was before you died and whatnot. Healing magicks can accomplish extraordinary things.

... However, it should by no means be something that a character brushes off like it was nothing. Your spirit and your mind take damage from the ordeal since you're yanked back from the afterlife and thrust back into your old life, with the memories of the experience that killed you. You know what death is on a very intimate level, and that's bound to do unpleasant things to your mind.

I, personally, want this to reflect in the resurrection system. Make it show how you deteriorate gradually from avoiding death for too long. The first time shouldn't be so penalizing, but the second and third? I would like the staff to be able to more formally put their foot down and enforce drawbacks for characters who simply die too many times. Nowhere will we stop you from continuing to play your character even when they die, but we also don't want to trivialize death and dying.

... I know there was a lot of "we" in there. Most of it is just me talking for myself. I don't want to go back and change it all, though.

... So. That's my opinion on the matter.
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