Roleplaying: Hidden Perma Death

Roleplaying: Hidden Perma Death

Original: In reply to:

Each time you die, a piece of your soul never comes back, even though your flesh will

this is from the wyrmslayer lore... may mean there is a limited number of deaths?
Edited: Or each time you die your spirit stat is reduced?

By- Rakesh

Answer: Actually, with regard to your soul getting whittled down by repeated deaths and hidden perma deaths, there a re few things going on in that Wyrmslayer narrative.

First off, from a purely narrative/dramatic standpoint, I wanted to create a tragic, burned out character. The more I thought about it, the more interesting it seemed to give the narrator a death wish. Given the reality of the Turning, it's plainly fultile, but he keeps trying.

Now - about the death shroud thing: as I understand it now (bear in mind that my understanding is limited, and also that the mechanics may change during beta) getting killed A LOT will not ever get you permanently killed. You will eventually end up being death shrouded into a state of extreme gimpishness, and the shroud will last longer with each death, but it won't ever snuff you out completely.

All that said, there still is hidden perma death built into Shadowbane. After all, we have to account for characters that get deleted, people who stop playing, or folks who get banned. The way I see it, it works like this:

When a person dies on Aerynth, they cross over to "the Other Side" for a while. An overwhelming majority of the time, they return with a new flesh body, chilled to the bone (they quickly recover from the chill, though). How long any given person spends on the Other Side varies a lot (from the OOC minimum time needed to restart or log back in, to whatever maximum the real-world player imposes).

Now, given the possibility of deletes/bans/no-shows, it's possible that some folks never come back. The way the people of Aeynth look at it, they went into the Black, and the Black "claimed" them. Of course, it is possible that they will respawn someday, or already respawned someplace else. From the average Aerynthite's standpoint, they'd have to be omnipresent and wait until the end of time to be sure. So, while there might actually be some "hidden" perma deathing going on, most folks in the game world aren't directly aware of it, hence they don't talk about it, save as a remote possibility.

And for those of you who want to sell your souls to something, you might have to wait until an expansion, but I imagine that the opportunity will present itself...