PERMANENT CHARACTER DEATH IN YOUR STORY?

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unity
You're magical to me.
12540
How do you feel about games that permanently kill off a character (a full fledged party member that you've had with you) as part of the plot?

On the one hand, it makes the risk to the players feel more dire, as hey, someone you counted on frigging died and the stakes are higher than ever! On the other hand, if that character was the player's favorite, they may not want to continue or may have their overall impression of the game lowered.

One trick I've seen used is to set up a character who's clearly a jerk and/or hasn't had enough development to be likable, and then kill them off. Or, if you kill of characters in the prologue before the player has gotten real attached to them.

I'm clearly in the camp of "Don't kill off characters unless you have a darn good reason for it." I've seen stories done really well where the character's death changed the world and the other characters really dramatically.

On the other hand, I've seen games kill off a character just because, and it feels weird and empty when there's no underlying reason for it. I did something that could be considered this (killing off a party member for a less-than-solid reason) on one of my early games, and since then, I've tried to avoid it. Because a game can be great, and then you get near the end, and your favorite character dies off, and you feel a little cheated. Especially if it doesn't strongly tie into the narrative.

What's everyone's take on this? How do you handle permanent character death in your stories?
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Death is probably one of the aspects where games/stories and real life tend to be most different. In reality, death usually comes unexpected and there seems to be no "underlying reason" for it. In stories, we're used to death not being arbitrary, especially when it comes to important characters. Making death as unfair and almost random as in real life would likely make most games feel extremely anticlimactic.

Whether or not permanently killing off an important character is a good idea strongly depends on what you want to do with your story. But except when you're making a humorous game in which death has little significance, or a game set in a world where death can be remedied, a character dying should always leave a noticable impact. Death is one of the (if not the) largest changes possible for a living being, and those left behind should feel this.

I think having the least likable character (with the exception of the antagonist, and even that's not as easy) be the one to die has the disadvantage of death losing some of its impact on the player, and runs the risk of coming across as a cheap dodge on the creator's side. If death is necessary to convey a certain part of your story, don't make it cheap.
Instead of "Don't kill off characters unless you have a darn good reason for it" I would rather say: "If you decide to kill off characters, make sure it's shown as significant."
Isrieri
"My father told me this would happen."
6155
LISA: The Second pulls this off with panache*. Mostly because all of the times it can happen are not part of the plot, but part of the game world, as random events. There's only one point in the game where you must risk their lives, and its possible to escape that unscathed with a lot of luck. However the game kills them off at all because 1) Permanent party death contributes to the overall themes and mood of the game. And 2) Makes sense that death exists in the game world and contributes to the setting. If you want to know how to handle permanent death I can't recommend that game enough.

Just make sure that if you do it, you do it right. Which is to say, a party member you've invested a good bunch of levels in shouldn't always be taken away forever as part of the game's plot, I think. That character shouldn't matter to the player much, being a character with set equips or not worth investing time leveling. Either that or make it so that there's always a chance they can survive this permanent death. That would be my recommendation: If there's a chance they can survive, than players who really care about them can either go back a save until they find a way to keep them, or just sacrifice someone else.

Of course that's all assuming that the characters are in the Final Fantasy school of characters in that they're players in the story with names and junk. But if you can just recruit more back at the bar or something then that's a whole other discussion.

* You don't know just how much it affects you as a player till you're gambling with your party's lives in a round of Russian Roulette.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
From a narrative standpoint, I tend to prefer to avoid character death, or at least protagonist death. I feel like it's one of those easy drama things that CAN work, but most of the time doesn't, because people use it lazily: "Oh, look, this guy really means business, HE KILLED ONE OF YOUR PEOPLES! He's much worse than those last bad guys!" or "I need to motivate the main character. I know! Kill a party member!"

I think it's particularly bad in games because the player has (usually) invested a lot of strategy and resources into a character's development, so it's not just losing the emotional investment, but pissing away a lot of a player's work.

There are certain kinds of games where it can work; overall, I feel like it's the sort of thing that depends a lot on mood and setting. If the game is established to be high bodycount, and/or the characters don't require a lot of level or resource upkeep, it works a lot better. A theme of despair is also enhanced by character death. Some horror games can benefit from it, though it's not actually necessary, and it's very easy to go overboard and break the mood.

Narratively, I feel a lot of the time character death doesn't work because it isn't handled as part of that character's overall story arc (usually because the character is dying to serve a different character's arc). A character's death really shouldn't leave any loose ends (unless they're to be resolved with another character) or a feeling like their development was cut short.

There's an argument for "realism" in fiction, that people just die randomly and pointlessly in real life, but I feel like that ignores the main point of what we use stories for. If you're going for a "real life simulator" or some kind of metacommentary, that's cool, but I don't think that brand of "realism" works well in a traditional narrative. (In fact, I think it usually works against the story, since it tends to jar the audience out of the flow.)

Thank you for reading my essay on character death I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :V
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Tentatively, I'd say I approve, in a general case. As a rule I respect creative works that are willing to kill off major characters unexpectedly a lot more than works that play it safe. That is one of the basic barometers I use for whether a piece of work is art or just entertainment. If a character dies in a way that shocks me, stuns me, or makes me feel like I was punched in the gut, that makes me consider that a work might be art, not just entertainment.

With that said, it really depends how it's executed (lol pun). And if at all possible, avoid Ludonarrative Dissonance (i.e. make it explicitly clear, even obvious-without-stating-it-in-the-text, why in this situation the party cannot just use a phoenix down).

Iron Gaia Part One kills off two party members you've become invested in over the course of the story, but it's so close to the end of the game that while the player should CARE because of story involvement, the player has no reason to get frustrated at the sunk cost of strategic resources because there are basically no battles after that, just cutscenes. (Ok, I think there's one battle after one major character dies, but it's a one-on-one duel and you're only allowed to use the main character anyway.)

Or, if you kill of characters in the prologue before the player has gotten real attached to them.

LINUS has a...heh...interesting approach to this.
I think the only game I've ever played that had a character die off was FF7.

I've been toying with an idea where all party members can die off if they die in battle. Getting your HP dropped to 0 wouldn't exactly be death. More like swoon haha or something. And you need to protect them from getting a final blow or something. I dunno, the idea is fresh so I'm still working on it. But basically the main story starts with 1 character on a mission and you find people to join that mission. If that first character dies, then the rest of the party is dedicated to finishing it. If your last party member dies, then it's game over(and maybe your save file is deleted :o I dunno).

They would each have their own backstory and events that showcase their personalites and such. They wouldn't be generic ninja character #10 or some shit. And depending on who's in the party and who has died, some events will play out different. It'll be tons of work, but worth it.

Lately when I think about games I want to make, I don't like to make games that are yet another typical RPG. So something like that seems way more interesting to try. Obviously a few, some, many people wouldn't like the sound of that but any idea can work if it's done right.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Final Fantasy Tactics had party members able to die permanently in battle. This was kind of cool, but it also meant that once a character joined you, they wouldn't comment on stuff as much in battle, probably because there was no guarantee that the player hadn't gotten them killed off or something.

author=Max McGee
Or, if you kill of characters in the prologue before the player has gotten real attached to them.

LINUS has a...heh...interesting approach to this.

It certainly does :DDDD
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=unity
Final Fantasy Tactics had party members able to die permanently in battle. This was kind of cool, but it also meant that once a character joined you, they wouldn't comment on stuff as much in battle, probably because there was no guarantee that the player hadn't gotten them killed off or something.

This isn't necessarily a result of permadeaths caused by battle. Fire Emblem games allow almost any character to die permanently in battle, but still have them show up in a lot of dialogue and cut scenes if they're alive. If they're not alive, they are either replaced by someone else, or the dialogue doesn't happen.

It's really no different from the player having the ability to choose who's in their party and leave other characters back at the base. In both cases, party members aren't guaranteed to be present, but you can write branching cut scenes to account for all the possibilities.

Also, strictly from a story perspective, Algus's death at the end of chapter one of Final Fantasy Tactics is a fantastic example of a character death that didn't bother me at all because he was such an asshole. I had invested JP and gold into him, I'd leveled up him and spent time learning a unique set of skill on him, and I'd gotten accustomed to using him in battle. And I wanted the motherfucker to die.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
Thinking on the subject, one game I felt really handled character death well was Phantasy Star IV. Obviously, this goes into spoilers (though given it's almost two decades old, I'm sure the statute of limitations is way past, but just in case!)

You start out with just two characters: Alys, a famous and powerful monster hunter, and Chaz, her slightly bumbling apprentice. As the game progresses, the fact that Alys is a huge deal veteran is driven home repeatedly, as is the fact that she's sort of a parental figure to Chaz, who's rather immature.

At about a third of the way through the game, the party tries to battle Zio, who at this point seems to be the Big Bad, and fails utterly to affect him at all, while he can one-hit-KO anyone in the party. When he targets Chaz, Alys jumps in the way to take the attack via cutscene.

The attack infects her with a kind of incurable, magical sickness (introducing it for later in the game, where it shows up in a few towns) and takes her out of the party, though it takes her a long time to actually kick the bucket because, again, Alys is a fukken badass. As she's dying, she implores another party member- an old friend of hers who doesn't like Chaz much- to help Chaz out in saving the world.

The death helps set up several parts of the narrative: the sickness, Chaz's journey into being less of a putz, and how nasty Zio and his stuff is. It also illustrates Alys's character, in that 1) she takes a blow for Chaz and 2) she stubbornly hangs on despite evil stuff trying to kill her.

Personally, I'd have preferred if it didn't go the route of "character death to motivate protag's growth" and "character death to demonstrate how bad news the bad guy is" but it works fine narratively: as a proven veteran and badass, Alys obviously didn't have a huge character arc going on, and her death sets up a lot of important things for several members of the party, as well as giving the player (and the party) a sense of what would happen to everyone if they fail: not just destruction, but untreatable, prolonged suffering, which shows up later in a larger context (adhering to the "rising action" of any good narrative). Plus, the sickness happening to Alys in particular helps drive home the level of loss and suffering, since she's the most important person in Chaz's life.


tl:dr- It's carefully woven into the narrative, to the point that it would be very hard to work around without it, and adds important information to the story.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Not a lot of discussion about the gameplay implications of permanent character death caused by cut scenes. Hmm. Usually by this point in the thread, people are all uppity about the loss of all their skills and AP and the fact that they no longer have access to certain strategies and stuff.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=LockeZ
Not a lot of discussion about the gameplay implications of permanent character death caused by cut scenes. Hmm. Usually by this point in the thread, people are all uppity about the loss of all their skills and AP and the fact that they no longer have access to certain strategies and stuff.

Yeah, that's a big part of it, too. Which further reinforces the Algus example, it's early in the game, so even though there is some investment lost, it's not a huge amount (and yeah, I wanted him to die, too XD)

author=Sooz
Thinking on the subject, one game I felt really handled character death well was Phantasy Star IV.

Well put! I would have preferred the death wasn't there, as I loved the character, but it made a lot of sense in the story.
Well, I'm certainly all for killing off important characters, or just removing them from the story somehow. But it's also true that
author=LockeZ
people are all uppity about the loss of all their skills and AP and the fact that they no longer have access to certain strategies and stuff.
and for good reason, since who wants to invest time and love into a character only to have them meet a tragic end?

The best ways I see of handling this kind of thing is either making the character saveable, or have branching paths; one where that chara lives, one where they're gone.

Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
The weird thing is with FFT, I got easily as attached to my randomly generated recrutis (who had no dialogue at all) as I did to say Agrias or Mustadio. Like if McCloud my elite black mage died I was just as likely to reload as if I had lost a "character" character.

Fuck Algus XD.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=Max McGee
The weird thing is with FFT, I got easily as attached to my randomly generated recrutis (who had no dialogue at all) as I did to say Agrias or Mustadio. Like if McCloud my elite black mage died I was just as likely to reload as if I had lost a "character" character.


Haha, same here! :D
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
As a player, deaths of characters you love obviously hit harder. And in a similar vein, deaths of characters you've invested in hit harder.

The trick is to make the player mad at the villain instead of at the designer. This is a difficult task even when it's an NPC, but when it's a character you've invested in personally and built your strategy around, I think it's basically impossible. Or at least it's something I haven't figured out how to do yet, nor seen any games really do successfully.

Some games try to replace what was lost by adding a new character with suspiciously similar skills, but that usually just makes the whole thing feel kind of cheap. Other games try to make all the characters be very similar to each-other, or make the game easy enough that any strategy is fine, but then it doesn't really feel like a gameplay loss in the first place. Letting the player revive the character completely changes the story significance, even if it doesn't negate it. I can imagine a game where everything becomes temporarily easier for a while after losing a character, to give the player a chance to build up their other characters or learn how to use them, but this is no different than what should happen after a character temporarily leaves the party - the designer still hasn't done anything to make up for the fact that it's permanent.

So yeah, even from a design perspective rather than a player perspective, the only games where I've ever really approved of a character death were the ones where the game made me hate the character first. And, preferably, let me kill them myself. Though you run the risk that maybe you failed to make the player hate the character enough, and now they're super duper mad at the designer for forcing them to kill off their own party member against their will! This is a really bad situation, you've just completely alienated your player, nobody wants a game to force them to do the opposite of what they think they should be doing, and if doing so destroys their own party then they'll almost certainly just quit the game forever at that point. FF Tactics handles this by putting a guest party member in the battle who is in a maddened rage, and who will defeat Algus with or without you. Bravely Default handles it by making the character be the final boss - so even if you're mad about it, there's no point in quitting.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
author=LockeZ
Not a lot of discussion about the gameplay implications of permanent character death caused by cut scenes. Hmm. Usually by this point in the thread, people are all uppity about the loss of all their skills and AP and the fact that they no longer have access to certain strategies and stuff.

author=Sooz
I think it's particularly bad in games because the player has (usually) invested a lot of strategy and resources into a character's development, so it's not just losing the emotional investment, but pissing away a lot of a player's work.


I dunno if it should be called "uppity" to be upset if the developer has suddenly deprived the player of an aspect of the gameplay that was important up to this point- particularly if one sacrificed unique or rare resources on a particular character. It'd be kind of like, say, no longer having the fire flower available in the first Super Mario Bros., or not being able to run: yeah, you can probably make it through, but suddenly you're being jarred from "I understand the mechanics and am now figuring new ways to use them against different challenges" to "I am learning the mechanics." It kinda interrupts the flow of the rising action.

I'm sure there are ways to handle it gracefully from a design perspective, but the main point is that it does need to be planned around in gameplay as well as narrative terms. It's anti-fun to go from "I get it!" to "I am now prevented from getting it by outside interference."
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
One interesting way to think about it: when the player beats the final boss, his or her entire party is removed, which theoretically should be worse than just one character being removed. But it's not worse. It's totally fine, in fact. The developer has just not only stripped you of all your work, but also removed the game out from under you that you were working on - yet having the game end after the final boss is near-universally considered completely inoffensive.

The reason for this is obvious. The player doesn't feel like he lost anything. He feels like he completed something.

How can we create that same feeling when a character dies? Is it possible to make it so that the last thing you do with a party member before he or she dies feels like the completion of that character's gameplay, like what you've been building them up to for the whole game?

I think it is possible. Look at Tellah's death in FF4. He dies fighting Golbez with the forbidden power he unlocked. Lacking the magical aptitude to use the power properly, he expends his own life force and successfully defeats Golbez. FF4 didn't handle this super well, of course - you don't even have control during that battle. But what if you did? What if it was a real battle, using only Tellah, that you could actually lose? It would feel like Tellah's final boss. As the player, you wouldn't feel like anything had been taken from you - you'd feel like you'd completed that arc of the game, and that all the work you put into that character was leading up to helping you win that final battle. The rest of the party would then have to keep going, and the player would still be stripped of the strategies he'd built using Tellah, but I think you could end up with a very different mentality in the player.

To not do this seems cheap. There are plenty of games where the main character dies after beating the final boss. But they always still have a final boss that you have to beat. Because it's really, really important for players to have a conclusion to the gameplay.
I recall Tales of Symphonia having a case. Spoilers below!
Zelos joins in about 1/4 of the game's progression I think. Depending on a choice late in the game, he may switch sides and become a boss, followed by his permanent death for the rest of the story. However, as I said, this is all optional. Choose correctly and he will stay alive and never switch side.
Though, he's only lost as a character considering he gets replaced by Kratos, an earlier party member from the first 1/4 of the story which had the same fighter class as Zelos. In battle, they are pretty interchangeable.

Um, and also, according to canon, Zelos never betrayed you and thus lives, so there's that...
@LockeZ it wouldn't work as much if the game had a more in depth character progression system, though.
Anyway, it's not too hard to accompany a character death gameplay-wise.
Instead of watering down the gameplay, you could potentially explore new gameplay ideas given the circumstances, making the gameplay move forward. And since a character death normally is a turning point in the story, presenting us with a new, but different character a while after, with new gameplay mechanics would create a sense of progress through the game.
And because of that, because of the sudden changes a character death can bring, it can be pretty much like breaking an egg on a piece of dough. And I super approve of killing important characters as long as this is properly echoed in the gameplay sections.
Sorry, but I'm all for character death. Even player characters. If the story calls for it then do it. I won't compromise my story just so the player has their favourite character still alive if the story is planned around their death. I won't do it.

What I will do is plan the death as a major point and give it all the attention that it needs because of that. I won't make it a cheap, cool ploy to show how edgy and dark my story can be. I will thus also plan for the game to be able to be completed without that character because their death is planned. Their death is part of the whole story and will set off different story points. I won't make it cheap but I will use it if the story calls for it. And I won't apologise for it, either.

My story, if it calls for death, is going to contain it and I will not compromise the story for the player or myself. It may make things harder on me but that's okay - that's just like every other part of the game that is designed for the story.

So, yeah.
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