DEATH, BLOOD AND GORE.

Personally, I find that's it's usually obvious from the context. If it isn't, chance is it's not obvious from the character's perspective as well, meaning you can have them tell the status of the body without it coming of as awkward. For example, when the heroes enter their room in an inn and find the innkeeper's daughter laying on the ground in a puddle of blood, they may not immediately know if she's dead or just injured.

As for how much blood and gore (and also dead bodies) you can add, it depends on what makes sense. Ask yourself, or are you placing as many dead bodies as makes sense considering the scenario are you adding a lot of dead bodies just to show the player how terrible things are? A village where the villain has gone and killed everyone should not have more corpses than other villages have live people. Do the same check for blood and gore; does it make sense for there to be so many?

If you're adding blood and death for the sake of causing a reaction from the players, chance is they will see your intention rather than what's going on in the game world which will have the opposite effect of what you intended.

As for whether or not we need blood, most games certainly does not. However, unless it's a lighthearted game and it makes sense for there to be blood, then the blood is an improvement as long as it looks good.

I think it's not whether or not your game has blood and/gore but rather how your game's artistic style can incorporate it.

It problem within the RPG Maker community is that a lot of us are pretty limited with what we can do, so slapping down a few red pixels resembling a pool of blood is about the extent of what to expect from many RPG Maker games.

I feel that blood and gore are hardest to add to your project when its presentation is pretty simplistic in nature (RTP, FF4/FF5, etc.) because the lack of detail that sprited blood will command will always come off as cartoonish. I learned this with Blackmoon Prophecy, because there is a beheading at one point that I struggled to not make look corny due to the FF4 graphics I was using. I wasn't able to NOT make it look corny, so I just went with what I had.

It's a lot easier to add blood and gore to games with more detailed graphics simply because you're able to add more detail. If you're even an adequate spriter then you should be able to get your point across without it looking too silly (if even silly at all).

I show a little girl getting decapitated in the first five minutes of Fragile Hearts. It's a comedy. Cheesy blood is supposed to be funny.

Yeeeeeeeah, I tend to keep gore out of the 2D games, because it ALWAYS looks laughably silly to me.

Always. IB

See The Way for an example of RTP gore done right.

author=Trihan
See The Way for an example of RTP gore done right.

hahahahaha

LockeZ, great minds think alike.

Or we're just really fucked up :P

author=flowerthief
Gore is not strictly needed. Even in real life it's not unrealistic to mistake a person who is dead as being asleep or vice versa, so it's not out of place for a game to simulate that ambiguity.

Because in real life, death is not always violent.

In games, death is almost always of a violent cause - killed by a monster, beheaded, died in an epic battle, stabbed with a sword, etc. Rarely does a character ever die of a heart attack or something that doesn't involve bleeding.