how about this for death?

I guess the reason I was thinking this way was from what I got from the Dev chat about people coming back to life.
http://tinyurl.com/m5z6g67 - (changed url start time)

Ok, you got me on that one.
The coroner knows your going to die so he follows you around.
Or maybe he has a dog that can sniff out where dead bodies are.

 

Thanks for posting that, I hadn't seen it before.

 

Yea and I'm not sure if I had the right spot in the video at that point.
The link should work starting around 40:40, or maybe not, for some reason I keep going back to the 38:00 marker but 40:40 is what I'm trying to get to.

 

Well, you you're out in the wilderness, it might take a while to find you, so you wouldn't instantaneously be off in a grave yard somewhere. You'd be where ever you were when some one/some thing dropped you.

 

Well maybe as a ghost we can talk to an undertaker (NPC). Once the undertaker is alerted it would take so much time for your body to appear in its grave.
I don't think it has to take to long.

Maybe with this system your body never decays. So either you get rezed or you find the undertaker who puts your body in your tomb.

 

I would worry about how big graveyards would have to get if each one had to have room for individual tombs of all the people who play the game..

 

If your body never decays, particularly with avatars, why bother burying someone or placing them in a tomb? Stack them up in the avatar 'lost and found'.

 

Well the natives to the new world don't know this, at least not yet.
And like they said in the Dev chat maybe look for new ways to deal with death.
Maybe as time goes on we could have other ways of dealing with death.

 

Players could come out of a crypt. That's just a house with a door on it. Then there's no need for individual graves.

 

Yea, that could work if we don't want everyone have their own grave.
Also if we do want everyone to have their own, then maybe a crypt with lots of sarcophagus. And that may still be too much.

 

I guess the biggest problem I have with it is that particularly in PvE, you may have died due to your own poor judgement, as in going solo against a dragon at low skill levels. If you res at a crypt or a graveyard, that is a cheesy way of avoiding the consequences of your own bufoonery. Unless you can gather a group to help you on your corpse run, that dragon is going to be squatting on your body, and you have the opportunity to learn from the experience.

 

Another good reason to have creatures looting our bodies.
A creature to loot a few things might go over better then losing everything in decay.

Hmm, I don't think I've heard what if everyone thinks about losing all our stuff due to decay.
I'm good with that but I doubt many are.

 

It depends on how easily gear can be replaced. If gear is expensive, and hard to come by in game, people will not like it if their stuff wears out quickly. If gear can be easily and cheaply replaced, no one will care unless it wears out so quickly that it becomes annoying.

 

Yea I'm all for gear that can be replaced easily.
I'd rather see the better items as something you could put in your house.
But then we have the problem that not everyone will get a house.

 

Where our body will wind up, how we resurrect, what happens to our gear, all of this is dependent on what EXACTLY is the force that is bringing us back to life. If there is a magic source outside of ourselves, then we could find our bodies and our posessions etc being drawn TO this source, for a common resurrect point. If the driving force is that our souls won't let go, then clawing our way back to our bodies makes sense. Or maybe, what if the mechanism for resurrection is that the basic raise dead spell isn't that hard, but it can only be used on certain types of people at certain times? Perhaps NPC's can cast the spell, and do so. Raising the dead around you is just being neighborly. After all, players will do it to each other. I know that when I am soloing in another game, playing a class that has a rez, and I see a random corpse, I cast rez on it as I go by. You never know who you could be helping out, and their gratitude might come back in a nice way. Sort of a "treat others as you would be treated" method. Maybe the NPC's are just being nice.

 

One thing that confuses me is that the devs are saying that raising from the dead is something that only 'avatars' can do.. and it sounds like it's something that just automatically happens, because we are immortal. Maybe there won't be any resurrection spell at this time period. I feel like I need to know more of the story before coming to any conclusions.

 

If we end up just auto rezzing ourselves, with no ability to modify it, I think something will be lost from group play. Instead of helping my fallen friends back to their feet, I'll just press on. They will repop and catch up to me, and if I die while they are en route, it's cool, I'll just rez and catch up to them. Sort of a zerg rush in slow motion.

 

Yes, death and on-site resurrection definitely adds something to group play. There needs to be a fairly accessible way to resurrect team-mates on-site, as it's convenient, fun, and promotes group play. Waiting for your dead comrade to run back to you/running back to your team is jsut wasted time.

As to whether you should need the corpse to do it (leading to the tense and fun/unfun fight back through to your fallen comrades) or can just do it to people you're guilded or whatever to (convenient, but makes it harder for random strangers to help each other out) - that's a whole different question.

Either way, though, these only apply to "done soon" resurrection, in which fun group play matters. Solo is a different beast.

I'd suggest that your corpse stays where you fell, and people can raise you either at it or at your ghost, BUT if you're logged out (for X minutes in case of connectivity problems) then your corpse and you goes either to your house or the graveyard according to what you have set up house-wise. This avoids waiting around for your dead friends to run back to the team, and losing your gear in a dungeon when soloing.

 

The solo issue really needs to be taken into account. Not only solo online play is supposed to be supported by the game - which means it shouldn't be significantly more punishing than group play - but also offline players simply won't have an option, since the offline game isn't supposed to even offer multiplayer. Not to mention the limited "temporary offline" mode RG hinted at for when the player doesn't have a connection but still wants to play for a while.

BTW, some other games use (or used) the "after a while, your body is moved" fix. In WoW it was sometimes used as an exploit in order to get earlier to places you weren't supposed to have access to yet (though it was not really much of an exploit, since a friendly high level mage or warlock, or anyone with a flying mount with a passenger seat, could typically take the lowby character there anyway).

 

Someone playing solo should exercise more caution than someone in a group. Unless you are going solo against something you have no business going solo against (Dragon comes to mind), PvE typically isn't all that dangerous if you employ reasonable caution. If you go Leeroy Jenkins into a pack of mobs while solo, you will probably die, but that's a self inflicted wound.