In response to the OP: I think the majority of games these days just treat instant healing, death, and revival as givens, with little thought given to in-world consequences. Not to be a bitter old lady, but I think how injury and death were framed, and how (if at all) characters could recover from it, are things I saw considered more in the early days of RPGs, when the tropes of "Revive Items" and "The Inn" were still young.
The Shining Series:Shining in the Darkness, the first RPG set in the Shining Force universe, never had characters die unless the party wiped; until then, they were just KO'd, and revived by Smelling Salts. If the party wiped, a Valkyrie would rescue the fallen and carry them to a priest to return their souls to their bodies for a steep fee. Pretty sure it was a racket.
Shining the Holy Ark handled death in interesting ways. Normal death is permanent, but exceptional magicians and priests (including NPCs) had magic powerful enough to return souls to their bodies. There were 8 characters and only 4 combat slots, so the party was large enough that a given dungeon crawl could be completed even if half the party were dead. Also, special rules applied to the 3 main characters; during the opening dungeon, the main cast are lethally wounded in a cave-in caused by the crash landing of symbiotic energy-based aliens / spirits. Both the spirits and the people are dying, and the spirits ask the party members (including the first-person-perspective character) if they agree to fuse with them, allowing them both to survive and recover. As a side effect, if these 3 characters die in combat but the battle is won by allies, they self-revive with 1 health. A good mechanic, with some neat worldbuilding behind it!
The Phantasy Star Series:In the early installments of the Phantasy Star series, before the Onlines, death was a permanent thing for people and aliens. However, being a sci-fi setting, surviving party members can go to any town with a cloning facility, pay a ton of Meseta, clone up a new body for their fallen friend, fill it with the last backup of their memories and personality, and get them back. The tech wasn't perfect, though. You might also be thinking that duplicating a living person would theoretically be possible, and you'd be right; though there are implied laws against it, cloning and genetic engineering gone awry were plot points in several of the games.
In Phantasy Star IV, knowledge of most technology was lost in the destruction of the Parman's homeworld and the departure of the Worldships; "Magic" and "Tech" became synonyms for "Sufficiently Advanced Technology We Don't Understand Anymore," but ruins found on other worlds and in orbit still contained rare tech and relics that people could use. Mechanically, characters could be grievously injured in normal combat, but the standard Death status was downgraded to "Dying"; Dying characters were unable to act in combat, and couldn't be stabilized by regular field healing, but were still able to move and talk. People could recover at a medical facility with the Tech, or through natural means and bed rest, and rarely though powerful Techs or Magic; portable revival items couldn't be purchased, and were strictly found as rare dungeon rewards. As a neat aside, Androids in the setting would self-repair and recover from being critically wounded and Dying, but as a trade off couldn't be affected by Magic and Techs designed to heal Organic life; they required Repair Kits, or special Tech Abilities of other Androids, to be repaired. Lastly, though Death generally only happened when the whole party wiped, there were some Techs and Magic that could cause special injuries which couldn't be recovered from normally, could theoretically cause proper Death.
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Topic: Dying in RPGs (Read 15377 times)