About Fairies

My status has been as thus - I have been at a loss about what the heck to do about "death" in this game, because in the Zelda universe, so long as fairies exist, death has little consequence in this game. Combined with that school turned out to be more than I thought this semester (ended up putting a LOT of work into creative writing, still got a bit left to do with it) and that I really didn't know how to handle the job of a DM, nothing really happened. In terms of the summer, I doubt I'll get a job immediately after school is over, so there'll be some grace time for me to do stuff.


So far, I've been going along with "because anything can happen, I'm just doing random storylines." Instead, I'm changing the approach to "let's go ahead and start the main storyline." I've learned a lot from the roleplaying group I've joined this semester, along with a good bit more from my creative writing class just about the creative process in general, and I think I'm finally ready to tackle this. And this first arc will deal with the one issue that plagues "how to do an RPG in a Zelda universe where fairies screw up death." I have not written this sucker out yet, I just have a vague idea of how I want it in my head.


What I want from you is how you think death should be handled in ZURPG. Should it result in "Game Over, go back to last save point", "Some time passes, and you're revived by fairies", or some other way? I'm not asking for what should happen in the storyline, I'm asking for something that's affecting the gameplay of both sides of ZURPG (battle and roleplay). Should there be two different kinds of death? I don't know in all honesty, so I want input on this.

In my mind, the fairy situation is easy enough to solve: Fairies can only affect those who are still alive. When someone is on the verge of death, a captured Fairy will act of their own free will in return for freedom. Death is still death.

Here's some ways I've seen games handle player death vs. NPC death:

• Provide an in-world system the players are tied to, but the NPCs are not. See Rift for a good example of this in action.
  
• Everyone can come back to life as long as someone is there to revive them who has the capability. From there, it's a short leap to state all players have that ability. You also need to deal with a total party wipe situation; one good option there would be to consider that storyline a 'splinter timeline', one that's failed. Show the outcome of the party's failure. Rewind. Tuturuuuuu
  
• Perma-death! ... What, not an option? Drat.
  

Also, whatever you end up deciding, please don't let us know. It'll make for much more of an interesting event the first time someone/everyone dies.

the sadist in myself is saying permadeath... but that's really not the optimal solution given the playerbase here. so i would have to say something that's like a hybrid between the 3d zeldas and the bottled fairies and the alternate timeline theroy should the party get defeated.

The big flaw in that, I just realized, is the NPC deaths. Players could revive even the most tragic of deaths. Proposal: there's a known time limit. A soul can only remain in a dead body so long. Permanent death can easily be achieved by killing a person and taking them out of reach. This is, essentially, what Wind termed as 'two kinds of death'. The trick is making players and NPCs aware of that fact; if the enemy wants an NPC dead, they have to make sure the players cannot reach the body.