Death
From Shadowrun: Awakened
Death is permanent and almost inevitable in Shadowrun Awakened, though it will never happen from only a single mistake.
Game Rules Description
"Memento Mori" is a latin phrase that defines life: "Remember you will die". This sentiment persists throughout a Shadowrunner's experience and is most often the swift culmination of their time in the game. They live fast and die young. The project is committed to applying this, even in a genre that does not embrace such a concept. Since Shadowrun has no built-in resurrection magic, unlike many fantasy games, and there is still no cure for death, permanent death is simply being true to the pen and paper game.
One of the fundamental draws for MMOs is that they are games that can be played forever. Often, this is taken to mean that a single player can play a single character forever. In SRA, we have rejected this concept outright. While we hope the game can have enough depth in mechanics and content to be played forever, we are intentionally trying to design a system where population turnover is natural. Both failure and success on the part of the player serves a role in this turnover. Successful play ultimately results in retirement, which will likely include some measure of reward, and bad play results in permanent death.
Permanent death must be handled as the ultimate outcome of bad play; not the immediate outcome. No single, isolated mistake should cause the character to be removed from the universe. Not only is this perceived as necessary for fairness to the players, but it's also in keeping with rules in Shadowrun. Shadowrun characters are actually rather durable, often able to sustain a much higher percentage of damage after being mortally wounded than in other games. This means teams will have a lot of time to apply first aid or healing magic to the character before their death. Additionally, the DocWagon insurance company will be able to intervene on the player character's behalf if they possess a policy. While this intervention will be much slower than anything a teammate could apply, it's a good last ditch plan, especially for the solo shadowrunner.
In addition to stopping death by making it rather slow, Shadowrun does set a precedent for second chances in the game. The "Hand of God" rule, whereby a character is saved from death one time in the game, is an often applied rule used by GMs to prevent characters from being expunged for one bad decision. To follow similar ideas, SRA will allow for edge to be used as a variation on "extra lives". For each point of Edge a player character possesses, they will be be automatically stabilized once in any situation where they would have otherwise died. This means the character is still incapacitated, but alive. This places them at the mercy of their team to pull them out of the situation or as potential captives of their assailants.
For example, a starting human who doesn't place any more build points into Edge receives 2 points in the attiribute to start. This means that in two separate incidences, they will be automatically stabilized instead of dying. If later on in the game, they invest points into Edge, that will add one additional stabilization for each point. The running total for how many times they have been stabilized will be visible to them in some way, along with their Edge attribute in the normal character stats screen. If the player character eventually exhausts their number of auto-stabilizes, they will then we permanently dead and their character will be unavailable to them to play anymore. At this point, they must create a new character to re-enter the world.
Ideally, we would like to supplement the automatic stabilization rule with a 'dramatic' escape, or other fate, for the player in these situations. This will be necessary for some scenarios where just lying down and not being dead is not good enough; for instance, explaining how the character might survive an explosion. This could include some form of scripted actions to save the player, or simply a fade to black punctuated by a miraculous return to the world. For instance, a player character's body could be 'swept up' as garbage and deposited in a dumpster or at the local dump. The character could be flushed into the sewer or even out into Puget Sound. As long as the action is accompanied by some explanation such as 'Lucky for you, the bullets / sword / weapons used to end your life missed all your vital organs and you just passed out from blood loss'. Finally, even using edge to escape death could fail to cause you to escape capture. One potential ending for any incapacitated character is ending up in jail, corporate or otherwise; and since edge burning only stabilizes, the character could always be imprisoned.
Technical Implementation
Death happens when a player exceeds their physical condition monitor by more boxes than their Body attribute. At this time, if they have any auto-stabilizes left, they will be set to one box short of this threshold. Likely, they will need to have a temporary invulnerability effect applied to them, lest griefers or AI somehow manage to damage them again. It is our intention that a single point of edge buys your way out a single situation, not just a single wound.
Characters that die cannot be immediately deleted from the system as there will inevitably be exceptions. One simple example would be if a player suddenly loses connection in the midst of combat. Paralyzed by lack of a pilot, the player character will most likely be killed. In this case, it is not viewed as fair to burn their edge. At the same time, we do not want someone to be able to turn off their modem as they are losing, purposefully dropping their connection, in order to avoid death. Incapacitation in enemy territory, anywhere they would have been engaging in combat with meaningfully dangerous foes, should always be a bad thing; even with dramatic edge events saving you.
Dramatic edge burns will be based on scripted events that fire when the character is automatically stabilized. This will call into a scripting and allow for a mission, zone, campaign, or storyline to cause actions that will offer a dramatic explanation (in that order of execution). This means some storylines could offer support teams that intervene to cover the character while maybe some zones are setup to always attempt player character capture when incapacitated.
