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A Good Day to Die

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Mike "JuMeSyn" Moehnke
FAN EDITORIALIST

It has been a few years since I played Warsong (aka Langrisser 1) but I remember one facet of its system quite well. If a commander fell in battle, that was it. The commander was dead with no hope of revival. This prompted numerous restarts on my part. Such a thing happens in Fire Emblem titles also, again prompting numerous restarts on my part. But permanent death is only a part of a select few tactical titles, and not of the traditional RPG. So, what would happen if that rule were altered?

As instant-death spells would have the potential to be incredibly aggravating when a system such as this is in place, a caveat would have to be set forth. Only once a character is wounded or incapacitated, whatever the player wants to title this status, can death occur. This should serve to remove some of the potential frustration by eliminating the possibility of a character's death being completely beyond the player's control. But the flip side of this proposal is that, if the player takes a chance and a character is allowed to die, that is the end. Save by reloading an old save or the character is dead forever. And even with a previous save being used, a record of how many times each character has died might be interesting (akin to Fire Emblem).

What would the effects of such a system be? Aside from altering combat strategies by the player quite a bit, having characters die would force the script to be changeable. Having the same lines be delivered by whichever character happens to be present is the lazy way; instead developers would have to change details of the story dependent upon who is still alive. Either that or branching paths in the story can be present, and seeing certain things can only be done if the player allows certain protagonists to die.

Such a system will certainly meet with a great deal of dissatisfaction from players, just as Fire Emblem polarizes (Langrisser 1 was an aberration thanks to later games having lengthier scripts that the creators did not want to rewrite based upon who lived and died). Trying such a thing out in a traditional RPG would be very interesting though, and I for one would like to test the efficacy of its implementation.