The Escapist Issue #84 Now Available

The eighty-fourth issue of Escapist Magazine contains five new articles, one of which focuses on the frequency of death in role-playing games.

As cRPGs moved from obstacle-filled mazes to, well, more complicated obstacle-filled mazes, players began to become as interested in what came next as what was happening now. Ultima IV and Wasteland tried to bring a world to life and introduced a range of setbacks for players, such as losing virtue, acquiring an STD or having a party member die. Since both games limited how saves worked (both in where you could save and in how many saves you could keep), players were expected to play through such losses, and they usually did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in Ultima IV, which pushed story especially to the fore, death was transitory: The player was immediately revived (back at the start of the game, reflecting the lingering “restart at death” model), though he lost reagents and gold. The designers realized that the more the player cared about his characters, the less justifiable killing them would be. Nevertheless, most RPGs (AD&D “Goldbox” games, Might & Magic, Wizardry, etc.) continued to use death as the primary penalty.