Form or Function

I'm sure you can all think of a point in time where you were playing a game, running along, and you run across a peice of the story that doesn't fit with the game world. A character dies, for instance, and while you have a dozen scrolls of ressurection in your backpack, you can't save their lives.

The delicate balance of gameplay versus story is the most evident when dealing with resurrection. If you can bring a character back from the dead with no effort, any tension the game might be trying to build is lessened, because any threats are suddenly less so. If resurrection becomes too much of an obstacle, the game becomes hard and unforgiving. Worse still, since you should have more powerful abilities and more resources available at the end of the game than you did at the beginning, there have to be new, more challenging ways to keep the tension in the game.

This particular argument was raised by a discussion on Final Fantasy. The series has been handled well over the years, breaking ground in many different fields, having new stories with common elements and so on. In several of the games, however, you have characters die on you as part of the story. PCs, and NPCs alike. Then, you are jolted out of your suspension of disbelief because for ten hours you've been fighting monsters and getting killed regularly, only to cast a little magic spell (typically called 'life', so there's no confusion as to simply recovering consiousness) to pick your mangled body up off the ground, and it doesn't work in the cutscene you're watching. Or afterwards. You can drag 'dead' party members around for days and ressurect them at the drop of a hat, but if someone dies in a cutscene they're gone for good, and forget about raising that dead NPC king who was the only one who knew where the secret treasure room was.

And that brings us back to the challenge of ressurection in games. If you could raise any NPC from the dead who died, towns would no longer be in threat of being destroyed. The baddies would never be any sort of a threat, because all you'd need to do is get strong enough, buy a million pheonix downs, let them wipe all life off the world, and start casting ressurect!

One way to get around this would be to make there be something special about the PCs. They could have special amulets that allow the bodies to be raised if they fall - but most NPCs don't have that amulet (or whatever it's decided to be). a character could be in real danger if that item or trait is taken away, allowing a game to threaten the characters when needed, but make things easy otherwise. But, would it work?