I've always been open about the fact that my characters are killable - not necessarily easily killable, but they can be killed. Like most people who have killable characters, there are the usual caveats: it's up to me to decide if my character is killed, yadda yadda, your mileage may vary, etc.
My old character, C'kayah Polaali, had an interesting relationship with death. I killed him off four times over the course of RP. In two of those, people made an extreme effort to revive him (one involving someone giving him a phoenix down on the spot, the other involving a clumsy kidnapper paying an assload of money to a conjurer to revive him).
The other two times? Those were interesting. Both of those instances made total sense: in one of them, he was brutally assaulted by a gang, his skull was kicked in, ribs broken, and he was stabbed. After the attack, when he had died, I got a lot of OOC grief from people who were involved in the RP, because they hadn't expected that he would die from this, and I eventually let them convince me to allow them to bring him back despite my better judgement. In the other instance, in a pique of "I've lost everything", he decided to end his own life with poison. Again, I got a lot of OOC grief from a couple of people I'd been RPing with - far more than the first instance - and again I let them convince me to allow them to bring him back.
In retrospect, I should have held my position on both of those. Well, if I'd have held my position on the first, the second would not have ever happened. But I let myself be affected by how OOCly upset people were getting. The funny thing is, I don't really RP with any of those people anymore, and no small part of it is because of how they behaved in the middle of some very powerful RP.
I did end up capitalizing on all this. Because I don't like to retcon, I decided that all these things (with the very "skin of his teeth" saves) happened. He'd died four times, and each time someone brought him back. Clearly, in his mind, he was Thal's beloved. Thal must have had some plans for him, and simply wouldn't allow him to die until those plans were completed.
Character death can be a very powerful thing. I used to play Eve Online a lot. A friend of mine played a character over a period of years, and ended up allowing his character to be killed during a conflict. I still remember that - the RP itself, and the aftermath that rolled through our characters stories for years afterwards. It was especially powerful in Eve because, unlike FF, you had no way of changing a character's name and moving on. He simply deleted a character he had spent years training up.
My old character, C'kayah Polaali, had an interesting relationship with death. I killed him off four times over the course of RP. In two of those, people made an extreme effort to revive him (one involving someone giving him a phoenix down on the spot, the other involving a clumsy kidnapper paying an assload of money to a conjurer to revive him).
The other two times? Those were interesting. Both of those instances made total sense: in one of them, he was brutally assaulted by a gang, his skull was kicked in, ribs broken, and he was stabbed. After the attack, when he had died, I got a lot of OOC grief from people who were involved in the RP, because they hadn't expected that he would die from this, and I eventually let them convince me to allow them to bring him back despite my better judgement. In the other instance, in a pique of "I've lost everything", he decided to end his own life with poison. Again, I got a lot of OOC grief from a couple of people I'd been RPing with - far more than the first instance - and again I let them convince me to allow them to bring him back.
In retrospect, I should have held my position on both of those. Well, if I'd have held my position on the first, the second would not have ever happened. But I let myself be affected by how OOCly upset people were getting. The funny thing is, I don't really RP with any of those people anymore, and no small part of it is because of how they behaved in the middle of some very powerful RP.
I did end up capitalizing on all this. Because I don't like to retcon, I decided that all these things (with the very "skin of his teeth" saves) happened. He'd died four times, and each time someone brought him back. Clearly, in his mind, he was Thal's beloved. Thal must have had some plans for him, and simply wouldn't allow him to die until those plans were completed.
Character death can be a very powerful thing. I used to play Eve Online a lot. A friend of mine played a character over a period of years, and ended up allowing his character to be killed during a conflict. I still remember that - the RP itself, and the aftermath that rolled through our characters stories for years afterwards. It was especially powerful in Eve because, unlike FF, you had no way of changing a character's name and moving on. He simply deleted a character he had spent years training up.
