One of C'kayah's characteristics is that he thinks of himself as the Beloved of Thal, because he's died a handful of times and been brought back every time. To me, he's always been a killable character - having a character who's completely invulnerable to harm, to me, destroys a great deal of the meaning of their story - and his habit of getting into dangerous situations makes this a very real possibility. In a world with any number of not-uncommon ways to raise the recently deceased, he's been brought back from them all. Most of the time, this makes sense. There were two occasions, however, where I allowed the course of things to change based on OOC objections:
At the First Royal Ball of Ul'dah (back in March 2013), C'kayah was attacked by enemies. It was a pretty brutal attack, with a pretty high overkill factor. The RP story behind this would have been served really nicely with his death, so I decided to let him die. A friend of mine at the time got hugely upset OOCly at the idea of this, and I allowed myself to be badgered into letting C'kayah be saved. ICly it was on the borders of plausibility, because they brought help soon enough that I could see this happening.
The next couple of months were pretty heartbreaking for C'kayah, and he lost everything he cared about. After a last shattering emotional blow, he decided enough was enough, and took poison. It was an interesting end to his story, and I was satisfied with the way it all played out. My plan was to do a server transfer name change (RMT name changes weren't a thing at the time) along with a fantastia and play him as a new character. As a postscript, I contacted a few people I'd played closely with to let them know what was happening. One took this extremely badly and again I allowed myself to be convinced to allow C'kayah to be saved, this time through some pretty serious story-breaking powergaming.
In retrospect, I regretted both of these. In the first, the RP arc I was playing in was materially made lesser, and (in my opinion) stripped of a lot of its impact by my allowing C'kayah to be saved. The second was worse, however, because I basically had to go in with a tire iron and remodel C'kayah's emotions. It took a few months after this before I felt like he was his own character again, and I would have had more fun in that time developing the character I would have replaced him with.
At the First Royal Ball of Ul'dah (back in March 2013), C'kayah was attacked by enemies. It was a pretty brutal attack, with a pretty high overkill factor. The RP story behind this would have been served really nicely with his death, so I decided to let him die. A friend of mine at the time got hugely upset OOCly at the idea of this, and I allowed myself to be badgered into letting C'kayah be saved. ICly it was on the borders of plausibility, because they brought help soon enough that I could see this happening.
The next couple of months were pretty heartbreaking for C'kayah, and he lost everything he cared about. After a last shattering emotional blow, he decided enough was enough, and took poison. It was an interesting end to his story, and I was satisfied with the way it all played out. My plan was to do a server transfer name change (RMT name changes weren't a thing at the time) along with a fantastia and play him as a new character. As a postscript, I contacted a few people I'd played closely with to let them know what was happening. One took this extremely badly and again I allowed myself to be convinced to allow C'kayah to be saved, this time through some pretty serious story-breaking powergaming.
In retrospect, I regretted both of these. In the first, the RP arc I was playing in was materially made lesser, and (in my opinion) stripped of a lot of its impact by my allowing C'kayah to be saved. The second was worse, however, because I basically had to go in with a tire iron and remodel C'kayah's emotions. It took a few months after this before I felt like he was his own character again, and I would have had more fun in that time developing the character I would have replaced him with.
