Is your character open for killing/death? What about injury?

[Chapter Serf]

Injury, absolutely. Either physical or emotional it just depends on the story and where it's going. If my character needs to be the victim of a no holds barred beatdown for the good of the RP, sure.

 

Death though? Not usually. Just because my story finishes, doesn't mean I can't start another one or jump into another one. Death is too finite. Unless I thought that there was nowhere else I could go with my character, I would avoid death like the plague. Besides, I'd then have to spend money on a name change and Fantasia which I'm not all that keen on.

[Guns Blazing]

It's a pretty useful plot element to be sure.

However, consider the possibility that four characters you know die within the span of two days due to /random combat. What if by the third one you've gotten tired of the same "A person close to me died and I'm traumatized/sad/confused" RP over and over again? If you're like me, you don't want to give the fourth player inferior play simply because the story thread has been tread into the ground. 

 

Again, I point out that our stories all take place in a sandbox that is completely war-torn. We're battling dragons, we're dealing with Garlean expansion and we have the primal threat constantly on the horizon. The entire continent was recently largely obliterated (just a few years ago) by the calamity. I'm pretty sure that MOST people living in a situation like this one would already be very used to death and losses. Sure, it'll hurt when you lose a friend. You'll surely have a natural mourning and grieving process (assuming normal mental health) of variable length and severity dependent upon how close the person was to you. However, this would probably be one of MANY losses your character has already experienced. Over time, after all of this, I'm pretty sure the majority of the population would be slightly desensitized to the idea of death, and would be much better at coping with such losses than you or me would be, in the real world. If you want to send your character into a deep spiral of grief, then more power to you... But it's probably  not necessary at all, given the fact that the residents of Eorzea are used to seeing people die by the hundreds, and possibly thousands.

[Caspar]

It's a pretty useful plot element to be sure.

However, consider the possibility that four characters you know die within the span of two days due to /random combat. What if by the third one you've gotten tired of the same "A person close to me died and I'm traumatized/sad/confused" RP over and over again? If you're like me, you don't want to give the fourth player inferior play simply because the story thread has been tread into the ground. 

 

Again, I point out that our stories all take place in a sandbox that is completely war-torn. We're battling dragons, we're dealing with Garlean expansion and we have the primal threat constantly on the horizon. The entire continent was recently largely obliterated (just a few years ago) by the calamity. I'm pretty sure that MOST people living in a situation like this one would already be very used to death and losses. Sure, it'll hurt when you lose a friend. You'll surely have a natural mourning and grieving process (assuming normal mental health) of variable length and severity dependent upon how close the person was to you. However, this would probably be one of MANY losses your character has already experienced. Over time, after all of this, I'm pretty sure the majority of the population would be slightly desensitized to the idea of death, and would be much better at coping with such losses than you or me would be, in the real world. If you want to send your character into a deep spiral of grief, then more power to you... But it's probably  not necessary at all, given the fact that the residents of Eorzea are used to seeing people die by the hundreds, and possibly thousands.

The thing is, that's how I'd play it. You were talking about how it is a really intense storytelling tool, and that some characters would have a greater affect on your story dead than alive, so honestly, I thought you were trying to give significance to death in the setting. Yet now you're talking about how the average person has seen a genocide-level of death, discounting the younger generations who weren't even around to see the Calamity. To me these statements contradict one another. Or would, if different people didn't deal with grief differently and in actuality there's probably plenty of hardened and sensitive people in Eorzea by now.

 

A big fundamental difference between how I see RP and some others is that I equate it with writing rather than acting. I am group writing, and a story's objective is to entertain. If I know A will happen before B, even though those events are scripted I will enjoy working with others to fill the gap. If even one person enjoys my writing, it was a good use of my time. If sudden death facilitates that enjoyment I will make it happen, and if a dramatic death does so I will do that as well, but either way choice was involved. It isn't like a Noh performer obtaining mushin or something esoteric to that extent and training themselves to solely embody the performance. I can say I used dice or just randomly decided to do it all I want but in the end a stylistic decision was made and others can decide for themselves whether they feel it was a selfish one.