Choices

[SekoETC]

Sometimes RP leads to a situation where your character must die because escaping death would require doing something against your characters nature. People change, but making big changes in character may sometimes feel false.

Often we need an outsider to interfere. If no one cares, then it's time to die. But everyone is affected by other people. Even in loneliness you still have the memories.

Maline died because she stopped feeling hunger. The character can't see the message, only the player. And when I say she lost the feeling, she did not get it back. She knew she was dying, but didn't realize why. And I let people know she's starving, by the way I described her body, but I did not let her speak out her hunger because that would have broken the rules I set. Till the last minute I hoped someone would ask her if she had anything to eat, or you look so terribly skinny, take this... But of course we all knew she was out of hope. She had to make many other choices before, and she ended up choosing life, sometimes in risky ways. But eventually we'll all face death.

Dove could have been saved. I set myself a time limit, if I don't get her deleted by that then I'll let her live. But then I killed her anyway. It happened really fast in the end. Partially it was of personal reasons, I couldn't have interaction with the other people around because they were from different timezones and I had to stay up all night if I wanted to catch them online. And this everybody hates her thing, yes she was often overacting and it hurt me and hurt her that no one could really take her seriously. She loved the clan so much and would have been ready to die for it. Instead she died of a sickness that doesn't exist in Cantr, someone said. Well many things don't exist in Cantr in programmed way, there is no wind, there is no temperature, there is no height, yet what is real? It's all just code. I think the coding is a sceleton and RP is the flesh. But now I'm drifting. What am I trying to say here?

So many have died.

Choices.

I had a character on the Swedish region that couldn't gather enough healing food to save herself. The animals were doing more and more damage. A young man was trying to help her. She knew they would fail. She told him to pick up all she's carrying when she dies and try to find wood for a shield. Maybe with her food he'd get long enough. Then she attacked all the animals, charge! doing 0 damage, and a goat killed her. It was a good way to go.

Yvonne wanted to see the whole K-island. After that she had no reason to live. A killer bid her safe journey. I don't remember if she smiled, if she thanked, but inside she was smiling sadly. For she knew she would never come back. Her journey ended to the shore, she made her journal uneditable and dropped most of her possessions. She waded into the water and started swimming towards the horizon. People went on with their lives. It took days before she was finally deleted, and it happened when I was sleeping. No last words, days in the water, and people would just notice the last things floating to the shore. But Cantr water is not even liquid, not even wet. It's just like blue earth. I told Colonel that a character like this had died. He was there then. He said "she'll be missed". By who? No one even noticed her. She was the most misplaced character, or maybe she wouldn't have been any better on any other island either, but with her I got a sad and ugly picture of the K-island, and I still can't understand how some people love it so much. She was a boring character. One of those non-destinct middle-characters you base on a simple idea or two. The first one I got deleted.

But I keep forgetting the first character I lost. It must have hurt the most. Maryan. In the beginning, even if you know you can't have them back you have this feeling of immortality, and thinking there are some sorts of laws protecting your characters because they're doing nothing wrong. But sometimes harm comes from the best intentions. She was just trying to be helpful, and ended up helping a thief. When the truth came up, she was handed a sword to fight against the person trying to capture them. She chose not to. The next time I logged in, she was dead. No waiting, no trial. Striking the person would have made no difference, they couldn't have taken her down. Yet it means nothing, that she didn't fight back, there will be no ingame proof of her intentions, her innocence. I doubt that Sjoftich was ever informed of her death, her name was never stiked out the list, not even marked missing. And now the people who killed her are probably long gone, killed by the plague.

There's always choices to be made. Even if you think there's nothing to do, there are still choices. You can wait, or you can die, or you can act. It all has an effect on something or someone. I don't think you understand why I'm writing this, but if it makes you think then that's good.

I think that's all I want to say at the moment.

[mortaine]

I have 4 characters in the French lands who are surviving well beyond what I wanted them to. They, too, are all dying from the animal problem compounded by the lack of ability to gather healing foods or heal naturally. Two of them have food. Two of them are starving to death. Two are inside houses now. Two are on the road. If they stay on the road, the animals can't get them.

Three of them left one day, deciding it was better to starve on the road, where they might find some food in a house somewhere, than to die in a box in a town that's completely beseiged by wild animals.

I keep wanting them all to just up and die and be done with it. Instead, they keep scavenging. Because the will to live is the STRONGEST thing in the world. I know Cantr only has a very early evolution, but any living thing has undergone millenia of evolving such that every cell in its body wants to live, to survive, to carry on the next gene. Understanding that means that I understand that every choice these characters make is a choice between life and death, and at no point can death be the choice they make. They might make the wrong choice, in the sense that the choice they make leads to death, and they can make mistakes, and others around them may misunderstand them or perfectly understand them and do them violence anyway. But they cannot simply give up and die. It's not in me to do that, and therefore it's not in them.

[Yo_Yo]

... What in the hell are you two talkin about?!?!

[mortaine]

We're talking about when your character is faced with a decision, sometimes conscious or not, about whether to live or die.

Example: A character may be too proud to ask for help, and may die of starvation. In Seko's case, her character was starving to death but had somehow purified herself of hunger, so while Seko RP'd her as wasting away, she could never ask for help or food, and the people around her did not notice or care enough to feed her.

I did have a similar situation with a character I play who has communication problems. When a notethief came into town while the leader was inside, he got tremendously agitated and couldn't articulate what was wrong, only that something horrible had happened to change his environment drastically. It wasn't life-or-death, but it definitely forced me to define the parameters in which I RP that character.

[SekoETC]

Yes, even not life-and-death situations can prove difficult when having to stay in character. My blind character happened to arrive to a scene where many old characters had just died and there was loads of valuables lying around, including keys. But she couldn't pick them up because all she could notice was a shield she stumbled on, and that she considered only an annoyance, not something to take. This lead into another character picking up most of it and later stealing a bike and driving away, when no one replied to her questions who to give them to. Since as you can understand, my character couldn't point out the person in charge either because she only recognized her by voice.
Another time a friend of hers arrived to a location, terribly wounded and it really hurt me as a player to see that. Yet I could not go to her because my character didn't know about her arrival nor her condition before she approached her.

I also have another Swedish character suffering from the animal attacks, but he's more equipped and still alive. Inside he had given up hope but decided to try gathering nuts anyway - if he would die before having a chance to use them then someone else could benefit from them. But then another people gave him a part of what they'd gathered and apparently nuts are far more efficient in the gathering/healing ratio than another things available. Though he knew going outside might lead into a violent death in the hands of gorillas, it was better than starving to death slowly.