{"id":7323,"date":"2022-11-18T13:34:40","date_gmt":"2022-11-18T21:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=7323"},"modified":"2023-01-20T19:59:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-21T03:59:29","slug":"wizardry-v-death-of-npcs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/7323","title":{"rendered":"Wizardry V: Death of NPCs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a bit of a surprise recently. Remember how I said that there was an NPC (named the Ruby Warlock) blocking a passage, and he wouldn&#8217;t move unless I gave him something to drink, and after a few iterations of this I got tired of fetching drinks for him and decided to try fighting my way past him? Well, once you&#8217;ve killed him, he doesn&#8217;t show up at his post any more, the encounter replaced with a pack of &#8220;demon imps&#8221;. Before this, it had been a rule throughout the <em>Wizardry<\/em> series that enemy deaths aren&#8217;t permanent &#8212; that anything you kill in a fixed encounter comes back when you leave the dungeon level. Even <em>Wizardry IV<\/em>, the one game in the series to have any persistent effects on game logic that weren&#8217;t embodied in inventory, kept all deaths temporary. <\/p>\n<p>That isn&#8217;t the surprise I mean, though. That came later, when I had occasion to go to the Temple of Cant in town for the first time in a while &#8212; my Priest had gotten paralyzed, and my Bishop hadn&#8217;t learned how to cure that yet. The UI for the Temple is a menu of all the dead or otherwise disabled characters who you can pay the priests to help. And there in the list was the Ruby Warlock.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve confirmed since then that other NPCs show up at the temple when killed, and can be resurrected. (In a way, it seems a little unfair. When my guys die, I have to drag them out of the dungeon before the temple lists them.) So it&#8217;s basically an elegant general way to accommodate the player&#8217;s desire to solve problems through violence, and still provide an undo button in case you kill someone with important dialogue. <em>Wiz5<\/em> is the first game in the series to <em>need<\/em> such a system, because it&#8217;s the first one to have killable NPCs who have functions other than being killed.<\/p>\n<p>A few other random observations on this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you&#8217;re the kind of person who does genocide runs in <em>Undertale<\/em>, you can use the temple as a sort of trophy case, preserving the bodies of those you&#8217;ve offed.<\/li>\n<li>The whole <em>Wizardry<\/em> system supports passwords on individual player characters, presumably to support multiple players playing from the same disks. It&#8217;s easy to imagine two players getting into fights over whether a given NPC should be dead or not, one player repeatedly killing them and the other repeatedly resurrecting them.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve talked with enough NPCs to get the impression that the final boss is a demonic being known as the Sorn. I wonder if the Sorn is resurrectable?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a bit of a surprise recently. Remember how I said that there was an NPC (named the Ruby Warlock) blocking a passage, and he wouldn&#8217;t move unless I gave him something to drink, and after a few iterations of this I got tired of fetching drinks for him and decided to try fighting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[348,734],"class_list":["post-7323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-wizardry","tag-wizardry-v-heart-of-the-maelstrom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7323"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7341,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7323\/revisions\/7341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}