Stored-PC Corpses and Skellingtons

[coconut]

Out of curiosity, if a stored PC is corpsed for plot purposes, is the player usually informed, and does this happen a lot?

[DrunkenSalarr]

I would imagine not.  Once stored, the character becomes the property of the storytellers.

[Ammut]

The same thing happens to TTRPG characters of players who bow out of a game in my experience.  They end up either assisting the BBEG and become a central plot point, or become a background VNPC.  There has to be a wrapping up of loose ends

Either way it's up to the dungeon masters aka Storytellers and how they want the game to progress.

[mansa]

I have never seen it happen...

Though I don't play cool characters that involve themselves in large world plots.

[Patuk]

I have never seen this happen in my ten years of play either. Not once.

[najdorf]

They are saying if they wanted to do it they could, but they don't want to. Just in case, they want to have the option.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rSPH368zIvc?controls=0&start=77&end=90

[Brokkr]

It is one specific example.  The broader issue is that telling folks OOC that you are storing is not okay.  It places constraints on what Staff can do.  It causes other players to view things in that specific light which can influence how their character behaves.  It sometimes is the first action that results in OOC coordination and other problematic behaviors.

We understand that players often think they are being considerate to the other players involved with their character when passing on this information, but it should be brought up with Staff rather than taking unilateral action to pass this information along.

[Inks]

If an imm ever dragged out my (voluntarily) stored pc or its corpse to execute them, unless they were currently captured, I would be extremely upset.

I've never seen it happen though. Not saying it hasn't but if it was it must be very rare.

Then again for a long lived pc I usually prefer their story to be ended for ic reasons, preferably by other pcs or in a blaze of glory (or a hilarious fail at a blaze of glory).

[Brokkr]

I've never seen it happen though.

That is the entire point.  You wouldn't know that it was a stored PC vs one that was still played by their player.

Unless said player passed on OOC that they were storing.

[Dune Bunny]

I had a pretty long-lived pc in the mid-2010's named Nell that had risen to a pretty prominent social position in Allanak/Borsail. She had quite a few other pcs that depended on her for protection/schemes/friendship. After irl years of play though, I was floundering and ready to move on.

When I stored, staff was pretty awesome about contacting me to ask if we could work out an assassination ending for her, so that those in her circle would have something to explain her absence that would be more engaging than "she left".

So we set up a scene in the Red's for her (or as speculated, a decoy of her; I share nothing!  ) to be assassinated by some people involved in a current war going down. This had a pretty strong effect on quite a few of the pcs engaged with her in the coming weeks (especially getting to see her best buddy, Brand, wreck the poor assassin in the arena!).

The reactions to it all were strong, people mourned for her, and some never really got over it from what I saw. I couldn't imagine robbing those pcs of that roleplay/emotion by telling them I'd just stored and Nell was spending her 50s lassoing dudes in the brothel. That'd have really killed the attachment to her ending when they would oocly be like, 'ah, whatever, stored lol'.

Your PCs matter to those closest to them. Do those players a solid by not announcing the departure and letting them experience it from an IC perspective, whether it's like the Nell example, or even just a random disappearance with no explanation. 

And if it all seems too random and unanswered, I do believe staff are fine with requests to inquire about the status of a missing pc, though they might return a vague, but at least telling answer?