Side-Write: Better Ways to Die

Glancing over the last Side-Write I realized there was still a lot to explore here with the questions of how the world of Project Wild One should be built. As I've mentioned, the story is still very much up in the air, and I intend to let the demands of the gameplay shape a lot of it-- in other words, the world will be shaped by what the game needs in order to be fun to play, and the story will grow naturally out of that world as I better come to understand it.

It's still really early to be stressing too much over the story at this point I think, but that means it's a good time to start spitballing on the basics. For this one I decided to focus in on some of the more practical questions of that big feature that makes this world unique. I should warn you: this one gets pretty weird and morbid, so if you don't have a stomach for discussing violence, you might want to skip this one.

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One of the more important, fundamental, and difficult questions of building a world where "murder does not kill" is: what counts as murder? Not just in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of some greater power that tries to decide "how reality works," something arbitrary but with more information than we could ever hope to have in any given situation.

Obviously, if you are torn apart by wolves, or if you shoot a wolf yourself, either case will qualify. If you're beaten within an inch of your life, you will know no mercy, but if you manage to bleed out from it, you'll be reborn. If someone breaks your leg, then you throw yourself off a building, though, that will be the end of your life. Similarly, illness and starvation can still kill you permanently, as can dehydration or suffocation.

But what if those conditions are forced on you? Surely if someone strangles you, you'll come back. What if you're smothered under a pillow? Surely killing someone with a sword earns them a rebirth, so it doesn't have to be murder by bare hands or claws or fangs. So if someone directly forces you to suffocate, even using an implement, that shouldn't be an issue.

But if you're already dying of thirst and someone refuses to give you water, is that murder? Does it matter whether they know you'll die if they refuse? We might call that murder under law, but it's not the sort of thing this "rule of reality" is really geared toward.

The core principle driving the creation of this "rule" is that when creatures attack or devour each other, it is not permanently fatal. From a gameplay standpoint that's important for enabling the things we want to do with less moral complication, and in-world it does make sense as a potential answer to a very large threat such as the existence of "monsters" in the world. People should be protected from direct acts of violence, because that is what monsters will perpetrate, and the animals and monsters will be protected as well, partly as a side effect. This means that this protection could reasonably, actually be quite minimalistic in the situations it covers.

So refusing to give water to the parched would not "count" and give the dying a free pass back to the world of the living later, because that is far too indirect to qualify. What about more directly depriving people of what they need? If you dug a hole and threw someone in it, they would eventually die of thirst if nobody came to rescue them. It would certainly be your fault, but this would still be much too indirect for a rule of this nature. If you buried someone alive in a coffin, they would have enough air to live a little while, but they would soon suffocate, as the coffin and the earth would smother them rather similarly to the pillow, but perhaps after you had already left the scene. They likely would not come back.

What if you broke someone's leg and left them in a dangerous situation, like in the middle of a desert? Could they find a way to die "because of the broken leg" directly enough that it would count as dying from the wound you gave? That might literally make the difference. But would it count as "because of your actions" if they forced the wound to open or to get worse?

Or, for that matter, what if you put them in the fictional device, the iron maiden? If it were designed such that they were not even poked by you closing the device, they would eventually be punctured by their own movements as they grew tired. Might their best bet literally be to throw theirself forward, into your motion as you closed the door, to force you to stab them with the spikes?

But then that opens the question of how much intention matters. If you are holding a spear and someone throws theirself on it, dying, is that a murder? Is it close enough to a murder that they would be brought back? The rule is not there to protect someone that grabs a monster's claw and scratches theirself with it, but to protect someone attacked or devoured by the monster deliberately.

The luxury of knowing motivation and intention is something available to this power, so that's fully possible, where human law would have to make assumptions. So in this situation, as an expression of the will of some greater power that monsters must not be the end of the people and animals of this world, the rule that would save the vast majority of deaths caused by the monsters while allowing life to proceed normally otherwise gradually comes into clarity.

The murder must be by direct action of one being against another, be it with natural weapons or any sort of implement. The aggressor must choose to inflict this harm-- it does not matter what motivates it, or even if it's intended, but it must be by the action of the attacker. The victim must then die as a direct result of harm received, whether quickly or slowly. This will save humanity (or its equivalent) from the monsters... but not from itself.

There would still be a million border cases, of course. If you press a button to activate some Rube Goldberg machine of murder, does that count? What if you rig up something with a very large time delay, like to drop an anvil after an hourglass empties? Is there any way that you might be able to kill someone through inaction that "should" count? If you're thrusting your spear without looking and someone gets in the way, does that count where it wouldn't if they just threw theirself on it? Would it count if they threw theirself on your spear, but you were startled and pushed your spear forward very slightly as they did?

What's certain is that humankind would still be very capable of "real murder" under those circumstances. Burying might well become the standard, in fact, for how thoroughly it would remove other factors and complications, to protect the victim from harm until their death. Perhaps clever animals would even adapt to it, like harrying a large prey animal away from water sources, giving it tiny wounds to bleed it bit by bit and deprive it of sleep in the hopes it won't be able to bull through them to get what it needs. Or they might even drive animals into "dying holes" from which only the predators can escape. It would take time, but nature would adapt, and those that couldn't swallow enough prey whole or otherwise were determined to kill properly would find their ways.

Murder would still be a serious crime in society-- or rather, one kind would be a crime, and one maybe almost as common as it is in our world, and the other would be seen as a minor offense, but sometimes a necessity. Healthcare might well be very simplified: anyone wounded would be swiftly euthanized so that they could come back in better health.

Disease itself might be an odd border case: if you are killed by bacteria, would you come back? Would you bacteria come back with you? Our bodies have so many bacteria in them that we need, surely they would normally come back with us, would this reincarnation "filter out" the "bad" bacteria or damn us to die over and over? If our bodies disappear when we're "killed," then our bacteria would likely disappear as well, but this rule isn't meant to kill any form of life, even those we don't like.

For that matter, viruses are so small and basic that scientists today debate whether they're actually a form of life or not, so that blurs the line further on whether they would "come back" with us. But are there some entities like viruses in our body that are foreign but that are important to our functioning like bacteria are?

And past that, there's silly questions like where the mass comes from if a body "turns to paste" when devoured whole, then another appears. Would the world steadily increase in mass from the countless instances of devouring? Could this eventually accumulate to have a serious effect on the world as an astral body? Could the addition of so much water and carbon further throw off the balance of nature in the long term?

It's easy to say "it's magic," but when an entire world has to live with the consequences, the details are important. The nature of civilization in this world is becoming a little clearer now, and it's possible that overcrowding and starvation, while still a problem, might not be as severe as I'd estimated. There would still be death, much of it inflicted by others, just less of it. It's tough to answer all the questions, but we do gain wisdom in the asking.