I’m surprised that there isnt a topic already. Atleast from my cursory search, but how would you all go about writing the death of a character like an RO or important NPC? Like, what would you say makes it impactful in a way that isnt contrived or feels like it is expected? Much in the same way that any character that talks fondly about family during a war film is almost certainly doomed to die. How fo you avoid tropes like that while creating enough interest within the character and ideally their survival to where you can properly have both the reader and the MC in a similar emotional state?
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Death flags are a necessary evil, so to make someone’s death impactful, you have to enumerate the ways they will be likeable; and possibly, if you’ll implement something that will prevent their deaths in the first place, make them just as impactful. Execution is key.
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The most important thing is to put in the work to develop that character. Make the reader feel something for them. The doomed character talking about family in the war film is a cliché for a reason - assuming it’s done well, it works. It makes the character more than cannon fodder, taps into our own relationships and fears. Of course, that’s not the only way to do it. But you do have to make your character feel like a person to your audience, someone living a life, someone who’s lived a whole life up to this point and probably expected to have a future, someone living in a beautifully messy web of relationships and obligations and dreams that are all coming to an end now.
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I know a lot people don’t like them, but I love good character deaths. Especially characters that you might otherwise assume are “safe” like ROs. For instance in Heart of the House, the second time I played, I lost Dev and I was legit so upset I closed the game (in a good way).
I don’t think you have to make them likable, exactly, but they need to be relatable in some way. There needs to be something there, whether that’s likeability, common ground with the player or PC, or just some understanding that makes you root for them even if they’re an ass. And you need to give people time to get to know them. Time to get attached.
Big one: you have to plant the seeds. I love when something is subtle enough that I don’t quite notice it but then after the fact I see those seeds everywhere. It’s an impressive display of skill and I envy it. But yeah, I do think you generally want things to be more subtle than, like you said, family talks fondly of soldier at wartime.
I also think it depends on whether or not the death is a fixed plot point. That’s something else that I think it’s important to be only clear enough about. But it matters that a huge moment like that–assuming it isn’t fixed–follows logically from the plot and the PC’s choices rather just being a simple skill failure. Skill checks can certainly play a part, but it needs to make sense that the character was in the dangerous position to begin with.
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Ya know this is one of my bugbears about the trend of most of the important characters being made available as ROs. It’s become almost unacceptable to have them canonically die or leave the storyline in any way (or even to break up or betray the MC unless there’s a redemption arc). It really limits how you can use characters and makes them always feel pretty safe that they’ll continue on as you’ve initially met them without danger or sometimes much growth.
On one hand to have a hard hitting death, you often need the reader to feel something for them, but on the same track if you kill off a beloved character then often people get upset because they can’t be saved. I’m not sure how to get around that. There’s a limit to how you can use the random person you’ve never met before dying to good effect. It can be done, but it often doesn’t work unless the situation is just right and the writer has the skill to pull it off.
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I definitely understand that. I’ve said before that the thing, for me, that makes the best characters isn’t just giving them personality, it’s giving them goals. Especially goals that complicate or oppose those of your protagonist. And when you’re on opposing sides, especially in games with fantastical elements, world ending threats, and violence as a problem solver, then those characters should be subject to the same rules of the world. Sometimes people die. Sometimes people get their asses beat. Sometimes people end up doing things their loved ones find unforgivable and those relationships can’t be recovered.
I do agree with you 100% that audiences often get mad when those things happen to RO’s, but I wish they didn’t because I also agree with you that that mindset limits how you can use characters and how characters can grow and change. To be their best, they have to be more than just RO’s. It’s a tough spot to be in when your audience is really wanting one thing but you find the other thing artistically preferable.
There’s always the spoilery CW I suppose, but those bug the heck out of me (in cases like this).
lol me. I’m that masochist. (But for real, I agree!)
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As someone who is a very very character driven reader and for whom character deaths are extremally distressing, i think the key for having a death not feel “cheap” or unsatisfying is some semblance of control over the outcome(at least in this medium). We are all here reading IF’s instead of reading one of the countless good traditional books(that litter our respective TBR’s no doubt) is because of the “I” in “interactive fiction”. Now i dont mean something as simplistic as a yes or no choice to save a character, no make it an ordeal we have to go through in order to save them. Put us through the wringer, make us sacrifice and go through hell. Imo by doing so you can turn a death that would otherwise be just quite sad into something truly gut wrenching, after all a character you love dying because the author needs it to happen narratively is one thing but a character you love dying because you made the wrong choices, because you failed to save them or dare i say you chose the greater good over them?
Now that is the kinda thing that would break a heart/spirit.
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Break hearts, crush dreams. Trust that the readers you lose will be made up for by the masochists who feel it gives your story more stakes.
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Hey, if it’s good enough for James Cameron, John Green, Wilson Rawls, Hanya Yanagihara, and Markus Zusak …
And the scripted death of a beloved character has been used to excellent effect in interactive fiction, too. Consider Choice of the Vampire and Pon Para and the Great Southern Labyrinth.
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Really? Because all I’ve ever seen are people getting very upset when that has happened. Maybe the masochists stay quieter about it. 
It’s actually one of the corners I wrote myself into for one of my WIPs. I relented and made some characters that weren’t supposed to be options ROs by popular demand then realised I didn’t know how to write some scenes which had kind of required some bad stuff to happen.
Oh no I totally agree with that. I don’t like angst for angst sake. Putting a death in there just for “shock value” doesn’t work for me either. It needs to be a fitting part of the story.
But sometimes those can be meaningful. What if you were in a situation where you had to choose between one person or many? Particularly if saving the one may in the end save no one including them with the fall out, or if it’s something they wouldn’t have wanted you to do. It could be a hard decision to make.
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I agree with @Havenstone here. Those that are the most outraged about something so impactful tend to be the loudest at making their displeasure known.
Truth be told… if you get this type of reaction to the death, that might be telling you that what you wrote has accomplished your goal and that is confirmation that you have executed the death in a manner that is successful.
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I think they mostly do, especially in a context where other people are being vocally upset. But a game with life-and-death stakes for the ROs will absolutely have fans as well as detractors.
This is a little different, but the people who hate the gruelling Rebels management chapters are a lot more vocal than the ones who like them. The latter mostly talk with their wallets rather than their reviews.
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…I’m sorry, I’m now stuck picturing that any character who talks fondly about family while they’re watching a war film (probably with people around angrily shushing them, because they’re sitting in a movie theatre) is doomed to die.
I’d certainly for once love having a character who talks fondly about family to actually get back with their family though…
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Well of course, the big battle scene is the perfect time to deal with that annoying person who won’t shut up about irrelevant things during a movie. 
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Writing a character death in static fiction that doesn´t feel contrived or pointless is hard enough. It demands a setting of tone, emotional payoff and skills.
Writing an inevitable death in interactive fiction is ten times harder because players often go, but why cannot I not do this extremley obivous thing to prevent it. And then there is the fact that the death of a loved one is a huge thing and most of these stories just do not have the depth to depict it. There is rarely the time to grieve in these stories - let´s be honest. And that risk reducing the death to a gimmic. It is not impossible to do of course, but is it hard.
Also even if there was a way, it is it will properly only work once or twice. It is the sort of thing that once you have pulled it once, you can´t pull the exact same thing again or it starts to feel tropey and as obvious emotional manipulation.
A good example is a game of throne/song of ice and fire. I had read a lot of fantasy of variyinf darkness before the series came out, so when the setting establihsed itself by throwing little kids out of windows, I knew that a certain person was going to die pretty early and as a result my reaction was more of a “yeah, that tracks.” than shock.
Some stories still demand it. Just because I happen to be genre savy enough to regonize a sacrificial character 3 miles off does not mean that the sacrifice shouldn´t be sacrifised. A song of ice and fire would be worse if that character hadn´t died. Some stories do demand death to be told.
The one thing you can never do, though. Is guarentee that the players and the mc reaction match one to one. Not just is real life people´s reaction to grief too varied to ever be covered in one mc. There is also the aspect that players are going to have variying feeling towards the dead character. And sometimes those feeling have nothing to do with how the character actually is.
A good personal example (again) is Varric from bioware. I remember liking him well enough when I played da2 the first time. Nothing fantastic, but also nothing too bad. Then came daI and he became a character I was entirely “meh” about. The came trespasser and I became infuriatied at how they basterized my Hawke just to give Varric a happy ending. But it was an ending, I took solace in that fact. Then came the Missing and the Veilguard gameplay and I have begun loathing Varric with the passion of a thousand suns. That means that my emotional reaction if Varric dies in veilguard become a celebration - a reaction that the mc will not be allowed to have. (It will be a bit of second hand celebration, because I am most likely not going to play veilguard.)
Now that is a bit of extreme reaction. Compouned by me getting more and more frustrating with the way bioware assume friendship and comeraderi on my mc behalf and Varric being a symbol of that. But you see shades of this in every forced best friend character here on the forum.
Some people reaction to the writer saying “the MC care about this person” is always going to be “no they don´t” and for those people it can be a relief if that character dies and thus exit the story. That does not mean that people should not write these kind of character, just that you can never guarentee how the player feel about a character. Nor will all people feel the same regardless of how well written the story is.
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To be fair, characters not doing extremely obvious things is also infuriating enough in static fiction.
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Except that these days, it’s such an obvious death flag that it almost has the complete opposite effect: it tells you that that character is doomed, so you stop caring about them as much. And I realise that the problem is that in a war movie especially, you don’t have enough time to get the audience properly invested in the multiple characters you’ll be following before they start dying, so you need whatever shortcuts you can find.
But that’s only true for movies. If you’re writing a book, a series, or even, dare I say it, an interactive fiction game, you do have time to actually make the characters interesting and likeable on their own, not just by using cheap shortcuts.
More generally, I am always very against having ROs be killed off without a chance of being saved. Speaking from experience (as someone who used to have a list of “dead boyfriends” given how often I ended up liking the character the writer decided to use as the “nobody’s safe” option), it really sucks and can end up with readers feeling punished for liking the doomed character (i.e. doing exactly what the writer wanted them to do in the first place).
Now, obviously sometimes a character’s got to die or the plot wouldn’t go the way it’s supposed to (heck, my own WiP is a good example of this), and it’s not going to be easy to hide this if they’re the one non-romanceable character in the cast. And I don’t really have an answer for this. Maybe you could leave off actually starting romance until after the death, but that will still have people being very invested in them? Or maybe have the death be preventable, but then the character’s survival will cause the plot to change, and sometimes that’s not possible.
And, as @DreamingGames says, often it is very easy to come up with ways to save the doomed character, especially in interactive fiction, where the protagonist is supposed to be following the player’s instructions, and forcing them to stand idly by while their RO is killed can feel a little cheap.
Not really a fan of the “bay vs bae” decisions in general, but making it so that the bae dies either way just feels cruel.
Oh, that’s simple: just have the entire cast talk about their families. 
That way at least one of them is going to make it back.
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I wasn’t advocating anyone resort to cheap shortcuts. I said it was effective if done well, and anything overdone is necessarily that much harder to do well. My point wasn’t “go ahead and use the cliché,” it was “understand why this thing was effective enough to become a cliché, then figure out a better way to do that.”
I know this was meant to be somewhat facetious, but it’s actually not far from what I was trying to get at. You should aim to have a cast of well-developed, interesting characters that the reader cares about what happens to. If you do that, you don’t need cheap shortcuts or fancy tricks to manipulate the reader in the moment.
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But then that’d just mean the character who doesn’t have family to talk about is the one that’s going to die!
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Meanwhile Breach fans: I killed Mouse (a love interest) for drama.
I don’t think masochists are quiet at all (see: AMR/SOH/Infamous fans), they might be quieter when there’s a wave of complaints from more sensitive readers (it’s against forum rules to argue with other users) opting to talk to like-minded fans instead or politely stating their preference.
AMR is a great example of both an IF with an audience who likes tragedy and frequent flame wars in cog thread.
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