I have the question of how to make an immortal character a viable rpg element stuck in my head. I did a little looking around and found this article that expresses some of my feelings but not all of them. In particular I'm wondering how to make it an RPG element. Lost Odyssey is, I feel, an example of a failed attempt at this. Your character is essentially immortal, but it is mechanically useless. Your characters still die and this will result in failure if they don't happen to get back up before everyone is down. However, I'm convinced that an infinite revive system isn't the way to go. I hated Bioshock when I used the Vita chambers as I felt no connection to the well being of my character. Of course Borderlands uses a similar system, but they were smart enough to add a cost to it- mainly a significant amount of money. Two other tracts to take are using it simply as a story mechanic- the character has everlasting life, but can be killed- or adding on an extreme resiliency such as Wolverine's healing factor. Of course, those don't really answer my question.
My current idea is that something else must be at stake. Some other character's life must be threatened or some objective where time is the obstacle. Of course, in the context I'm thinking of this- mainly turn-based RPGs- time isn't a really big obstacle since you have all the time in the world to pick your attacks (adding a real time timer is not a valid solution in my opinion unless the entire game is real time) and having someone else be in danger might only change who's HP you have to watch.
I want to think I've seen this mechanic in other games, but I can't think of where. I know I've heard of robots simply creating a copy and downloading the memory. Any suggestions on how you would handle this conundrum would be interesting to hear, for any genre really.
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