PC gamer here. I have messed about with Skyrim, having beaten Oblivion (although Sheogorath can bite me -- I spend my non-gaming life not becoming an avatar of teh cray, thank you), and am partway through a Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough. I keep studying videos of the crisis when the first town is destroyed so I can save All the Things, I mean NPCs, like the poor bastard trapped under a beam in a burning building. Also I always play female elves (going back to paper-and-pencil, red-box-set D&D) but that may make me less likely to get with Sera, alas. I really should have been a Qunari because she digs them, but that gets you a severe setback to a fairly important scene in the game. What are you gonna do, right.
However, most of my gaming time is spent in Lord of the Rings Online. I rolled on an RP server and found some of the most amazing, dedicated RP'ers (there are groups and events specific to Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves -- I mean, people do their research, yo), and made some great friends. My character, who had spent at least two and a half Ages (born during the First Age) assuming she would never fall in love, fell in love. This plot between me and my now-betrothed (some guy in Germany whose real name I don't know) has been going for two years. And about two weeks ago, I finally learn that he has a desk job all week to finance his playing in a prog-rock band all weekend, and a "demanding girlfriend" -- his words -- and therefore has decided to leave the game, partly because he thought I was one of the best RPers he'd known and he didn't want to keep being unfair to me with long absences. I was given a choice between having him killed off in the current military operation they are RPing, or, if I couldn't roll with that, he would have the character permanently posted to guard duty in the Misty Mountains, and he could be the Phantom Husband who always gets mentioned but never appears. The problem with this, as he saw it, is that eventually nobody would remember him and our story together, and I would come off as jilted, crazy, or both.
So... if any of you RP, even in headcanon for your console-game characters... you'll understand that even though I hate it with all 206 (or whatever) of my RL bones, I agreed with Plan A. It's more in the spirit of the character -- who, after all, is a soldier and signed up for this -- and of Tolkien generally. Imagine if Théoden King survived the Battle of the Pelennor Fields; rode back to Edoras in triumph; and then got old and senile all over again, the natural way? Éowyn and Faramir might still hook up, but he doesn't have that urge to pry her out of her depression, and nobody really cares at this point. Éomer still becomes king someday, as Théoden's son Théodred bit it at the Fords of the Isen, but by then he'll be past his prime and not known as a glorious war-leader, because he never charged the enemy yelling "Death!" when he thought Éowyn had also been killed. You see how the impact of not killing a character can screw up a host of other storylines you're building. (Hell, even your appendices. Example: Théoden promised Merry that after the war they would have a nice long chat about plants, and the herbs of the Shire, particularly pipeweed. Obviously they never get to have this chat, which is part of what spurs Merry to write a book about the topic when he's comfortably retired as minor Shire nobility.)
The problem is that both of us are horribly depressed about the situation. Whoever this guy is in real life (the owner and user of a Fender Telecaster, he told me), he is a hell of a good RPer. His character is nicely balanced, neither a Gary Stu nor an Anti-Sue, and he's always been written with wit and humor -- a good thing because, if you've read the Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, you know Tolkien Elves have a bad habit (sometimes fatal) of taking themselves far too seriously. And he's my friend. And the entire kinship (guild) has been looking forward to our wedding. One person crafted me a pair of gold rings. Someone else wants to sew my dress. Another kinnie wants to do my hair. The other character has been in the kinship since its founding, and our plot has been going on for at least two years. More, I think. So probably everybody assumes he's unkillable because he's RL dear friends with the kin leader, or just because he's been around forever. This is going to shock everybody, which will lead to RP all over the place, and it is overall the better decision. Two healer characters are in on the secret, because the group is going to be dragging my betrothed home dying of an unstoppable poison to which no one has the antidote. You know the kind... the kind that will allow him to make it home, will allow us to be hastily married by the kin leader, and then I get to watch him drop dead. He says there will be a ceremony after his death in which I am given his arms and hauberk. Great, just what I wanted, a pile of chainmail and a warhammer I can't swing.
TL;DR = RL necessity makes Horse, her RP partner, and two other characters sad, and that's just the beginning of the avalanche.
