If you’re new to the online role playing game World of Warcraft, the best thing you can do for yourself is let go of your fear, and try things just to see what happens when you do, without worrying about the concequences.

Of course, use your intelligence - there’s a vast difference between practicing on Non Player Characters (NPCs or monsters) and practicing on other players. Continuing on…

The Importance (or lack thereof) of Death

One of the best things, I find, about World of Warcraft specifically is that Character Death means very little. I mean, it is a little inconvenient, but compared to other RPGs I’ve played, in WoW, death is nothing to fear, nothing to worry about avoiding really.

You see, when your character gets killed in World of Warcraft, the punishments are that your worn equipment degrades by 10% in quality and you are turned into a ghost who needs to find its corpse to return to a living state.

Recovering Your Corpse

Finding your corpse isn’t even that bad, because your long range map points the way, and when its within long view range, you can see the cross and gravestone that represents your corpse’s location. The only challenging part in coming back to life is selecting a safe spot to do it so you won’t be attacked again while your health is low.

Leaving Your Corpse Behind

If you don’t want to run all the way back to your corpse or you were killed in an area that is way too strong for you, you can even make the choice not to run back to your corpse, and instead take a 25% hit on your worn equipment and be brought back to life immediately from where you’re brought to after you die.

[Stay tuned for my upcoming entry on repairing your equipment as it degrades]

Keeping Your Inventory

The big thing about dying on WoW compared to other RPGs I’ve played throughout my life (online and off) is that on World of Warcraft, you don’t drop any of your inventory when you die. There’s nothing for other players to loot, nothing for you to have to make a mad dash back to so you can recover what you had already attained.

I haven’t ever found that death discourages me on World of Warcraft has it has on other games like MUDs and even RuneScape - on both the latter games/game types, I could have lost equipment that I worked months to attain and had spent hundreds of thousands of coins on, and I’d generally have to log out for a few hours to quell my discouragement. And this is supposed to be fun! I think Blizzard got it right.

I’ll probably write some more articles on how this one aspect of the game (not losing your inventory when you die) influences other parts of it compared to other online role playing games, because it changes a lot of things.

Until later, ta ta, and feel free to post questions or ideas for me to write about here :) I’m just flying by the seat of my chainmail pants! ;)