How does people see memory loss on dying here?

I've played on RP servers a long time and this is the first time that I've heard that your memories remains 100% intact when you die and get raised and even if you die and should RP-wise be perma dead, you still have 100% memories of what happened when you miraculously turn up in the Temple of Waukeen.

I can see the sense in remembering a ~little~ when you get raised, but if you just die and have to respawn?

I just don't feel like it has any RP-credence at all. A victim of a maskite assassin could just wake up suddenly and just pick out the killer out from a large croud. Killing an eye-witness is also completely redundant work as he'll just turn up magically and be able to recollect everything that happened.

So: Getting Raised -> Minor Blackout; Respawning -> Complete Memory loss of the last trip = False?

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Main Characters: Rosalind Karpovsky

It makes no sense to forget. Why should you forget? You died yes, but were magically raised. You should remember everything up to the killing blow.

I've never understood this rule on other servers. It just seems completely stupid. Why would a character forget anything when dying? Their mind is active all the way up till the time they die, they remember it all, why would they suddenly forget something?

It's a stupid practice.

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I keels u with my axe!

"Do ye know where the Holy-Flamin' Frost-brand Gronk-slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' woundin' an' returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-out-yer-bum is?"

It's a practice mainly done to avoid "Raised -> Hey, I know who killed me, let me go kill them back!". And to make assassinations more of whodunits than constant vendettas.

I don't particularly care for it. Sometimes I RP minor disorientation right after being resurrected. Sometimes my character comes up flailing and swinging, thinking he's still in the fight, if he was killed but a few moments ago.

I believe memory loss is left up to the players involved, the consent coming down to the player killed, perhaps requested by the killer, but that's it. And unless otherwise noted, I think Selvec is right, you remember up to the moment you actually die.

Because your soul is damaged, you lose experience which is tied to what you've been through.

It also makes it impossible to play anything undercover if you ever make a kill.

losing memory also gives a little more seriousity to the fact that you just died instead of just "WHOOPS! Looks like I died, Haha! I won't go into that cave again! *Shudders*"

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Main Characters: Rosalind Karpovsky

Honestly, Memory loss should be optional, or only available via spells, such as Brainkill, with player permission of course.

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Khaldun Menetnashte Khalfani
Victor Wilkinson

^totally not a lie or anything.

Soul, not mind. It's not like someone smacked your character over the head really hard with a big blunt object.

And what? Thats a load. It just makes playing undercover stuff harder. Which is good, because keeping a secert should be hard work. There are plenty of PC kept secerts on Amia, you just don't know because they are secerts.

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I keels u with my axe!

"Do ye know where the Holy-Flamin' Frost-brand Gronk-slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' woundin' an' returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-out-yer-bum is?"

Your soul is not damaged through death. Not in FR at least. When you body dies, it merely leaves the body, it's not damaged or "hurt" in any other way than it no longer has a host. It remains intact. That's the only reason True Resurrection and Reincarnation work they way they do.



No, it doesn't. It makes you play smart. "Huh, maybe I should wear a different outfit than I usually wear before I kill this guy. 1) He may remember what I look like if he's raised and 2) someone else might see me killing him."

If someone is going to metagame your character's name when they killed you, even though you didn't speak and you wore a different outfit and are covered head to toe, they would metagame or conveniently "forget" any memory-loss-death rule that would be instituted. The fix for this problem is not more rules, but rather players being courteous. Which is an issue all in itself, not just for assassinations.



It -is- as serious as that. I don't understand why people feel the need to transpose their own feelings about death in the real world to a fantasy game. The reason we treat death so "seriously" is because we know for us at least, there's no bringing us back once we take a dirtnap. That's not the case in FR. Resurrection magic exists. Ways to come back from death exist. And they are rather available to the adventurer class in terms of merchants and people who can cast it. It's serious, but it's not as serious as people try to make it out to be. You can add all the penalties to death and such that you like and sure, it will make it more "serious" ingame. But it will never make it serious on the level that we take it IRL. So it's better to aim for something that makes sense IC than what we feel is serious enough OoC.

Well sorta off topic but there are certainly ways to kill someone in FR that makes it impossible to rez them : )

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Characters:

Fel'Brin - I am one with the shadows

I'm not looking for any hardcore rules or penalties, just the fact that when your character dies in a location no one would ever find the body and respawns, or gets OOC raised, it's pretty strange if she remembers everything about it as there is no RP explanation to the fact that she's even alive.

Or is there a RP explanation behind the whole respawning procedure and why no one every dies on Amia?



So if I kill you with a blunt object to the head, does that make memory loss fine?

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Main Characters: Rosalind Karpovsky

i think death here is the more retarded thing ever created. i say everyone should either have god mode enabled and there for stop pvping other than for contest OR have some sort of rules to it. the only thing i have ever had a problem with is this and here is how i sort it out for myself

...when my toon respawns i stay away from the killer for a few hours to simulate a bit of downtime as seconds irl are hours ig and it takes time to click buttons to do what the player needs done. even if i respawn and bump into the player in the SAME spot, not moving or whatever i ignore him/her unless he/she starts something first. for me thats the only way to prevent useless and boring rp. BUT if i bump into that person again elsewhere (or are actively hunting them) all is fair game, it is a new pvp situation and all but i often times allow my own victims a kill on sight accord where they have my permission to forego the RP before retaliating to me (being a mage its hard to catch me unprepared if i know im in trouble but it does happen, the KOS just makes it more fun and TENSE for me as well as the others involved. plus it stops me from being able to say WAIT we need to rp this first!!! after we have already and its pretty clear as to how we feel about each other IG).

those things make it easy to make death fin and interesting. i do not use the memory loss thing but do rp a few seconds of disorientation when raised (be flailing my weapons or shooting off a spell etc) but not when i respawn as i think respawn is a more divine thing and the diety just gets you back up.

be courteous even if your death makes you feel all angry inside and even if it was from something silly like lag. just send a friendly PM saying "nice one!" or something and make sure your all friendly OoC because that is what actually matters. i play a nasty villain (one of the best to some people) and even them i play nicely through tells, even if my actions IG are evil and mean. i let everyone know it is only my toon, and if they fight with me about it, well i tried and i can do no more. so dont be a bad RPer and say "ima get that guy back!!!" and then go right back and find him while he is still rping your death and fight him and then proclaim your manhood regions superior. just give it time and roll with it. and if your dying to monsters... why... also i dont have any rules for that just go back and try and regain your honor you silly ninny.

not saying this is the best method but for me in my personal experiences this has worked well.

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Plays-
Maggot Bucktooth (Retired)
Giando Paladrious (Retired)

Wall o' text, paragraphs please? D:

still attempting to read it...

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Jack Tesilent - Jack's Bio

mah bad, will edit.

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Plays-
Maggot Bucktooth (Retired)
Giando Paladrious (Retired)

No. It should be mandatory - especially if it was a PvP death.

I know Amia will never make it so, but it should be.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

Sure, if you some how get through the helm, skull and damage my brain before I'm dead yep. But thats highly unlikely to happen. I remember someone hit my character Xal so hard once that the combined amount of pain caused his body to completely shut down, and his mind to reject the memory.

I'm not saying that Memory Loss due to injury isn't possible, but Memory Loss due to Death is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It just comes down to common sense. If someone Metagames your name, then putting in a rule about Memory Loss on death won't stop them from Metagaming, it just adds yet another rule nobody will likely remember in the heat of things.

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I keels u with my axe!

"Do ye know where the Holy-Flamin' Frost-brand Gronk-slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' woundin' an' returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-out-yer-bum is?"

Why would memory loss through injury be okay, but not memory loss through death? Can't death just be considered an injury? (That's what it seems to amount to, anyway.)

I ask this without a preference about the subject, by the by.

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"A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did." - Anonymous

Because if you get injured in the head, your body is able to produce it's reactions from the hit.
If you die, your body won't produce those reactions, as everything is dead.

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I keels u with my axe!

"Do ye know where the Holy-Flamin' Frost-brand Gronk-slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' woundin' an' returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-out-yer-bum is?"

So if some cleric casts heal on you, you automatically remember everything that happened?

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Jack Tesilent - Jack's Bio

medically, we dont know anything about death, so please dont assume that the body will react in any certain way when killed. All we know are the visible signs and reactions to certain procedures (like administering adrenaline to a recently "dead" body). Everything we RP about death is just our own take on the subject most likely made up due to our own feelings about death or past experiences with certain RP tools. I say whatever works best for YOU is the rule.

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Plays-
Maggot Bucktooth (Retired)
Giando Paladrious (Retired)

Personally, I see it as when the body dies it result in a systems failure of all major organs. The brain, most importantly. The lack of blood flow through the body causes the brain to suffocate, and in turn -die-. That is an injury in and of itself.

Just because someone can die on here and magically be brought back a few minutes later, doesn't mean there aren't side effects to such happening. When someone gets injured there isn't always a cleric who can magically cure any wounds. Yes, this is thinking realitisticly which has little place in a "game" as has been said a few times I believe. The only reason it doesn't fit is because our characters -do- have access to ways to magically recuperate and heal wounds.

I don't know about many others, but I personally enjoy a game and even a world where I realize that my character is mortal. Memory loss -is- a factor if dying, it's even stated that when a soul leaves its body and goes to Kelemvor's Realm to be picked up it has no recollection of how it came to be there. In a real life comparison, you could even ask someone who has "died" for several minutes. They rarely, if at all, recall the moments leading to their temporary demise.

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Jack Tesilent - Jack's Bio

i agree that death amnesia makes sense for the following reasons.

1. when you die in pnp & in nwn you lose exp, the exp as a mechanical representation of your character gaining experience in the world they are in and becoming better at what they are, when you die you lose some of your soul some of your experience an thus return a little shady or fuzzy if not gone all together.

2. Amnesia can happen IRL from mental illness, physical trauma, emotional trauma, or in some "rare" cases repression. ( thus if you "die" you may not remember what happens entirely, it make take weeks to even years to recover the complete intact memory of what took place after you were obliterated by magic or a sword to the head.

However i do agree that "magic" is just that magic, an so the use of magical healing takes into account that someone is returned they are as they were before they passed, however unless it is true resurrection i believe there is still traditionally some loss to the character, an we all know that TR is not cheap or easy to have done as the rest.

my 2 cents, id be all for a death amnesia rule on the server, it makes assassins jobs easy it means that if someone witnessed something they can be silenced, etc etc ( of course magic dose all the same) maybe amnesia that effects anything below true res would work, with the ability to have someones mind assessed an healed over time to return the memory's.

be interesting if it was say 3-7day before the persons could recall what happened, thus its like a week for the bad guy to try cover his tracks well enough instead of just "i know how it is" an more pvp.

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If i am not about when you are, but you would like to RP with Valkin, chose a time in red (GMT+8) / add character name PM me ICLY/OCC :http://teamup.com/ks662ccbfedda01eb0/

Look espionage RP is great how it is because only those who take their RP seriously, and think before they act, succeed in it. If you make Memory Loss a rule when dying, your essentially taking the awesomeness that is Amia stealth RP away. Your giving access to any twit with a power build the ability to keep things hidden. Sorry, but Amia's secerts are awesome because they are secerts. Because people don't know them OOC as well as IC.

On other servers it might be okay to have stuff some place that everyone knows about OOC, but nobody knows IC, but IMHO that is really quite lame. It's like having a big piece of cheese hanging in front of someones face constantly, but they don't know its there because you've duck taped their eyes shut, yet they can still smell it right in front of them.

And yes, for those of you who would argue that what I said sounds kinda elitest, your right. It is elitest. Because hiding something really good effectively means your RP will be extremely elitest.

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I keels u with my axe!

"Do ye know where the Holy-Flamin' Frost-brand Gronk-slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' woundin' an' returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-out-yer-bum is?"

Perma-death would make more sense I think.

A memory loss thing can't be enforced mechanically however. No sense adding the rule thus.

I for one always have my characters forget what happened 5-10 minutes before they were killed. It makes things easier for me too, and makes death somewhat more meaningful when it comes with side-effects. And yes, I think people take too lightly on death. Dying, and consequent raising should be very, very, very unpleasent, and something you'd rather not want to remember.

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"Edwin do this, Edwin do that. Somebody get this jerk a banana!" - Edwin, BG II

Valygar 'Stonesnake' Stark -Human Ranger
Garret Smith - Archer and peddler of deity-statuettes
Dáin Saltbeard - Dwarven sailor and fencer. No, I'm not joking.

Your brain shuts down. No blood circulation or anything. It's not very hard to see why you might lose your memory immediately prior to death.

It makes a lot of sense IC and it would be nice OOC. However, it's rather difficult to enforce because we don't have timers and there's bound to be metagaming anyway. But still, I don't see the overwhelming negative sides that some DMs have insisted on in the past.

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you do lose a bunch of experience.... that kinda counts as forgetting stuff i guess.

Experience points are a numerical way of keeping track of the character's progress. They are not memories as such.

You can block a recent traumatic experience, either because you want to forget that it happened, or because it's too painful for you to deal with right now, so you don't really remember it until much later. So if you must block those memories (because it avoids another confrontation and trauma) pick one and roleplay it.

Memory loss when dying depends on what sort of person your character is I think. I have some characters who forget parts simply because they can't deal with them. And others that don't.

Though the main reason I'm not doing this currently is because I have no desire to reward people that mostly deal in pvp around their own RP.

Also.. if you're an assassin that's stupid enough to kill someone in the same clothes you wear 24/7 then you deserve to be cought. I've played assassins for a long time on Amia, and I've never had a problem with assassinating people and then being fingered later. IF anyone tries to finger you for it.. wiggle out if it Icly instead of immediatly crying foul OOCly. Sometimes it's not actually meta, but insightful characters. (Especially if it's someone who wasn't there and didn't see your "real" name to know it was you)

As I see it memory loss is likely for the first few minutes after ressurection as life comes rushing back into your body and it's a tad wonky at that time. As I see it, you'd be groggy the same way after comming out of deep sleep, or like when you wake up at the hospital after surgery. Hazy, groggy.. and takes time to collect your thoughts. But the memories are -there-. IT voids the chance of your character instantly jumping back up and going "ARR! Chase them down! Person X killed me!". Which is sort of against the rules anyway, because after you leave a PvP encounter.. you can't jump back into it, or create another one without some RP first.

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Adair - Druid and part time treant cosplayer

Modern medicine fails in FR, you know how all the organs of all the subraces work? Your char doesn't remember his time in the Fugue, but why should he forget who killed him? "Soul being dmg" etc. sounds like a load of bull, you get healed magically.

Your approach fails. We obviously shouldn't consider whether you'd "really" forget or not and then play according to that; there's no telling if you do or don't. The motivation is the OOC realization that you should forget the specifics and that it's awkward you don't. It's a work-around we could accept to help us deal with the ridicilous lack of permadeath. The IC explanations are the icing on the cake, not the starting point. And it's incredibly easy to explain it away IC: you died. That's bound to cause brain damage, and even if that can be healed the memories don't necessarily reproduce themselves. Think of it like the server crashing: normally your experiences are saved into your long-term memory, but when your server suddenly crashes you lose the moments after the last backup. It doesn't matter if that's an accurate scientifical explanation; it makes sense, and it's something you could easily accept without ruining the immersion.

You can argue all day about why you could remember IC. But that's not the point. It's partly an OOC issue. If you wanted to argue purely IC, you'd have to let me exercise my IC power to grind your corpse into dust and sprinkle it into the four winds, so that you never come back.

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Oh I also forgot to mention that XP loss Doesn't equal Memory loss..

And here's why:
- Just about all crafting in PnP has XP cost attached
- Developing Epic spells have XP costs
- Several spells have XP costs attached to them

And I could probably list more reasons if I felt the need to.. but those three are more or less nails in teh coffin.

As I see it XP X000/X000 is how much experience and time you have put into further developing your skills, knowledge and understanding of your class, so you will become more powerful in it.
XP costs on things can be that you have chosen to spend time and energy in something else, besides researching/training/whatever to further your skills in your classes.

And the XP loss of dying can thusly be because your soul spent a large amount of energy to return to life. This is why you loose 1 level normally in pnp, as I see it.. and why people that have no more "energy" to give (down to level 1), start permanently being strained by it.. and eventually simply don't have the energy to make the trip again. (permanent con loss.. cannot be raised when con is at a certain level)

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Adair - Druid and part time treant cosplayer

Yes, but you still miss the point. It's not whether XP loss must be interpreted as memory loss. The fact is, it can be. You do forget spells after a level loss, for example, so there's a precedent. And if the OOC desire is to enforce memory loss (which is reasonable and fair), we have a valid IC explanation. It's not really a question of "Will death necessarily cause memory loss IC" at all. It's a question of "Do we want, OOC, death to have consequences." I don't see why you even need to talk about nonsense like the soul; isn't it enough to say that dying takes a toll on your body and mind (brain)? Constitution used to be a factor in whether you were successfully resurrected, so clearly it's a difficult experience physically, not just for your "soul".

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You guys are selectively blind, I see. Have fun with that.

Who's "we"? The majority of the server, a minority of assassin characters? I really don't see that OOC desire of memory loss and not remembering who killed you has absolutely nothing to do with death consequences, nor does it make it more meaningful.



Why should my character forget anything, why is it awkward? What does it have to do with permadeath?

This.

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Araxus Balmor
Gurth Balmor (retired)

I've seen some terrible metagaming when it comes to situations like this (albeit these were rare events considering my total time on the server, and quite a while ago) with people recognising their killer by their height, voice and even things in their character description that wouldn't be visible when they were wearing a full body disguise. It would surely be simpler to say they had no or only a terribly vague recollection of their killer rather than let this sort of thing happen.

I recall a conversation I had with a friend of mine (who happens to be a nurse) about brain damage, and I know it's not always convenient to bring in real life medical knowledge (in a fantasy setting in a discussion about resurrection), but memory loss and confusion are very common occurances following brain damage. It's realistic to impose memory loss and following a PvP death it's a relatively minor price to pay considering you lose nothing, in my opinion.

You seriously don't know? Most of the reasons have been stated in this topic. It has everything to do with permadeath: when you get caught doing something wrong, your ultimate solution is killing your victim. Ideally, that would be that. But because you can always come back in Amia, unfortunately, enforcing some kind of memory loss is the least we can do. It has everything to do with permadeath, because the only reason we need such work-arounds is that we've decided OOC we don't like permadeath.

And frankly, the counter-arguments suck. Selvec and Gravemaskin's arguments are beside the point. Yes, there are situations where it's possible to make the effort so that you don't need to rely on memory loss. Yes, it would be better if the secret wasn't known at all, as opposed to known OOC but not IC. But when the secret really does get out and you don't have a complicated contingency plan, grabbing your sword and killing the guy should do. Really, that's an ideal solution if people just knew how to play along. We're violent adventurers in a world where death lurks behind every corner.

I don't like the idea of memory loss. I'd rather enforce permadeath in PvP. But until Amia grows up, it seems it's the best we can do. That said, I'm not sure how it would be best enforced. Can we please just stop dancing around the real issue and introduce permadeath?

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I still say whatever the logic, whatever your reasoning, the answer is not another PvP rule for people to bitch over, forget and argue about, but player courtesy. You want the person you kill to forget what happened upon death? Ask them.

You make it into a rule, people will argue about how long before death, what constitutes "forgetting", can they ever remember, it'd just be a whole big mess. We've gotten along this far without such a rule.

It won't have to be a major rule or enforcement, just the information that memory loss through death may be discussed between players. That there is no real Right or Wrong.

Right now it feels like DMs just gives the answere "Yes, you'd remember 100% of what happened" which doesn't leave the players much to discuss as the DM always has the ultimate word.

As there is no rule about this anywhere it'd be cool if DM's could say "You may decide yourself or discuss with the concerning players, either way is fine" instead.

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Main Characters: Rosalind Karpovsky

That's the point I was getting at.

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"A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did." - Anonymous

What's to keep you from doing that right now? Agreements made between players, as long as they don't violate some server rule, are exactly that. Between the players. That's how people can be kept in captivity for more than 24 hours, that's how some people RP being slaves, that's how torture is had, that's how permadeath and PnP soul-captive spells get done on Amia.



The DM's have not stated any opinion on this, to my knowledge. Until they do, make do. It's a little presumptive to say they'd say that, when no word's been made on it.

I say that because my character killed two people last night deep down in a cave, when one of them sent me a tell afterwards asking me if it was okay that she'd auto attack me next time she saw me I said that she probably would have lost the memory of the entire thing, so she asked a DM that told both me and her that you lose no memory what so ever.

And there the discussion begins, as I was really surprised by that answere as all server I've played on before this one has had a rule about respawning (not getting raised) and remembering all about it.

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Main Characters: Rosalind Karpovsky

Well how I would have handled that, if I wanted the person was to forget,would be to send them in a tell that I'd appreciate some "forgetfulness" after they got rezzed.

But if they say no? Then no. Simple as that. The problem is not with the idea itself, it's that it deals with something so abstract, so subjective to each situation, making any blanket rule is bound in failure.

If you sneak up behind me and cast Finger of Death and I don't see you, what do I observe before I die? Well I heard some words behind me. Then I was dead. That's all.

If I fight you face to face, for a fight what lasts a good 2 minutes IRL, what do I observe before I die? Well, if you're foolish enough not to wear a helm, your face. If you're unwise enough to talk long with me before or while you fight, your voice, probably. Unless you wear stilts , your height, maybe race if you're not covered up. And well Mr. Assassin, if you kill me in the outfit that you wear 24/7, well I'll be damned if I don't recall you wearing gold and black too.

But who remembers what? It depends on how observant the character is, how quickly the even happened. What constitutes forgetting? Is it all a blur, or do I have some basis idea. Do I just get raised, look at my tattered clothes, the arrows sticking out of my body and say, "Huh, I must have gotten killed, but what did the person use?"? Can I ever remember? If someone sees me fighting and get killed, if they tell me about the fight, do I recall the facts? How early does my memory black out? Etc, etc et-frickin-cetera.

And on the sidenote, it is a land of fuggen magic, people. When you get raised, it reforms whatever the body needs to be the least functional. No, I'm not claiming that it heals, that's why you come back at 1 HP. But if you have an bolt-hole clear through your cranium, I'm pretty sure that gets fixed in the course of the spell for you to come back to life. And in the case of Resurrection, well then the body is completely reformed, from whatever pulpy, bloody, dismembered mess it may have been. That includes your brain too.

You can't go trying to reason things with science in a magical world, and that's what most of the arguments for death-memory loss appear to be. "Your brain looses blood and therefore cannot function, and therefore you cannot remember!". Well then why don't I suffer memory loss like a regular person would from getting hit with a mace in the head, even if it only takes 50 of my 400 HP? Why can I continue to fight when I have 20 of my 400 HP? Wouldn't blood loss take effect there?

It's a game. A fantasy game. Drop the science reasoning and start explaining how this bolsters RP. And "it makes being sneaky too hard" is not a reason. Because it only makes ill-thought out sneaky-assassinations hard. Which it should. SCGC: Stupid Crooks Get Caught.

If you dress in clothes other than your regular outfit, RP "disguising your voice" with Charisma or Perform, and go about killing someone in a smart way, they won't be able to find you, when/if they come back. Unless they metagame. And if they're going to metagame all you've done to maintain secrecy, that same person would metagame any rule about memory loss you'd form. There's no way to enforce it. It would just create more opportunity for feces hurricanes. And in that respect, no rule at all is much better than a flimsy, non-enforcible one.

In terms of neuroscience, that analogy is actually pretty accurate.

Memory is a very dynamic cognitive process that requires an integration of environmental stimuli into a neural representation of the situation. This requires that the brain structures that are involved in receiving sensory inputs are intact, and that the brain regions which are involved in their integration are also intact. After the memory is formed, however, it is continuously modulated when new information comes to light, or if it needs to be transferred to a more long-term storage area. This involves new brain regions. After that, other brain regions are then once again required for 'pattern recognition', to complete a pattern that will evoke recognition of the person or situation, and also require that some brain regions retrieve that information from the permanent storage areas. THEN, the information has to reach the cortex, where it allows the person to perceive that information.

Memory is exceptionally complicated and involves many, many brain regions.

Permanent brain damage can cause quite severe memory loss, and this can occur in death by a sustained lack of bloodflow to various brain regions. Many, many other things happen in death that can cause memory loss, however. Permanent brain damage would require some time to occur (some minutes), and so a pretty quick resurrection might prevent such permanent brain damage and therefore memory loss. Therefore, the assumption that death always leads to permanent brain damage is logical grounds for amnesia following death lacks supporting evidence, I think.

Having said that, while permanent brain damage can cause amnesia, it is not absolutely essential for it to occur. The truth is, that all you need is some disruption to any of the brain regions that are involved in formation of the memory to prevent learning, and disruption of any of the storage or retrieval areas for impaired storage and retrieval of those memories. This disruption only needs to occur in a few crucial moments, while memories are being formed/transferred/modulated.

The distinction between these two events is that while in the former, there is impaired learning in the latter there is impaired memory. This distinction is extremely important for this discussion. If we say that resurrection restores the body to a state that it was in some moments prior to death, then in the latter situation, where damage occurred to storage and retrieval areas, the memory was clearly already formed, and would therefore be completely retrieved in the resurrection procedure, as the body would be completely restored. However, if amnesia occurred due to impaired learning, there would be nothing to retrieve, because no memory was formed in the first place. This latter situation would therefore support amnesia due to death.

Memory of past events and experiences (episodic memory) is formed, and stored in the short-term in a brain region called the hippocampus. This region is quite large, and is highly susceptible to damage following any disruption of bloodflow, or other events which are known to occur during death. From a neuroscientist's perspective, there is very strong ground for the assumption that this region would be damaged, and would therefore prevent learning, and also possibly impair memories which were formed in the short-term.

Memory of faces follows a complex circuit which goes from the optic nerve, through the optic chiasma, through to the lateral geniculate nucleus, to the optic radiation, to the occipital lobe and the visual cortex. These regions span the entire brain, from front to back, and damage to any of those regions can cause impaired facial recognition memory/learning. In fact, the brain regions that are crucial for facial recognition are perfused by a major artery in the brain called the middle cerebral artery, and this artery is commonly the one to be most severely affected in stroke/myocardial infarction. So again, there is very good support for amnesia of faces.

In purely physical terms, I would say that in death, these regions would almost certainly be disrupted, if not damaged, while the person is still learning to remember the event or face and because of that, I would say that there is little support for restoration of a memory, which was never formed in the first place, of the assailant or the event.

This is FR, a fantasy setting with magic etc. That's totally understandable. But there is absolutely no reason why magic itself can't be defined and classified, and why magic shouldn't have some limits: a resurrection spell should restore all physical and mental properties of the being to perfect health. That's fine. But how do you explain the magic suddenly implanting memories in their brains which were never formed there in the first place?

I'm probably over-thinking this, and it's probably something I tend to do in excess. Oh, well. I'll still stick by my view, though: death should lead to amnesia of faces and events, no matter if the person was resurrected with true resurrection or not, and no matter how long after the death the resurrection occurred.

I've completely ignored the OOC perspective, which is also important and valid. From my pov, Assassins/bad guys should be able to kill people to prevent them from talking. I think that Amia lacks conflict RP between players, and even if this rule will prompt evil players to bash their opponents to death to prevent them from remembering the event, there is nothing to stop good guys from doing the same. I don't understand why there is an insistence on keeping evil on Amia to a cloak-and-dagger style, when really I think we should cater to all kinds, including the burly, up-front, completely revealed evil.

Most importantly, I think this will put an IC weight on dying - the characters will realize that they can't die, but that by failing to survive they will lose the memory of the event and will therefore be at a great disadvantage later on. Therefore, they will do everything in their power to prevent that.

In theory, I therefore think that amnesia following death should definitely be looked into in more detail.

Or maybe people can learn to wear a disguise before killing someone?

Um...I think it is pretty obvious that the memory loss schtick is one of those OOC measures people take that has no great IC explanation (except for mine). I'm indifferent because I never killed people and people never bothered killing me but as a DM if my NPC kills you, you bet I want you to remember it when you come back. Otherwise, well, I wasted my time and yours and in the one action of forgetting did away with every consequence of action.

Since some of you seem hung up on an IC explanation, which is really just icing on the cake like Iron said, the best explanation is thus:

Any time you return from the afterlife to your body, it is through the grace of a deity allowing it to be so, a deity petitioned by a cleric, typically. Each deity knows that your soul has memory of the instant of your death - not merely who killed you, but also the pain, the trauma, the agony, and most particular to Kelemvor, the peculiar mystery of death. If this memory were still a part of the soul when it returned to the body, the psyche of the individual would be broken and shattered.

Knowing that you died because your adventurer buddy tells you, "Yo, you got killed by a goblin, homes," is entirely different from remembering the fatal blow, the life that flashed before your eyes, both all that came and all that you wished to come but agonize over never seeing in a split second, the sudden and overwhelming tragedy of your lost dreams and faded hopes, the meaninglessness of faith and the demise of courage and all of these things that would leave a person absolutely broken if they returned to life remembering the instant of death.

And so the deity does you a favor and returns you to your body without turning you into what would amount to a zombie, a broken mind in a shell that it sees as completely meaningless in the face of death. Instead, you have a very big degree of separation between you and the knowledge of your own death. Your death is a story, a narrative, rather than an experience. It is the difference between reading about someone who had been tortured for thirty years or being tortured for thirty years.

So there you go.

Sometimes I like the overdramatic trauma of remembering it slowly. But I do always like to remember. Just maybe not right away.

And hey, Yoss, that "icing on the cake" is why I play this game. I like my cake with icing. I like my games with icing. It's not a bad thing to like icing or explanations!

I'd not like that explanation simply because one of my PC's recalls the moment of death in his training as motivation. The fear of that last blow, that pain, that agony is the same thing that inspires him not to die -this- time.

If people didn't recall that pain of death, those last moments, well they'd be running around like death was absolutely, positively, nothing but a distant dream. Oh, wait....

If there is an OOC reason for something, it should still be backed by solid IC reasoning, I think. I generally take OOC concepts and try to mesh them into the existing world to allow for streamlined immersion. This is personal taste in RP, but I like everything about the external world to make sense, simply because no matter if a god controls the sun and another god controls gravity, in order for any world to exist there has to be some order, some laws, some consistencies and these should be elucidatable (so not a word! O.O) by direct observation. Not only that, but I think that this is a very important point to find a very good IC reason for, because it's quite central to normal gameplay, or at least I think so. Having said that, I'm well aware that others have their own tastes and viewpoints, so really, all I'm aiming for here is a resolution of my own battle with the concept.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that some deity allows you to remember the event as if it were just another mundane event that happened in your life in order to separate you from the psychological trauma of the event.

That makes sense. But it still doesn't address directly the question of whether, and why, a person fully retains their memory of the event, when, at least seemingly, they should not. Firstly, if the deity was doing you a favor, they might save themselves time while they were at it and simply blank your memory of the event; problem solved.

Secondly, in real life, there is an axiom that if a person dies, a variety of physiological changes take place and then the body becomes lifeless. In Amia, I'm assuming that death is much the same in terms of the event itself, but the difference is that it's finality is less real, because there are ways to resurrect a dead comrade. I think at least, that what this means is that the physiological changes which take place in RL also occur in Amia, meaning that while resurrection can completely restore a person's physical and psychological characteristics, it should not be able to implant memories that the individual was not able to form in the first place. If the spell does do that, then possibly that detail should be added: "a full and accurate memory of the entire event is also implanted into the resurrected individual's mind".

If you want to pull the "because I said so" card, that's totally fine, and I'll accept that. But I'd rather you not, considering how niggly my mind is about these sorts of things. Hehe.

It hasn't "implanted memories" at all. Re read the post. And then remember that gods and DMs are above such things as "logic", so they can do it anyways.

_________________
Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

But how does it add to RP? I'll put the logic aside just fine(along with the science), but I don't see what it does in the least to help RP other than reward sloppy whack-jobs and the characters that perform them.

The only people that are sincerely worried about the people they kill coming back in retaliation are the ones who kill relatively unprovoked(aka brigands, bandits, assassins, and instigators). And the only ones of those that actually get retaliated against are the ones that forgo the proper IC measures to avoid the consequences.

And compounding that, how does this help the other issue with death that it isn't "taken seriously enough"? If my PC can't remember the moment death, any moment of death, it leaves him with less reason to be cautious about it. The pain that comes along with death is pretty much the only thing "Death" has left to scare adventurers with. There's of course the possibility that you'll never be raised, IC at least, but as far as the actual act of dying... it'd be like going under anesthesia.

"Dude, Wayne, wake up."
"Woah, Garth, what happened?"
"You know that dude you got in a fight with?"
"Yeah, the one that broke my nose?"
"Well, after he broke your nose, he stabbed you 75 times, and then you bled out all over the place."
"Oh...well let's go kick his ass!"
"Yeah!"
"Yeah!"

Problem-not-solved.