What would be the cultural implications of an impermanent death?

    We all know that death is a one-way journey in reality: death's permanence affects everything we do in this world -- all our laws, customs, and moral values. Yet in Azeroth it is not so: the main consequence of dying is a tedious and expensive "corpse run" for your ghost to retrieve your body. If this sort of impermanent death were a reality on Earth as it is in Azeroth, then everything about our world would be changed. As Nibuca points out, people would take risks with their lives much more lightly, execution would no longer be the ultimate punishment, and doctors might sometimes find it easier to let their patients die and then resurrect them, rather than deal with the mess of curing their sicknesses.

    Roleplayers have to be somewhat careful not to let impermanent death and other such necessities of computer gaming become realities from their characters' point of view. After all, if the rules of Azerothian reality were the same as the rules we have in the game -- where death never lasts and good gear is the ultimate goal -- then there is really nothing of importance at stake for any of the characters in the Warcraft stories, least of all yours. That kind of world would effectively be just a game, no matter it was real for its inhabitants or not.

    It wouldn't be quite as depicted in game. If you died anywhere near a group of semi-intelligent beings like in an orc camp or goblin town, you'd run back to your *naked* corpse. All your phat epix gone, ninja-looted by a filthy barbarian.

    That having been said, people who would confuse the two worlds to such an extent that such a discussion would be relevant should be doing other things, like going to special-folks school or something.

    When a Cylon dies her memories and consciousness go back to a resurrection ship where it's placed inside a new body to be re-animated. They learn from these painful deaths and try to adapt for the next time.