Respawn Point

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A Sub-Trope of Staying Alive. A character dies, sometimes repeatedly, but is always resurrected in one particular place. Usually memories are intact. The most popular variant of justifying is cloning a new body every time (regularly causes Cloning Blues).

This sometimes overlaps with Check Point. See also Resurrective Immortality.

Note that this is not a gaming trope per se: it must be justified in-game to qualify.

Examples of Respawn Point include:

Video Game Examples

  • BioShock (series), Vita-Chambers.
  • Being Bioshock's spiritual predecessors, the System Shock duology had these.
    • With the important caveat that you had to activate them on each level, or you'd die. The second game also had a monetary requirement.
  • Borderlands, New-U Stations. Played for Laughs as well.
  • EVE Online, cloning stations.
  • The classes in Team Fortress 2 reappear in the locker room. (This plays into Competitive Balance as the better a team does, the faster they can respawn. On Control Point maps, players of either teams get spawns closer to the next contested control point, and on Payload, the attacking team gets spawns closer to the Final Terminus.)
  • The hospitals in City of Heroes, which work by teleporting defeated heroes to safety upon defeat.
  • Home Points in Final Fantasy XI.
  • PlanetSide With a Justification, The Terran-Republics Research of the Warpgate systems Reconstruction-abilitys has discovered that a Person can Be reconstructed after death, thus turning the story into an Endless War
  • In RuneScape the respawn point for most players is in the first city Lumbridge, it's handwaved that the life stream that returns the player to life connects with the teleport way from the Tutorial Island to Lumbridge, so when the player comes back its in the same place. Some quests allow the user to change its respawn point to other cities.
    • The respawn points are more or less hierarchical based on proximity to a bank. The Lumbridge point is furthest away. The Falador point is slightly closer, unlocked by an easy quest. The Camelot point is closer still, unlocked by a hard quest. The Soul Wars point is as close as you can realistically get, unlocked by the consensus hardest quest.
      • Being closer to a bank is highly desirable in that it allows players to gear up and rush to their corpse, which they'll have to do in order to recover their dropped items.
  • In Rohan Online, Bindstones act as respawn points for players who die. Each major area in the Rohan setting has its own bindstone, which you can set as your own in order to respawn there after you die.
  • Resurrection shrines in Guild Wars.
  • Dystopia has a rather hazy example. If a person is equipped with a CCU, their mind can be reused in freshly cloned bodies that are sent to the spawnpads when they die. However, there have been reports of employers choosing to simply not respawn their soldiers. Even worse, there are rumors of corporations tampering with the minds of soldiers between the time that they die and the time they the new bodies are activated.
  • Grand Theft Auto series - When you die you are transported to the nearest Hospital, and lose a set amount of money for the "costs of surgery".
  • Red Faction Guerrilla - takes you to the nearest "Safe House", with a -3 drop in the Morale of the sector.
  • The Tuurngait artefacts in Penumbra. "I felt like I left a part of myself in there..."
  • In some parts of the Ultima series, a defeated party would be resurrected by Lord British in his castle. In Ultima VII they would wake up in a Fellowship shelter instead.
  • Dungeons and Dragons Online has Spirit Binders, which can be found in any tavern. Once you've set your resurrection point, you can respawn at the tavern if you die during a dungeon crawl and your party has no means of raising you. There are also Resurrection Shrines which are found in dungeons and wilderness instances (along with Rest shrines) which can be used to revive dead party members whose Soul Stones are brought to the shrine in question.
  • In World of Warcraft, your character's ghost respawns at a graveyard; you then have the choice of resurrecting then and there for a penalty, or finding your body and reviving yourself there.
  • Robot chutes in the multiplayer mode of Portal 2: The robots are mass-produced.
  • Nanodrive restoration units in Iji teleport you back to them in one piece, though they only work once.
  • Unreal Tournament 3: 'Respawners' are in widespread use, even changing the nature of war.
  • Bonfires in Dark Souls. It's part of the curse/blessing of the Dark Sign—until you go permanently Hollow and insane, an Undead can't stay dead.

Non-Video Game Examples

Anime and Manga

Comics

Film

  • The Sixth Day, clones.
  • Groundhog Day - even when he dies he wakes up again in the bed & breakfast, as part of his Groundhog Day Loop.
    • The movie 12:01 (a more serious take on the same concept that was coincidentally released the same year) also has this.
  • Moon - big secret clone base on the moon.
  • The Tall Man from Phantasm use his portals as this.

Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms setting. Manshoon of the Zhentarim had many hidden chambers filled with clones of himself, kept in stasis. Any time he died, a clone would automatically activate and take over right where he left off. (This worked great until, by accident, a dozen clones activated all at once. Each claimed to be the real thing. This era of history became known as "The Manshoon Wars.")

Web Original

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