Disclaimer: This may be a touchy subject, so I would like to begin this post by saying I do not believe suicide is funny or something to be taken lightly. Depression, mental illness, and debilitating physical illness can all lead individuals to suicidal thoughts. I strongly urge anyone having these thoughts to reach out to loved ones and/or medical professionals.

In a game like Chronicles of Elyria where your character ages from young and spry to old and, well... not so spry, I believe the developers have done a great job of keeping characters relevant throughout the entirety of their lifetime. Shifting focus from physical skills, to mental skills, to social skills over one's lifetime ensures an individual can explore a range of skills throughout their time in Elyria. Given the nature of the game and how open the world and the character options are, it is a good thing CoE gives each player an assortment of three souls to play with. While tying each soul to a body requires the expenditure of a spark of life, this allows players to explore different styles of play at the same time.

However, there may be instances when an individual wishes to explore another style of play in a new body while retaining their current soul. Perhaps they want to try their hand at being an explorer or champion, but they feel their current body is too old for such a path. Perhaps they are trying to time the peaceful transfer of their estate from their current character to their heir, but they feel like a window of opportunity will only be open for so long. Perhaps their character has bitten off more than they can chew and they wish to restart their journey now, before their character dies of natural causes.

Whatever the motivation, whatever the personal reason, I believe players in Chronicles of Elyria should have a mechanism for them to seek out and end their current character's life in a peaceful and painless manner.

Presently, a player could force their character into a situation where they are forced to spirit walk (throw themselves off a cliff, tease a herd of trison, try to pet some canis rabbits), but the rules for spirit walking are a little vague. Will there be an option to "walk towards the light" and force PKing? An issue this sort of mechanic might face is abuse if someone was able to get a hold of another player's login information. They could PK a character through one of the above scenarios and then walk towards the light.

I propose, a mechanic be put into place where a player who still has juice left in their spark of life has the option of "retiring" their character with a 24 hour period between initiating the retirement and finalizing the retirement. During this time, the character can still engage in OPC scripts but would be unplayable. This would be similar in many ways to how Eve Online allows players to "scrap" their characters (hopefully without the off screen screams of horror and mechanized buzz-saws). For SBS, having this option available can only increase their revenue as a soul needs a spark of life in order to enter a new body. The player doing the retiring loses the excess spirit their spark had remaining, a loss that is a trade off for getting to choose the time and place of the character's in-game death.

I am interested to see what other people think of this idea or if this idea has been explored previously, I would appreciate links so I can learn more.