How come anyone dies at all in RPGs?

[DigoDragon]

What makes the funeral rites bit particularly funny to me, is that it kind of implies that the default state after dying is to become undead, and we need active conscious effort to actually stay dead. Like, if a human dies, it will become undead, unless acted upon by an opposing force.

I think this was a plot point in the game Final Fantasy X. You needed summoners to "send" the soul to the afterlife or they come back as monsters.

[Psyren]

If you're asking about D&D worlds - remember that necromantic faiths/deities exist too, and they will actively be trying to disrupt any attempts to mass-sanctify or mass-repose any funeral rites or corpse disposal. on top of simply making their own undead to boot.

On top of which, not all undead even require the previous occupant's soul, or indeed any soul at all. So even in the unlikely event you're able to perfectly grant rest to every single fallen soul and have it move on, there's still the issue of the raw materials (bones and flesh) it left behind. And sure, you can comb every single battlefield or plague outbreak to burn everything you can find, but you're going to miss some, to say nothing of all the flesh and bones in the ground BEFORE you began such a practice.

Did I mention you'll have to do the same not just for every humanoid, but also every animal and insect?

[Imbalance]

It may depend on the setting whether the soul is antecedent to biological consciousness, if those aspects are distinct from one another, and whether magic can provide a facsimile of either or both among many other fantastic variables. Corpses may be animated by the echoes of what was life. Is a ghost a memory of living energy or the eternal soul detached from crude matter? Does magic imitate life or vice-versa? I suppose it's ultimately up to the worldbuilder(s) to define the extent that death is a terminus of whatever life is, but at any rate, there are bound to be nearly as many ways to become undead as there are to become dead.

[vasilidor]

Answering the initial question:
The games are designed to allow for character death. Often even facilitates the creation of scenarios that guarantee character death.
Most of them, anyway.
And for some reason most of us seem to like it that way.

[Stonehead]

This is not an unknown possibility in some fantasy settings. In Exalted, this was more or less the case, a person who died and who was not given proper funeral rites would leave a Hungry Ghost behind (whether or not they left a reasoning-capable ghost behind as well was more nebulous). That was just what happened to that part of the soul. This sort of setup is also common in various zombie apocalypse scenarios where anyone who dies for any reason will rise as a zombie.

Now its important that, if a setting functions in this way, the world-building reflects that. If the world operates where anyone who dies and isn't properly buried becomes a rampaging killing machine, societies are going to take extremely strong steps to minimize the number of cases where this occurs and, for the small fraction that is impossible to prevent (some people will always end up dying alone in difficult to find locations, like by falling into caves) there will be ready and capable forces to counter this problem. If there are ghosts, there is a market for ghostbusters.

I think this was a plot point in the game Final Fantasy X. You needed summoners to "send" the soul to the afterlife or they come back as monsters.

Those actually sound like pretty fun settings to play in, fully built around the constant threat of undeath.

It's kinda funny though in vanilla DnD though, where it's more of an afterthought.

[AsuraKyoko]

Interestingly, the default setting for Blades in the Dark has this baked in to the setting: everyone comes back as a ghost when they die, unless their body is disposed of promptly and in the right manner. There's an entire faction whose job it is to deal with this; they have a magical alarm that goes off whenever anyone dies, and when it does, they rush to that location, secure the body, and rush it to the Ghost Incinerator.

Notably, there's all sorts of cases where that doesn't work out, and the setting is swarming with ghosts. In fact, much of the technology of the setting is either uses ghosts or is designed to ward them off in some way (or both). Also, if your character dies, there's a relatively simple conversion to turn them into a ghost and keep playing them.