Quote Originally Posted by Morgaln View Post
I've never considered this, but you just gave me a thought. In a world like the Forgotten Realms, where powerful casters are a dime a dozen, the only reason why there is a royal succession at all must be that whoever succeds a king is not willing to dole out the cash to have the king resurrected. Which has certain implications on who is most likely to actually inherit in the long run...
Yeah, it's one of the issues with Fantasy -- some of the magic that occurs in fantasy would logically negate some of the medieval tropes we also expect them to include. Some of those are easy to at least paper over -- put a few ballista on top of every castle and you say 'yeah, they know flying creatures don't care about walls.' Others change things fundamentally, and you either have to quietly ignore them and hope your audience does as well, or produce (a whole lot of) in-universe explanations (such as in Girl Genius, where royals who get resurrected lose their claims to titles specifically to prevent this chaos).

Quote Originally Posted by Anarchic Fox View Post
Good analysis, Morgaln. Let me also point out that not all characters need to have arcs. Back in classical Greek plays, only the protagonist and deuteragonist did.
This is absolutely true. And if Dies was a simple supporting character (let's say this was a typical five-man-band and it was the Leader, Lancer, and Antagonists who got to develop, while Dies the Heart, Brain, or Brawn), this would work really well. It would be weird though, for him not to have an arc, given that for most of the time we've known him he has effectively been the protagonist of a side-plot. Fortunately, he has had an arc, it's just not (at this point) a classic three-act story. Since we're pointing things out, I'll point out that classic three-act stories aren't a requirement, just a trend. If Dies does all he needs to do in 2 or even one-and-a-half acts (say, we cut away from him mid-climax of act two, but it really works in a 'you don't always get to find out what happens' way), then that is fine. Breaking the 'rules' of storytelling work when they are really well done. I don't feel that that is specifically true with this case, though, and I hope we do see an end to Dies' sub-plot at some point (before the end, circa 2035).