Respawn Point

"Finality's not what it seems.

When your end comes, rise up and run.

Don't let defeat dissolve your dreams."

— Spawn Point Mem Cake description, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion

A subtrope 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 Clone Angst).

This sometimes overlaps with Checkpoint, Justified Save Point, and Justified Extra Lives. See also Resurrective Immortality.

Certain characters (and video game players) can exploit this, using their own death as a means of quick travel.

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

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Video Game Examples:

Action RPG

• 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.
• DeathSpank has various outhouses that the character will always respawn from when he dies. They also serve as warp points. At the end of the second game, this is stated to be a power from the character's Thong of Justice.

First- and Third-Person Shooter

• In BioShock and BioShock 2 there are Vita-Chambers that let the player respawn without penalty. They also are important plot points in both games: In the first one, Jack can only use them because of his ancestry and Delta in 2 was revived through them at the beginning of the game.
• The Borderlands series has the New-U Stations, which are basically In-Universe Save Points where the players respawn after they're killed for good (i.e. they couldn't hit an enemy on time during "Fight for Your Life"). They become something of a Plot Hole in Borderlands 2 as they're maintained by Hyperion, the corporation that the player happens to be openly opposing. Eventually, they were ruled out as non-canon by Word of God, which is lampshaded in the Tiny Tina in Assault on Dragon Keep DLC.
• Devastation: A device developed by Grathius Inc. is capable of bringing anyone Back from the Dead basically by nano-cloning them, clothes and gear included. It plays a vital role both in story and gameplay. Disabling enemy Re Gen platforms cuts their endless reinforcemets. Later the protagonist group manages to hack the device to work for themselves turning any battle into a multiplayer match.
• 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.
• Splatoon: The term "respawn" is widely used by characters in-universe to describe the process of returning from being splatted, and terms like "spawn point" and "spawning drone" are likewise given to various machines that are used for regenerating the body after it is splatted. That said, Inklings and Octolings can only function like this when they've been synced to such spawning devices; they'll die like normal if they aren't, with Word of God giving the escape sequence in Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion as an example of this.
• 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 (except on Easy difficulty).
• 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.)
• Though previous games in the series gave hints about them, this trope is invoked by the so-called "respawners" in Unreal Tournament III: they're portable units that allow dead soldiers to come back to life and take many forms ("Field Lattice Generators" in (Vehicle) Capture the Flag and the Power Core in Warfare, for example), so in order to win a battle, one faction must deplete the other faction's respawner units.

MMO

• Anarchy Online, has cloning stations that are only functional on Rubi-Ka, the planet's setting, due to the specific nature of the planet's make up. A popular sport (mentioned in supplementary materials) is committing suicide.
• The hospitals in City of Heroes, which work by teleporting defeated heroes to safety upon defeat.
• Dungeons & 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.
• EVE Online, cloning stations.
• Home Points in Final Fantasy XI.
• Resurrection shrines in Guild Wars.
• In PlanetSide, 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 R.O.H.A.N. 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.
• 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.
• Because of the Bees inhabiting them, players in The Secret World are respawned at the nearest Anima Well; for good measure, you're given the option of reclaiming your old body by walking back to it in Anima Form, or just building another one from scratch. In fact, your effective immortality is so well-known within the setting that villains are in the habit of blocking off the Well's exits or just cutting off your limbs just so you can't interfere with their plans.
  • This is actually turned back on you in Issue #11 when you actually find yourself pitted against a group of Bee-imbued agents employed by the Orochi Group, who actually have mechanical respawn points of their own. Now you have to cut off their access to respawn points to stop them from interfering with your mission.
• 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.

Platformer

• Since Gamer 2 is set in a virtual reality world, Checkpoints are an in-universe part of the levels. Hailey must even destroy the final boss' checkpoints in order to stop him from respawning after defeat.
• Nanodrive restoration units in Iji teleport you back to them in one piece, though they only work once.
• In Spyro the Dragon, the dragons' platforms in the first game act as save points, watched over by fairies when the dragon is rescued. In the second and third games, Zoe the fairy periodically appears and zaps Spyro with a wave of her wand, saving the player's game and transporting Spyro back to that same spot if he dies.

Puzzle Game

• Bendy statues in Bendy and the Ink Machine and pools of ink in Bendy and the Dark Revival
• Robot chutes in the multiplayer mode of Portal 2: The robots are mass-produced.

Role Playing Game

• 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.

Roguelike

• In FTL: Faster Than Light, you can install a clonebay in your spaceship which allows you to resurrect killed crew members with only a slight skill penalty. The bad news is that you can patch up your crew only by doing FTL jumps rather than at any time. The good news is that the clonebay also works on crew members killed in cutscenes.

Survival Horror

• The Tuurngait artefacts in Penumbra. "I felt like I left a part of myself in there..."

Wide Open Sandbox

• In Foxhole, the base Respawn Point is the town hall/Port Base, conveniently where weapons, ammo, and other equipment will be stashed; an unlimited number of players can respawn at the town hall. Players can construct the barracks and the Foward Operating Base, the barracks will only permit a small number of players to spawn there, the FOB is unlimited like the town hall. However, three of the structures(Port Bases do not) have to be stocked with s. supplies; each respawn will consume a unit of supplies and without the above structures you're stuck with respawning in the Home region or in another Base.
• 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".
• In No Man's Sky, each ship is equipped (and starts out as) a Lifepod, which also doubles as an Escape Pod. No matter how many times you die in the game, you will always respawn in your ship's Lifepod.
• Red Faction Guerrilla takes you to the nearest "Safe House", with a -3 drop in the Morale of the sector.

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Non-Video Game Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Higurashi: When They Cry: Rika appears between worlds as a part of her "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion uses it for Rei.

Comics

• Ra's Al Ghul uses the Lazarus Pit to maintain his immortality.
• Crushed The Doomed Kitty Adventures has the heroine routinely fail fatally in her quests for sacred relics. Fortunately, she's a disciple at the Temple of Infinite Lives, where she's remade intact after each failure. Unfortunately, only her body is restored; her outfit and equipment are left where she died, leaving Crushed to amble home buck naked.

Film

• The henchmen in The 6th Day are repeatedly brought back from death thanks to the illegal cloning science.
• In another "Groundhog Day" Loop example, Edge of Tomorrow, which takes explicit video game inspiration given the loop is caused by the protagonist dying, has him repeatedly waking up in the base where a soon-to-fail military strike is planned.
• Groundhog Day: even when he dies he wakes up again in the bed & breakfast, as part of his "Groundhog Day" Loop.
  • The movie Twelve Zero One (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 uses his portals to do this, as when he is seemingly killed, another incarnation of him steps from a portal and gets rid of the corpse.
• In the movie Wreck-It Ralph, as long as a video game character is in their own game, they will regenerate upon death. If they are in another game, they are dead permanently. Understandably, this is the source of a lot of the film's drama. It's also part of how King Candy/Turbo is ultimately defeated.

Literature

• Jack of Shadows members of the magical half of the world have multiple lives, and after death they wake up in the not very poetically, but perfectly descriptively named Dung Pits of Glyve. Political control of the areas surrounding the Dung Pits can be valuable, as it gives you power over your enemies when they are at their lowest point. The protagonist experiences both ends of this.
• The Worm Ouroboros: Whenever King Gorice of Witchland is killed (and buried), he soon after reincarnates in the Iron Tower of Carcë.

Live-Action TV

• The Cylon Resurrection Chambers from Battlestar Galactica (2003).
• On Forever, whenever Henry Morgan dies, he wakes up in a nearby large body of water, naked.
• In Stargate SG-1, the Goa'uld are healed in their sarcophagi. However, they need to be physically brought inside for that (It also makes them go steadily insane).
  • In the Episode "Avatar", Teal'c is in a VR combat simulation game where each time he dies, he is brought back to the same place.

Tabletop Games

• Mechanon of the Champions setting started out as a Captain Ersatz Ultron, and as such maintains a network of automatic factories all over the world that will rebuild his robotic body if it should be destroyed. These factories will also upgrade him to prevent him from being destroyed the same way again. In universe this gives the GM an excuse to keep ratcheting up the danger for players. Out of universe his point cost has gone up over 800 points in his 30 years of publication while starting characters are only about 100 points more powerful.
• 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.")
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Anvil of Apotheosis is where the souls of Stormcast Eternals who fall in battle are sent to, allowing them to be Reforged by Sigmar and sent back into battle.

Toys

• The Red Star in BIONICLE. Problem is, the resurrected characters can't go anywhere from there due to a malfunction that occurred over 80,000 years ago (when the Red Star was less than 20,000 years old). Also, characters who are disintegrated or whose heads are too badly injured, such as Kodan, cannot be resurrected.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation — SCP-076-2. If completely destroyed, he automatically reforms inside SCP-076-1.
• Dark Pegasus in DMFA. For security reasons.
• Morty Kombat has people who respawn in specific places after they get killed. Morty ends up in his apartment with Jax on the couch.

Western Animation

• South Park. Mysterion/Kenny has Resurrective Immortality, and when he dies, he wakes up the next morning in his bed.

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