prokopetz:

An incomplete list of descriptive paradigms for physical immortality – a resource for tabletop RPGs and other situations where you might find yourself playing or writing a character who can’t be hurt through conventional means.

• Superman: The standard option – physical dangers just bounce off of you. If something does manage to injure you, you’ll display signs of pain or discomfort, and may exhibit light bruising, a thin trickle of blood, or some other cosmetic damage, but nothing short of complete destruction can violate your bodily integrity.

• G-Rated: A series of unlikely coincidences arranges for injuries that you suffer to be much less severe than they should be.  Fatal plummets become embarrassing pratfalls, and plunging into a fire merely leaves you artfully singed. Should you have enemies, they likely find you extremely frustrating to deal with.

• Looney Tunes: You stretch and squash like a cartoon character, or else your body is simply amorphous. The effects of injuries tend to be exaggerated, but inflict no long-term impairment; for example, you might be cut in half, burnt to ash, or shattered like glass by trauma that wouldn’t ordinarily produce such extreme results, but quickly recover.

• Zombie: You’re no more resistant to injury than an ordinary person, but being injured simply doesn’t particularly impair your ability to act. You’ll just keep going through anything short of complete bodily dismemberment, and even in that situation, your severed limbs may continue to act with far greater effectiveness than they really should.

• Jekyll & Hyde: Trauma that should incapacitate or kill you instead causes you to transform into or be replaced by something else, typically an entity that can more effectively remove or escape the threat. The process later reverses itself, leaving you unharmed; you may or may not remember what your replacement did in your absence.

• Skinsuit: Your human form is something you wear like a suit. Damaging it doesn’t meaningfully injure you, though it may impair your ability to act in a human fashion; in essence, injuries are recontextualised so that they change your ability to interact with the world rather than reducing it. Tentacles are traditional but not mandatory.

• Puppet Strings: Your body is something that you have rather than something that you are. As you become progressively more damaged, it becomes progressively more apparent to onlookers that your body is being driven or dragged about by some outside force. You may or may not be able to replace it in the event of complete destruction.

• Reset Button: You can be hurt or killed in the usual fashion, but no matter what happens to you, you just show up again later as though nothing happened. This may involve time manipulation, literal reincarnation, or some sort of metatextual contrivance. If killed, you may or may not remember dying.

• Disposable: You’re actually one of a large number of essentially identical entities, typically a hive mind (if biological) or part of a product line (if mechanical). Destroyed instances are simply replaced. There may be a fixed number of you; if not, you may depend on some sort of external facility to produce more of you.

• Outside Context: Your nature is sufficiently weird that it’s unclear what would qualify as an injury for you. The archetypal example is an intangible ghost, though there are many other possibilities. This usually involves a set of concomitant limitations on how you can interact with the world – it’s as alien to you as you are to it!