: Re: How to make a repeating plot "slice" not annoying In my fantasy novels, I don't want to kill anyone off, I just want to get them injured, like badly. I made up numerous believable excuses

@Angie602

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One of my favourites in this respect, Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction trilogy (or 6-ology in some countries), does this in a quite non-tiring fashion:

People who see front-line combat are often "boosted" and have "nanonics", i.e. implants which can turn off pain nerves, inject adrenaline and such. Also, there are highly advanced external medical packages which you simply slap onto the damaged body part and which will fix most non-deadly issues on their own. If worst comes to worst, they have human-sized transportable "stasis" chambers where they can stop time for individuals in the hope that better medication becomes available later. All of these concepts are frequently employed.
Uncritical damage just gets switched off by the nanonics and everything is well. Protagonists feel like having a bad case of sore muscles. Most times, it is not mentioned except in passing (like you would bruising in a more realistic book).
If this keeps going, the character will be described as receiving ever more damage piling up one after the other; but this seems to mentioned only very seldomly.
(Side) characters are seldomly introduced for specific combat scenes, and set up as, e.g., very experienced, advanced fighters; if they sustain heavy damage, they will die - i.e., they are a plot device to prove that nobody is really invincible, and also to enable the main protagonists to have some emotional trauma as well. Their fate is then quite impactful, as they seemed almost all-powerful before, but still succumb to the even more powerful enemy.
One character in particular is entering the novels very early and appears again and again; he is particularly unlucky in that his body gets beat up especially extremely. Him constantly being close to being finished is like a running gag (presented not very humourously...).

If you wish to see in detail how he does it, I highly suggest picking up those novels; they have aged well in my opinion.

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