Scars and an idea regarding them

By GroggyGolem, in Game Masters

Anyone ever thought of allowing for Scar effects to be more potent at the cost of the critical injury effect being permanent? So a Crippled limb stays crippled but maybe you get like a free 20xp talent or something. Random thought I had in my head, just needed to get it out.

6 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:

Anyone ever thought of allowing for Scar effects to be more potent at the cost of the critical injury effect being permanent? So a Crippled limb stays crippled but maybe you get like a free 20xp talent or something. Random thought I had in my head, just needed to get it out.

Like a custom talent? Battle Scarred or something like that?

There's a set of rules for "Scars" in Forged in Battle, the AoR Soldier book. Essentially it comes down to "When a crit is removed, the player may spend Z xp to purchase a specified talent outside their spec trees." Further rules allow for only 3 total Scars per character and the worse the crit they took, the cheaper the talent gets (by a factor of 5 less xp per difficulty increase of the crit).

My thought was increasing the potency or further diminishing the xp cost of the talent with the caveat that whatever effect that the crit had stays. Thinking about it regarding game balance, it's probably an awful thing to implement but regarding narrative, it's kind of neat for long-lasting effects like that.

I actually have that book. ? Retention of Information fail lol. I like it when games have Advantages and Disadvantages on a 1:1 ratio for character creation, so I think this idea has merit. Because this game has a progression factor (though nothing compared to D20 games) it seems like the ratio I like gets harder to achieve unless some nasty critical hits do the job for you, or you get players creating their own feedback negatives through their stories. Obligation is supposed to achieve this somewhat, but it seems like a lot of people use Obligation as a covert request for Hooks or as a complimentary trait.