What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger

 There’s a bit in Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes (a book I’ve written about before) that always stuck with me. About fifty pages in, we’re introduced to the character Stranger Come Knocking, a wild man among wild men, takes off his shirt and shows off the scars he’s accumulated in his many battles, boasting about taking over a tribe, murdering a witch, and taking on two men in “single” combat. 

When I was fourteen, I saw Dredd (2012) for the first time and had my lesbian awakening. The main antagonist is Lena Headey’s Ma-Ma, a psychotic gang leader who sports some gnarly facial scars, a permanent reminder of her days under her old pimp before she killed him in a…fairly gruesome manner. Setting aside how it cemented that I was definitely into girls, those scars show where she came from, and why she fights to protect what is now hers.

not to be a lesbian but oh my fucking god. oh my god. jesus fucking christ. oh my god. fucking shit jesus fuck oh my fucking jesus fucking christ. god in heaven. holy fuck ing shit

I’ve always felt that kind of thing should also be true in RPGs, with characters able to point to the battles they survived for greater strength and resolve. Coupling that with a desire to reduce the low-level lethality of your typical OSR experience, and I’ve put together a tiny little system I’m gonna be using in my home game going forward. I’m obviously not the first person to come up with something like this, but all the ones I’ve seen involve adding on permanent negative modifiers. I’m not a fan of death spirals personally, and I come from the Blades in the Dark school of “Trauma is like salt: A little adds a lot of flavor.”

Scars:

When a character would be reduced to zero or fewer hit points from injury, the player rolls a d6+the number of Scars they have accumulated-their Constitution modifier. On a 6 or higher, the character dies. On a 5 or less, the character gains a Scar determined by the player and GM. This can be psychological or physical.

Each Scar a character has may be invoked once per game session. The player describes how the memory of that scar applies to the present situation, and then gains advantage on the relevant roll. 

Examples:

• Vadzlo the Rogue has always had trouble breathing after a spear trap pierced his chest. He invokes his resulting paranoia to gain advantage on detecting traps later on.
• After being splashed by acid, Wendy the Wonderful’s visage is marred by burns. She invokes her fucked-up countenance to intimidate a goblin into spilling more information.
• Jingling Jim has a twinge in his arm after a bugbear broke it into several pieces. He now hates bugbears with a passion, and invokes his scar to gain advantage on an attack roll against one.

Hopefully this has characters thinking a lot more about their past adventures, and adding an increasing danger to battle-scarred veterans traveling around, as the more scars you have, the closer you are to death.