Would you ditch your crippled character?

[hector]

Just curious. Have you read the brain damage flaw?

I had, but I just took a reread and I would replace probably with maybe, depending on what the dice give me.

In general, I probably would keep playing a character who has been taken in an interesting new direction that I might not have chosen for them; I wouldn't keep playing a character who I didn't believe would still be fun to play. Which potential injuries would result in which will generally depend on the campaign.

[nemedeus]

A few weeks ago, I rolled very poorly in a Burning Wheel game, resulting in my character taking a crossbow bolt to the chest. This was a mortal wound, but I spent a persona point for Will To Live, allowing my character to survive. I then proceeded to fail my recovery tests, resulting in the character being permanently crippled. I wasn't the only one who the dice were unkind to that night, and the result was that two thirds of the PC (including me) were dead or disabled. We decided to end the campaign there. I'm still rather attatched to that character, and would like to revisit her story sometime (which was left very much unfinished), though it definitely won't be the one that would have been told otherwise (Vincent Baker has a saying along the lines of "the rules are there to force us to tell a story that we otherwise would not have told). I can't speak for what Higgins and Agamemnon are trying to achieve with the BoB, but BW's tagline has always been "Fight For What You Believe In"; this cuts the other way, to: you'd better believe in what your fighting for, because your character's life and limb could very well be on the line.

Stories like these make me wonder why we in this hobby almost never consider the superhero comicbook principle of "in this continuity they died, but what happened in another timeline?"
Although i do admit, In saying that i feel like i just commited sacrilege or something.

[Marras]

Stories like these make me wonder why we in this hobby almost never consider the superhero comicbook principle of "in this continuity they died, but what happened in another timeline?"
Although i do admit, In saying that i feel like i just commited sacrilege or something.

Yes, you did

Anyway, sometimes disabilities are what make characters personal. How they cope with this disability can really be an interesting story to be told but sometimes it's not. It also depends on what kind of campaign you are playing in.

Perhaps there could be a lever that allows player to get rid of extreme cases of the injuries like loosing an arm but still getting rest of the effects. Instead (or in addition) of spending a point, the player agrees with the GM to sort of postpone his ill fortune of loosing an arm now to something very nasty in the future. This could be more or less scripted character death where the player and GM agree about that to add something to the ongoing story or it can be just a sort of black mark that when someone will loose all his gear, it will be this character. Or whatever. So, it the crippling injury is OK for the player, then go with the current wound system. If not, exchange it to future badness. The last option could even be that if the player so wishes, he can declare his character dead and the wound just happened to be a bit worse.

[Benedict]

Perhaps there could be a lever that allows player to get rid of extreme cases of the injuries like loosing an arm but still getting rest of the effects. Instead (or in addition) of spending a point, the player agrees with the GM to sort of postpone his ill fortune of loosing an arm now to something very nasty in the future. This could be more or less scripted character death where the player and GM agree about that to add something to the ongoing story

Slightly off-topic but I can't help it.

That reminds me Rell the cyclops from Krull.

[Marras]

Slightly off-topic but I can't help it.

That reminds me Rell the cyclops from Krull.

Unfortunately I don't remember much at all from that movie except that I liked it as a kid when I saw it.

[Benedict]

Cyclopes had made a deal with the Beast (the main antagonist) where they traded one of their eyes (making em cyclopes in the process) for the gift of knowing the future. The Beast however tricked them and the only knowledge they got was the time of their death.

Since Rell knows when he will die he can't die before that. Hence he recceives multiple mortal wounds throughout the movie without even flinching. But when his time comes he suffers an agonizing death.

[Marras]

Cyclopes had made a deal with the Beast (the main antagonist) where they traded one of their eyes (making em cyclopes in the process) for the gift of knowing the future. The Beast however tricked them and the only knowledge they got was the time of their death.

Since Rell knows when he will die he can't die before that. Hence he recceives multiple mortal wounds throughout the movie without even flinching. But when his time comes he suffers an agonizing death.

Damn! I have to find this movie somewhere, unfortunately it's not available in Finnish Netflix (probably the worst list of films and TV series where Netflix is available). Anyway, yes it would work pretty much like this except of course the PC in question wouldn't be immune to death or anything later on.

[Benedict]

Hence he recceives multiple mortal wounds throughout the movie without even flinching. But when his time comes he suffers an agonizing death.

Anyway, yes it would work pretty much like this except of course the PC in question wouldn't be immune to death or anything later on.

Something important I forgot to clarify.

If Rull chose to accept his destiny knowing the time of his death he could die peacefully in bed.

However he chose to go against his fate by helping the heroes, and cheating death so many times by doing that, he earned his agonizing death.

Damn! I have to find this movie somewhere

It's worth the watch. Imo its the perfect blend of sci-fi with swords & sorcery. Directed by Peter Yates, it has an amazing british cast (with a very young Liam Neeson), the heroes drop like flies in the final showdown, sports a fantastic soundtract by James Horner, and early Star Wars compareable SFXs.

Wish they'd made movies like this with today's technology.

[ChaosFarseer]

My RPG group and I generally lean towards keeping the character alive and relevant. One of us would prefer to 'retire' a crippled character and keep them around as an NPC, then move on to a new non-crippled character. (At least, a character that's crippled compared to their general game plan. If you're missing an arm and trying to pilot a giant robot, it's a problem, but not if you control giant robots with your mind.) None of us would resort to killing the character off, though.

Maybe there could be an incentive for struggling through, despite the injury, instead of taking the easy way out and replacing your character. Perhaps an extra SA which fires whenever you overcome something that would have been trivial before amputation.

The difficulties when losing a limb can result from either the shift in roleplaying, or the penalties in gameplay. I imagine that, in general, roleplaying as the crippled character is something that works. Performing mechanical gameplay with the cripple, however, is generally not going to be fun. The latter can be sidestepped by thirtythr33's character rebuilding idea, but if a player doesn't like roleplaying as a crippled character, they're the kind of person who will retire the character regardless of the means to 'get around' the crippling factor. The gameplay problem is more likely, IMO, so some way of working through that would be worth adding.