Quote:
Originally Posted by Anders
There are poisons that cause permanent damage. Imbibing one of them to invite the spirits inside?
It's not difficult to think up ritual that permanently damages the initiate.
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If a player came to me with such a theory during a campaign, I might or might not approve of it; it would depend on what I had decided about the campaign setting. (I can't see, for example, that it would make any sense in Tela, the settiing of my current fantasy campaign.) But I wouldn't allow such a thing simply because there was a defined game mechanic for doing it, any more than I would allow teleportation or Trained by a Master for such a reason.
And it rather seems to me that what this thread is doing is
first proposing a game mechanic and
then trying to come up with a rationale for using it in a campaign, which is way too gamist for me: I want to see it emerge from the nature of the game world (simulationist) and from the flow of events in an ongoing conflict (narrativist).
Ritual that permanently damages the initiate is obviously possible; you could put out an eye, or cut off a hand, or the like. But that by itself doesn't convince me that "lose one point of ST/HT" is a plausible form of damage. Can you point to anything in the published rules where some form of inflicted damage reduces an attribute or secondary characteristic in that way? Can you, for example, point to a poison that is defined game mechanically as doing so?
At the most basic level, my take on this sort of thing is that character points DO NOT EXIST in a game world, and the characters have no awareness of them. They exist only as a formal convention by which the players and the GM keep track of certain things. You may be able to say, as a player, that X is worth n points, and Y is worth n points, and therefore they're in some sense equivalent; but that doesn't compel me, as the GM, to allow you to remove X from your character sheet and add Y. In fact I would say that the equal character points are irrelevant, because it's entirely in my power to give your character a new trait that doesn't conserve character points at all.