A House-rule Guaranteed Not To Get Out of Hand

Well.  Once a month, non sequential, barely new writey..things...posts seems to be the current way of it. I suppose I ought to get to scribbling a bit more on the Bright Spans, if for no other reason than the title did say "Pt. 1". Though that sort of thing rarely puts a dent in my focus to get some follow-ups done. 

I did, however, throw down some stats and saves abbreviations right behind my moderately functional hit-chart. Thems are for the "sweet scars" one can receive! It barely makes sense with some of them, but they mostly have a reason, even if it is obscure, or just amusing in my own head. Easy ones are like the "side/kidney → stone" or various head to int ones. More obscure ones like "calf → wis" take some parsing I suppose (the calf as the "heart of the lower body" and some sort of correlation of wisdom to the cardiac muscle). Ok, I suppose many of them are really stretching it, but it gave me a bit of amusement, and, more importantly, a way for my players to get big-bubba-stat boosts! 

The glorious glow knowing you can now take on one more henchman after your Charisma went up,

 

Man, if there's one thing that players like, it's attribute bumps. Attaching all of this to the hit chart gives me a reason to use that hit chart. When a player drops to 0 or negative hit points I roll the bones, and if it makes any sense at all, the devastating blow will have landed on the bodily region indicated. At 0 hps, the lucky PC just gains the sweet scar and +1 to the relevant stat indicated. At the dreaded negative hps, if they survive, they come-to with a limp or some other memento of their battle as well as the little boost. 

In the last session, dipping into B4 The Lost City, the Wednesday group came upon the scrufflings and eventual crunchings of the giant-ass gecko on the bird-masked guy behind the bed in the abandoned priest's quarters. They weren't too careful, and just poked around until the thing jumped them. Then everyone converged on the room, just in time for the second one to spring. They almost lost a PC or two, but with judicious use of the porters they brought, and my wrassling rules, they barely scraped by. (Also the fighter Anja crit failing, using a luck-point to reroll, and rolling another 1, leading to the Dragonslayer crit fumble chart, and another hit on the already downed assassin was classic.) The cleric Eli turned and healing energies flowed off of him to Omen, but was then munched on by the hungry hungry gecko. So close. Anyhow, they both got "almost died-gimme my sweet scar" bonuses.

I can already see all of this getting out of hand, so I'm thinking about limiting it to once per level, or having it cost one of their limited luck points to boost the attribute. If that's the case (and that's what I'm leaning toward right now) I'll only allow once per session. If someone gets KO'd multiple times in a delve, it seems alright to let the player choose what to get the boost in. Hopefully all of this doesn't promote carelessness or nonchalance toward getting downed or, worse, the players looking to get smashed (though that does give me thoughts of amusing scenarios), but instead a feeling of hard-won improvements and battle-field experience. 

Besides, they have yet to experience someone getting dragged off instead of just attacked until hps are depleted. That might make the less thoughtful character squint apprehensively into the gibbering darkness.