In games where physical/mental damage is recorded, how much is too much?

Will you retire a lame character? What about one that only has one arm?

Are "handicapped" characters still playable in your games?

In a setting with magic, all of those up to and including death can be little more than speed bumps.

Sci-fi settings generally have cybernetics and/or cloned replacement parts.

Superhero games generally have both, including temporally displaced copies of yourself or versions from parallel universes where the only real difference is that the Golden Gate Bridge is blue instead of red.

In many settings death is so pervasive the odds are you'll be dead long before you're just crippled (and not just OSR stuff... look at the 1-in-36 (or worse 1-in-6 from punches/DFA) hit location rolls chance to headcap in the Battletech RPG that is applied even if it's a PC driving the Mech).

Basically, I don't have much experience with any system where permanent crippling of the PC has even come up.

As damaged as they can become, up until my character can no longer contribute meaningfully to the campaign premise (or I just get tired of them). If that's dungeon delving then the second they can no longer fight monsters and delve dungeons, they should be retired. If there's a lot of political intrigue though, maybe my one-eyed paraplegic fighter starts branching out into intrigue, levying his reputation to gain position and military command or become a powerful advisor of some kind.

If I'm *running* the game, it depends on genre and flavor of the campaign. A pulp campaign will have much more forgiving crippling/maiming/madness elements (even disallowed entirely) than my gritty peasants-with-pitchforks-as-militiamen campaign.

My players generally don't seem to mind disfigurement, and relish the chance to explore different sides of their characters. My brother was delighted when his not-Viking land pirate lost a leg and got to have it replaced with a wooden elven table leg (after throwing his dismembered limb at his attacker and knocking him out with a direct head hit). Another player enjoyed gaining a phobia of elk after being knocked unconscious by one. So on and so forth. It adds dimension and scars that deepen attachment, I think, at least up until the core character concept stops being viable.

I played CoC with some two-fisted hero who went insane but held it together for five sessions before he gunned down all the other investigators and committed suicide. That was a fitting end to the campaign, but I don't think I would have stuck it out that long had the GM not insinuated that was sort of the point. My favorite Star Wars character retired after getting blown up in a botched rescue mission and decided he'd rather not get half his body parts replaced by cybernetics. Got a wheelchair droid and became a professor. In D&D, never retired any character as permanent injury is sort of a misnomer.

In CoC

• One investigator ended up in a wheel chair. He didn't go out on many investigations, mostly acted as a consultant after that.
• Another had a Sanity that went down to the twenties. She became semi-retired and spent a lot of time in a rest home.

I usually retire my character when it's development has ran it's course, or I got tired of it's concept. So it has nothing to do with injuries, really.

Depends on the setting and situation. Sometimes you have no choice but to soldier on, or limp forward bravely despite whatever loss of limb you suffer.

In my old Gamma World campaign limb loss was a possible threat due to how violent the setting was. There was no cybernetics to fall back on so PCs and NPCs either made do with what was left. Or on rare occasions got a replacement as a reward from some ancient fasility or advanced pocket group.

Whereas in Rifts where I was a player my character was just short of killed while on mission in Japan and as reward what was left was inserted into a dragon borg body. That was about a 75-90% limb-loss... ow...

In D&D there are occasionally magical workarounds, or just making do with whats left as usual. Depending on the severity and what is possibly out there to counter that loss. Magic eyeballs. Wizards Eye, helms of sight, etc might replace lost sight. A sort of "golem" arm prosthetic might replace a missing arm or leg. A character that cant walk might adventure on horse or pony-back, or ride something exotic and more ATV like a spider. Essentially an organic wheelchair. Or ride a flying carpet or broom everywhere.

It really depends on how lucky and/or creative players and NPCs get to find solutions. If any. Otherwise they have to live with the penalties or retire.

Is retirement even an option? What if the disabled PC is at the spearhead of stopping some disaster. They can retire later.

In Ars Magica, I had a Companion who was a traveled cartographer. He made maps, could sail ships, spoke lots of languages, and had contacts all over. The group basically wouldn't let him retire because he had so many useful skills. One magus even offered him a longevity potion, but he rejected it in favor of wanting to train an apprentice instead. He aged, taking all the disabilities that come with it, until he died around 80 or so.

I more likely to retire a successful PC than a "damaged" one.

Games with hit locations and permanent damage do result in "retired" PCs. If you lose a limb in RuneQuest or Warhammer, you're in deep trouble...and worse when you lose two. I've rarely seen a player continue with a PC who suffered a limb loss in either of those games. I've done so in both games, but I enjoy playing "suboptimal" PCs to play the underdog.

I had a RQ 2e character who had one arm and one leg. My friends called him a Halfling. He didn't retire, but got killed by Trolls thanks a max damage smash to his head. I also had a one-handed Protagonist in Warhammer Fantasy 1e who also survived an internal wound guts critical, and he had a goblin head taxidermied that he wore over the stump. He would talk to Gobby and show him off at taverns. And if you mouthed off, he would challenge you to a duel...then kill you with his WS 40. Shame that campaign ended when the GM moved.

Most Cthulhu characters I've had have died. But I believe one of my PCs "retired" after he was last seen alone in a rowing boat in the ocean off South America, naked clutching a copy of Cult des Ghoules. He had a fear of clothes and water at the time. Most of the others died, so they don't count.

This literally became an issue this weekend. One of my new players took several crits (playing Edge of the Empire) - he got swooped and snatched up by a flying varactyl mounted by a Tusken raider - which got shot out of the sky... the damage from the attack was already horrible, the drop from the air was worse, and he was already fighting the good fight and had crits. The final one would have randomly dropped one of his stats and everyone knew while he *would* have survived (the team was already enroute to get him) - his character would have been essentially fucked.

I know he liked his character a lot, so I fudged it and ripped his arm off instead. They're still in the middle of the adventure, and still in a world of shit. But I'm erring on not going *too* hardcore and letting a random freakish roll (and it was a very freaky roll - two triumphs and a very high crit-roll) "ruin" the character for a noob.

Well, in Lion & Dragon there's some magical healing, but you can't raise the dead nor can you normally restore completely ruined/lost body parts.

In my current L&D campaign, one of the characters is a warrior who took a critical hit that took out his shield-arm hand. He's replaced it with a gauntlet that connects to his shield and has continued on that way without too much trouble.

Depends a lot on the system. If you lose a calf but a peg leg allows reasonable movement, game on. Or if you lose an eye, suffer a penalty for a while but the game allows you to eventually adjust to one eyed fighting with minimal or no penalty, game on. But if the system means lost limbs/eyes etc are completely debilitating, then retirement is calling...

Played enough Dark Heresy to see characters rack up crippling physical injuries, insanity, and corruption along with lists of enemies. Somehow this made my players like their characters more, but IME, DH did seem to attract masochistic players.