What is your opinion about giving your players permanent scars/disabilities?

Or if you’re a player, receiving them?

For me, I tend to stray away from forcing my players into something they don’t have control over. I know a lot of people get attached to their characters and hate when they dont get a say in what happens to them.

On the other hand, I think it’s an awesome story mechanic and I’d love to implement it into my future games. If the party is cool with it, of course.

I prefer to have a discussion with my players beforehand of what they are willing to physically allow their characters to go through. As a disabled person I don’t want my autonomy taken away from me even in a game. I understand that there are risks as a character going into deadly situations and things can happen, but it feels disrespectful, and almost outright malicious to force your players to have to have their characters endure something that could leave a permanent disfiguration, or a physical change that alters their character.

I know some people who like to give their characters certain disfigurations or physical disabilities or scars because it’s something that they’ve gone through, and they understand how this works, or we have a long discussion about how a physical disability will impact their play, I had a player at one point who had a blind character and we had to discuss how they were affected by certain spells and not affected by other spells. and we made unique situations to fit this character’s specific skill set and how we tied and them being blind as a part of their being.

I know plenty of people who played tabletop RPGs as a way to escape what they deal with in real life, because there are certain things that impact their daily being that make it difficult to do things that they would like to do and playing things like Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder, allow them to project as a character in a different manner than they would in real life. But I’ve also had players who like the challenge of giving their characters something to struggle with. Because they identify with that struggle.

It is important to have a conversation about this because the disability whether mental or physical,will have a permanent impact on how certain things affect this character and open up unique opportunities within the world that they are playing in. As always, autonomy to your players is important, as is giving them the right to have representation. I found personally, it is quite fun to play characters with certain mental and physical disabilities that reflect my own because I like to give fantasy representation to something that you don’t see very often. Such as fibromyalgia, and I always work with the DM to make sure that these things can be implemented in the world without having too much of a negative effect on gameplay itself. You don’t want it to impact your play in a negative manner and make the game unfun for you.