Bumping for great interest, this would be of great use in a Savage Tide campaign.
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How about: The PC picks up a scar when the player thinks it would be fun to have a scar. Or is there some game rule involving scars that I'm unfamiliar with?
Like others, I don't think there should be a hard and fast rule for everything. That being said, as a rule of thumb for my campaigns, magical healing that heals all of your HP won't leave scars. Bed rested healing, however - particularly ability score damage - will. The bigger the damage, the bigger the scar.
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As a house rule, how about:
1. Target is on the recieving end of a confirmed critical.
2. Target makes a fort save with DC equal to damage; fail means no scar.
3. Damage done by non magical means can be healed by means (gut scar is removed by potion of cure light), only if done immediately.
4. Damage done by magical means can only be healed by restoration and like spells.
I wont mess with social interactions involving scars. Its been talked about Batman being heavily scared and he still has a high CHA. Same with Magneto and Conan.
How about: The PC picks up a scar when the player thinks it would be fun to have a scar. Or is there some game rule involving scars that I'm unfamiliar with?
+1
If I were going for a battle scarred char, I'd probably give myself one every crit, and then put down a bit of a story as to how I got it. May even start doing that for my barbarian.
How about: The PC picks up a scar when the player thinks it would be fun to have a scar. Or is there some game rule involving scars that I'm unfamiliar with?
This.
I have a monk(ish) character who wears no armor, and has lived his life one massive beating to the next.
When his shirt gets ripped off in battle (which happens whenever he takes damage...) His many scars are more evident.
As a 'FLUFF' rule,I usually say, Magically healed damage goes away just fine... if the magic didn't heal you full.. there may be a scar.
If the damage was PARTICULARLY memorable or Plot worthy... he can point to the scar and show it off...
However I wouldn't be in favor of a rule that tells you when and wear with every strike of a sword... that would get tedious. And considering the 'official' stance on Charisma is that it has NOTHING to do with physical attractiveness, then scars have mechanical bonus or penalty to stats anyway.
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My DM would give us a scar whenever we hit by a crit. We used a critical hit deck to spice up things up a bit that would usually have locations the hit landed (pierced abdomen, broken jaw, etc...) and we would say the scar was on the body location hit.
Like Douglas Muir 406 mentioned, our melee fighters got crit hit all the time, and our "scar journals" (we liked to keep track) filled up pretty quickly. Good or bad thing depending on your outlook
I'm in favor of letting the player pick up scars when they like. Some people have a specific idea in their minds of what their PC looks like and a scar could enhance that idea or utterly turn the player off to the character. That said, it was mentioned in passing after my cleric died and was revived that she had a scar where the offending glabrezu had neatly cut her in half (well, not so neatly :) ). Now it's a part of her, and I'm happy with it. You need to know your group to know when scarring is okay.
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The Pathfinder Companion for the Legacy of Fire Adventure Path has an 'Achievement Feat' called 'Legacy of Scars' (on page 29) with a prerequisite of taking 1,000 points of damage, where magical healing reduces your running total (for the purposes of qualifying) by 1 per 5 points of damage magically healed.
(The Feat iteself, if you ever qualify and take it, means your thick scars give you a -2 penalty on Charisma-based Skill checks, but increase your natural armour bonus by +2).
As others have said, I think keeping this a houserule and perhaps one that is at the player's option would be best. I'd be more than annoyed if my GM arbitrarily started describing my Cha 22 bard as having scars across her face and limbs, etc.
If you a dead set on such a thing though, I think the whole natural vs. magical healing issue is a decent idea. However, I'm hard-pressed to think of any reasonable situations where characters would need to heal from a critical solely by natural means. Even if the party's cleric needs to wait until the next day to recover spells, I don't see the natural healing a character gets in the meantime having a meaningful impact on this.
Perhaps a simpler way of keeping track would be a scar if they get killed and are brought back by anything less than True Resurrection, Wish, or Miracle. I could see a reattached limb and a Raise Dead spell leaving a mark...
Of course, if you go this route then there should be some spell capable of removing a scar, tattoo or birthmark etc. Perhaps a lower-level regeneration or a transmutation effect. Why? Because you know damn well that a rich fop who got disfigured in a duel would pay good money to get their countenance restored if they were able. Where there's someone willing to pay for something, you'll find someone willing to sell it.
I think it was rite publishing that put out a pdf on scars. They gave you a negative to something but a bonus to something else. There was also a pdf on magical tattos that had rules for scars in it. I'm on my phone atm so I can't tell you the names of them but I will when I get home.
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I have a houserule, that (like Helaman above suggested) if a critical forces a character into negative hit points, the wound leaves a scar. The spell Heal will remove any scars a character has...
Several people have stated that they would dislike a DM arbitrarily giving their beloved PCs any scars, I say, in the real world; does ANYBODY really want some ugly scar?
True, BUT...
The concept is the same. And the life of an adventurer is a dangerous one, and in my games, the possibility of scar tissue is but one of the hazards that comes with the job...
I will say however, that until one has alot of scars, the scar is just considered character fluff. So until that point, I do not impose any negative effects upon the character in question...
-That One Digitalelf Fellow-
heres the links to those products
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I think ill second what Lathirra said. Letting the players decide when they want scars seems to be a good idea.
the "house rule" that seems to float around my local gaming store, is that if you heal naturally, you get a scar. If you are magically healed Partially, but then naturally heal the last bit, you get a scar.
But all in all, if the player wants a scar, i don't quibble over it.
I hope this helps
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The Pathfinder Companion for the Legacy of Fire Adventure Path has an 'Achievement Feat' called 'Legacy of Scars' (on page 29) with a prerequisite of taking 1,000 points of damage, where magical healing reduces your running total (for the purposes of qualifying) by 1 per 5 points of damage magically healed.
(The Feat iteself, if you ever qualify and take it, means your thick scars give you a -2 penalty on Charisma-based Skill checks, but increase your natural armour bonus by +2).
You know, I really like the idea of that Feat, but it just seems way too tedious for it to seem worthwhile. I for one, would easily lose count of the damage taken by the time I could feasibly qualify for it.
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I've never implemented it, but I like the idea of using a converted Werewolf: The Apocalypse scar system. Basically, whenever an attack drops you below 0 hp, you gain a scar. The scar gives you a +1 to one kind of social persuasion roll (Intimidate, usually), and a -1 to something else (Diplomacy, or possibly something like ranged attacks if the scar is over the eye).
If I were going for a battle scarred char, I'd probably give myself one every crit, and then put down a bit of a story as to how I got it. May even start doing that for my barbarian.
My life oracle gets a corresponding scar every time he heals a wound. He's pretty messed up! :)
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You know, I really like the idea of that Feat, but it just seems way too tedious for it to seem worthwhile. I for one, would easily lose count of the damage taken by the time I could feasibly qualify for it.
Yeah - the LoF companion book introduced a bunch of 'Achievement Feats' where you needed to do 'X' in-game to qualify. They're an interesting idea, but I think the excess bookkeeping puts most people off, and since we don't seem to have seen hide not hair of them from Pazio since, I'm guessing they didn't get a lot of positive feedback on the concept.
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Yeah - the LoF companion book introduced a bunch of 'Achievement Feats' where you needed to do 'X' in-game to qualify. They're an interesting idea, but I think the excess bookkeeping puts most people off, and since we don't seem to have seen hide not hair of them from Pazio since, I'm guessing they didn't get a lot of positive feedback on the concept.
You know, you just gave me an idea of a new house rule. Maybe instead of making them painstaking to track just to attain the feat, maybe they can be supplemented as a reward for certain encounters. Like replacing some or all treasure of an encounter to reward them with the feat. Leaving it up to the GM.
Personally, I've always played that magical healing prevented scarring while natural healing doesn't -- and that the scarring threshold (as it were) was 15% of hp -- so any knife or dagger cut at low-level, but at high level, it needed to be something that really got past your defenses (based on how HP are abstracted).
I liked that particular handling of it, and I think I might have been inspired by "Once a Hero" by Michael Stackpole -- where the main character refuses magical healing as a matter of pride (and, in fact, is collecting scars for just that reason).
It could be argued that Fast Healing leads to scars also (in which case, Inquisitors are scar-er-riffic).