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“Having One Eye is Purely Cosmetic”

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Long hair, fancy clothes, one eye. All a matter of style.

Long hair, fancy clothes, one eye. All a matter of style.

I realized something: in Dungeons & Dragons and its derivatives like Pathfinder, having one eye is purely cosmetic. There are no effects, positive or negative, that come from making a character have only one eye. They can spot enemies, shoot a bow, and jump over chasms just as well as their two-eyed counterparts. If their eye gets gouged out by a monster (or heaven forbid, they plan to use the Eye of Vecna), there are no lasting side effects. At the end of the day, having one eye is just as important as having blonde hair; it’s a purely cosmetic choice.

I’ve thought a bit about the reasons for it and here’s what I’ve come to the conclusion of:

No Way to Voluntarily Lose an Eye

I imagine that part of the reason for this is that, unlike other roleplaying games, Dungeons & Dragons does not have a set of rules for Hindrances or Drawbacks. During character creation, players don’t choose any flaws for their character, physical or otherwise. Without a way for a player to voluntarily make their character have a physical defect, one impetus for including such rules is lost. I’d hope that D&D Next would include a system like this, but alas it doesn’t seem likely.

Granted, you can gouge out your eye voluntarily to use the Eye of Vecna, but if you actually go through with it, you’re back to full sight (plus all the fun stuff that comes with it).

Death Has Historically Been Cheap

I imagine that the lack of such rules is largely because Dungeons & Dragons began as Chainmail, a wargame. In that game, you’re dealing with armies of soldiers who are all fighting fit because they would be discharged from service if they had only one eye or another hindrance that prevented them from effectively fighting. Furthermore, in the early days of D&D when death was cheap (and many low-level characters died from a single unnoticed trap), there wasn’t really any point to noting when they suffered a grave injury; you’re concerned largely about if they’re alive or dead, not about if they’ve lost an eye.

I think that this legacy has still continued to the day, even though the initial reasoning has largely gone. Even in Dungeons & Dragons 4e where characters are pretty hard to kill, a character can’t get their eye gouged out as an injury or lose a limb.

Hit Points Make it Tough

Back in the wargaming days, units were either alive or dead, and one hit took them down. When Gygax and Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons based on Chainmail, they decided that characters needed to be a bit more hardy to survive. Instead of taking one hit to go down, some unitswould take two or three hits to go down. They called the system “hit points.” Since then, the hit point mechanic has evolved into the system it is today (and pretty much every game and video game that uses hit points is indebted to this mechanic).

Over time, hit points became greater and characters became even hardier with changes to the rules on death. But the basic concept has stayed to the same. One side effect of this development is that your character can get all the way down to 1 HP and still fight just as well as they were at full health, and make a full recovery without even a scar.

HP. I still have one left.

Interestingly, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons did try rules like this with their Unearthed Arcana book, which added optional rules for severe injuries, such as a broken arm. The implementation though was…poor. Basically your arm is a “bag of hit points” and if your arm gets to 0, it’s broken or worse. Most people found it too complicated and not really worth the called shot penalties it incurred, so those rules didn’t make an appearance in later versions.

A Possible Solution: Injury on Incapacitation

Yup, it’s totally ripped off from Savage Worlds, but it works. Why not just have this: whenever a character becomes incapacitated, they roll on a table for random injuries, indicating the damage they got from their last few attacks. The severity can be modified by the results of a Constitution roll (or Fortitude Saving Throw for 3.x systems). Then they’re stuck with the injury until they get fully healed, or permanently if it’s severe.

Injuries by default would add a penalty to some characteristic. A limp penalizes Pace and Agility, a gouged out eye penalizes Perception and Ranged attacks. And this solution works even with the current hit point system.

Ultimately though, I guess it all comes down to a matter of preference. Some people are totally fine with the fact that one eye is cosmetic. I on the other hand want things to be a bit more realistic in my games. Or at least let characters have flaws (which is a much bigger topic).


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