06-21-2016, 04:39 AM
(06-21-2016, 01:42 AM)tmjva Wrote: I may have read into it wrong, I'll have to check it out.
On the other side of the coin, there are people so "mentally challenged" they can not speak their own language and must be trained to sign, otherwise grunt, or point at a picture book to indictate wants or needs.
Maybe I'm overthinking it and should be looking at issues regarding INT = 2 or INT = 1 for disability issues. Because INT = 3 on three 6-sided dice would be too large of a slice of the bell curve of a normal population distribution.
I would say that it's not important to throw every factor imaginable in one great, big stew. If you consider INT < 3 to indicate mental disabilities, what would you make of something like an idiot-savant, whom for most activities, an INT score of 2 might be appropriate, but in a few areas might actually perform as if INT was 20. A "mute" disadvantage coupled with just about any INT score pretty much nails the full range of possibilities. Hackmaster includes advantages & disadvantages, does it not?
We can also revisit the monk with the leg injury. Point of DEX lost, walks with a limp. I would rule the limp reduces movement rate by 25% (above and beyond the effects that having below-class-minimum DEX has on any class abilities). Over time, the DEX can be restored to its original level, but you can still be stuck with the limp (until cured by a cleric's Regeneration or a mage's Wish). I would imagine such a thing as the monk having adapted a new style of fighting around the limp.
Mixing in disabilities can really enhance the feel of the game. There was one encounter I ran where a group of little goblin-creatures were trying to capture the party. One of them whacked the fighter with a club in the knee-cap (successful hit against the odds on a called shot). It did very little in terms of hp damage (half normal damage due to striking a non-vital area), but I ruled until the damage was healed, either naturally or by magic, the character suffered 1/2 point of damage every time force was applied to the knee. As the goblins attempted to die the party up with nets and lassos, this character, being bigger and far stronger than the goblins, was able to just power out of it, but it was almost as if the player himself felt his character's pain as he had to lose the half hp every strenuous move he made trying to power out. The players felt that the knee-capping was also especially brutal, despite being a relatively weak creature that did it and how many things exist in the D&D world that do far, far, far more damage.