Hacking the Game - Loosing Stats due to Psychic Damage
Neuron Loss Due to Psychic Damage
Let’s consider for a moment that psychic damage causes neuron loss. In a campaign where the GM wants to make psychic damage a truly dangerous element—and not just a narrative or mechanical one—we can come up with a small house rule to represent this cognitive damage.
Cognitive Threshold
Every character has a cognitive threshold defined by:
This yields values ranging from 9 (with all three attributes at 3) to 60 (with all three attributes at 20). The Cognitive Threshold starts at 0, and every time the character takes any amount of psychic damage, it increases by that same amount. Once the threshold is breached, the character temporarily loses 1 point of INT, WIS, or CHA—at the player’s choice—and returns to 0, carrying over any excess points. Once the player has chosen an attribute to be reduced, they cannot choose it again until they take a long rest, or until the other two attributes have also been chosen.
e.g. A character whose cognitive threshold is 34/36 takes 8 points of psychic damage, raising their threshold to 42/36. The player decides that the character will lose 1 point of WIS, and the threshold returns to 6/36.
Neurons do recover, however. For each long rest, regenerate 1 attribute point from those that were reduced.
0 Attribute Points
If, as a result of applying these rules, any of the three attributes reaches zero, the character dies.
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