@Swordgleam – Actually humans rely quite heavily on using known sizes (i.e. you know a human male will most likely be around 180cm tall) for things when estimating distances even if they have both eyes. I would assume someone with only one eye would learn to be better at this quite quickly.

2. Whatever you do, you don’t want to lose the “Oh my god, my character is going to get #$%^ed!” feeling.

3. Seeing one PC go down, and stay down, gives that feeling to the others. So it’s not *always* a bad thing.

4. If your system uses some kind of player controlled way to cheat death (Fate/Hero/Wawa Points), you can combine the death cheat with some consequence. Example from my Dark Heresy game: “You are horribly burned and your eyes melted out of their sockets, but you live.” Now he is scared and has two cybernetic eyes that glow purple in the dark.

If you said death first, that’s what you get.

I am fond of rules like Saga Edition Star Wars, where falling below zero HP means unconsciousness if you opt to save your character. I suspect if you maim occasionally and play up the pain of a slow recovery from the bruising and trauma, you can work good roleplaying in to wounds. Spirit of the Century handles it very well by treating wounds as aspects, like any other– so “broken arm” is invoked against the character when he tries to jog across the room without fainting, and the mechanic is the same familiar one that applies to everything else.

For low magic/tech settings, both Shadowrun and White Wolf have a mechanic that makes the character less effective until they recover– which seems like a big part of what you’re trying to model. Of course, those systems fall prey to “death spiral” claims, where getting wounded makes you less able to hit your enemies… and easier for them to hit, making you even more wounded.

Then we all rag him about his death for an hour.

Meanwhile the GM decides how to best resurrect or replace the dead character.

I find resurrection to make death largely meaningless, so the meaning of combats must be derived from other consequences.

And as a disclaimer, this is one of the major issues as to why I stopped playing some published games.

1) Importance of consequesnces. You didn’t really touch on that here, so I won’t dwell too heavily on it, but the level of consequences and the incidence of same is one of the most basic decisions a GM has to go through when creating a setting. You offer 2 options at the top of the page, but the ease or possibility of option 2 (raising) is a whole chapter here for me.

2) Systems of scars, injuries, wounds, et al. By the title and first paragraph, it seems you are using one of these other debilitaing options as a substitute for death. We are kind of skipping over, probably for the sanity of system wars, the idea that the whole mechanics of death (when does a character die vs wound) need to be looked at here. Becasue it is better to have this change made BEFORE the Farm is Bought by a PC.
For instance, let’s say for example your system used some measure of health. We’ll call it Hit Points in our caffeine-driven lack of originality. It would be better BEFORE all of this happens to decide that 0 HP is not death, but unconsiousness, and that maybe down to -5 is a serious injury, and -6 through -10 is a maiming type of wound.
I’ll not get deeply into it, just tying your truly excellent examples of possible alternatives to the first paragraph, to call attention to the need of the mechanics being in place before the inceident.

3) I want to point out another factor that speaks in favor of your alternative. I’ve been doing this for a little while, and I have always found that the level of versimilitude and consequence both dramtically increase player emotional investiture in the setting, as well as increase immersion.
As an example, it just so happens that in my IRC game, a PC lost an arm when the group ran into a were. The rest of the PC’s roleplayed around it very seriously, and the consequence really rallied the group together, as well as bringing home to them the seriousness of their quest.
Adventurers lead dangerious lives. A game where they have 20 combats and the player characters have no scars, marks, injutries, where their existence and lifestyle has no lasting affect is ‘less real’ (I know. Fantasy game. I know. Bear with me) and therefor less important than one where characters have ‘earned their stripes’.

If circumstances (and later posts) dictate, maybe we’ll delve more.