Revised Wounded for DF/DFRPG

I've always like the idea of the Wounded disadvantage, but it seems so unlikely to come up in play.

Foes that know of your weak point can target it at -7. So, basically, foes who know you with skill levels high enough to absorb a -7 can attempt to hit your weak point. At -7, they could also just go for skull (-7), neck (-5), chinks in armor (-8), eyes (-9) - it's not a big stretch to hit something that is weak on everyone.

What seems like a throwaway side penalty is probably the main part - poisons treating skin contact as internal contact on that point. Which is kind of odd to me - so it has to be a wound, not an injury.

In a DF/DFRPG game, a wound is going to be covered by armor most of the time, hard to spot with Per rolls, and rarely vulnerable.

So it seems a bit . . . weak. Less restrictive and less punishing than even other 5-point disadvantages. It should come up more often than "the poison doesn't affect you, unless it gets inside the armor on your knee!"

It is only a -5 disad, so if I want to make it a little more harsh I have to be very careful.

Here is what I did:

Wounded

As written, but add this sentence after the line ending "(round up)" and before the line beginning "Any poison":

Foes can sometimes strike this randomly - any critical hit to the location of your wound automatically hits the wounded area, in addition to any normal effects of the critical hit!

* * *

And done. That seems fair enough - sometimes when a random ghoul or ravenous ghost-bear or orc takes a slash at your neck they hit your old wound. But it's rare enough that it's not pushing a -5 disad up to something too harsh for the points you get.

Another approach would be to make it much more often - any critical hit, and 1 in 6 chance on any hit, period. For something like that, you'd want to make it -10 points, or remove the poison effect. That would allow for injuries (like a knee with a torn miniscus, or a bad shoulder, or separated abdominal muscles, or something like that) that don't have any obvious, open access to your bloodstream.