Death and other penalties.

Back in the "Dark ages" of Wargame play, there was but one penalty for losing in combat - you were out of the game. Either dead, dying, incapacitated or captured.

Then with the advent of RPG's in their first incarnation the penalty for losing in combat was... death. There where ways around it, but in the end all it came down to was "if you lost, you died".

Sometime later the "minus numbers" rule came up, putting a buffer between death and losing. You could instead of being dead just be "out of the fight" and dying.

So, here we had two penalties for losing combat - dead or out of the fight.

RPG's have moved on a long way since then, with fallout, negative traits, skill or attribute loss and other such downsides.

LRP, certainly here in the UK, seems to have stayed firmly in the dark ages.

Some ideas present themselves for alternate losses.

By placing a ban on "dying" through combat, the Lorien Trust place the penalties of losing to the Loss of Money/items and 10 minutes of gameplay. However, this leads to a lot of complaints about plausability and the fact that these aren't really that bad. They aren't enough of a stake to be worth fighting over. The penalties have swung too far into the trivial.

Maybe somewhere inbetween...

Currently I have discounted fallout as being logistically too tricky without a massive overhaul of the entire premise of LRP in the uk, a topic for a later thread - but on the other hand, the temporary loss of skills may be feasable.

Consider this mechanic.

Each character has 5 "Energy cards". When reduced to a state that would otherwise kill them/impose a penalty, a card is torn.
A character's skills (randomly?) assigned Energy card requirements, if you have less than the requirement you lose the skill.
So, a character instead of dying loses the skill until the card is replaced or until sufficient healing time has elapsed (the next event)

A simple and easy way to represent the loss of skill.