Originally Posted by
Jormengand
I'm very wary of this idea of random, eternal shots-in-the-foot for doing your day job. Sure, if you accept that your magic is dangerous by choosing a type of magic that's dangerous, you should maybe have a chance to accidentally hit yourself with the spell if you're both careless and unlucky, or you should pay in hit points to cast the spells, but... say in D&D, if you're facing a 5% chance of losing a constitution point every time you cast a 9th-level spell, 4% for an 8th, 3% for a 7th, 2% for a 6th, 1% for a 5th and none for anything below, then with a decent charisma a sorcerer can expect to take 0.13 points of CON loss at level 10, 0.1625 at level 11, 0.455 at level 12, 0.5525 at 13, 0.6175 at level 14, all the way up to 4.65 at level 20, which is going to make him very very frail indeed just for doing his day job, through no fault of his own. I'm not a fan of permanent stat loss, honestly.