Butthole Sergeant

This is a belated comment on Jeff Rients' post from the other day. He was pondering ways to get parties to employ flunkies more often and he suggested this:

And then there's this last idea I've been kicking around.  Call it the Emergency Red Shirt Rule: Once per session a PC can automatically save their own sorry hide by sacrificing one of their retainers. A smart player will come up lots of ways for their retainers to stand between his PC and the reaper man, but with this rule even clueless newbies will be able to use retainers to hedge their bets.

That imediately made me think of a similar ability available to characters in the miniatures skirmish game Shock Force 2, AKA WarEngine. There are several elements to that game that resemble what you would find in an RPG, such as a system of colorful Edges and Flaws that you can use to customize a model. One of the Edges is "Butthole Sergeant."

Butthole Sergeant
+ 5 points; Elite or Character with Control Radius only
If this figure is leading a unit that fails a Rout test, he makes an example of one of his followers to keep the unit from routing. Instead of removing the entire unit, only remove the figure closest to this figure.

This is intended to stop your unit from screaming "Run away!", and fleeing willy nilly after failing a morale check rather than keeping an individual character from getting iced, but the means are the same in that some poor schmuck gets whacked. So this kind of rule could serve the same function in a game assuming you have your players regularly check morale during fights. Besides, who wouldn't want to write "Butthole Sergeant" on their character sheet?