Favorite Non-HP Health/Damage System?

[Aldarc]

Saying Fate and Cortex at this point feels a bit much at this point considering how much love they both have received, but oh well. I love how versatile they can be. It's not just about HP or physical damage. You can use Stress to represent far more than that depending on the game or variant. Taken out by Mental Stress? Cool. Taken out by Social Stress? Cool. Taken out by Financial Stress? Cool. And you can also tie the recovery of these Stress tracks to different things in the fiction. So versatile and fun.

 

[Blue]

On a homebrew system I was playing around with there was bit of a death spiral, except that all PCs (and the occasional rare master NPC) had a feature called When the Going Gets Tough, which would reverse the worst level of the death spiral to make it a bonus.

While I played with having it activatable with a later cost, sort of a martyr option, I really liked how always-on it gave bonuses that weren't really optimizable-for. Also since resisting damage was a check so was modified, it gave a really nice buffer between "I'm almost out" and actually being out for PCs while everyone else didn't linger too long.