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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9760212" data-attributes="member: 6799660">At their basic level, hit points act as a waypoint between perfect health and down (giving you an opportunity to decide to retreat, go defensive, move resources, etc.). There isn't a specific need for any other battle conditions (like wound levels) having to be directly tied to that scale. Hit points, by themself, serve the function for which they are created. By that measure, they are a success. With that and their ease of use, it's easy to see why they are so often used. That's going to depend so wildly on the type of combat and situation as to make it hard to generalize. Boxing this is a hard no. Knife fights -- even the victor walks away with defensive wounds (whether these are at the slow-you-down level or not is again context specific). Sword fights -- so depends on the era and weapons and armor and so on (getting your head chopped off with a sword is dead, but getting a mace blow when in plate is broken bones and a lot of pain and maybe bent and hard-to-use armor). Shoot outs -- yeah, it could well be everyone fine... fine... fine... down (with survival maybe being a second check). Even then, modern body armor can really change this too. Personally, I think HP work well alongside static or proportioned wounded mechanics such as 'bloodied' at 1/2 hp, which not invoke combat abilities/penalties -- either universal ('-1/2/3 to-hit at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 hp gone) or at the individual level (berserkers get +4 damage when bloodied). For me, these are still mostly 'hp-like,' at least compared to something like WEG SW or world of darkness wound categories, etc. There's plenty of reason to like super complex (realistic or otherwise) combat systems, and plenty of reason to like straightforward and simple systems. Honestly, so long as a system has a reason for what it is doing, I'm all for it.</blockquote>

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