3catcircus
Adventurer
I'd beg to differ; as applied to D&D, hit points are a terrible representation of the idea of fighting through pain despite wounds, passing out from wounds, being KO'd, etc.
In D&D, you can not be KO'd or pass out from wounds solely and directly due to a particular wound unless that wound takes you below 0 (or your DM is using the massive damage rule and you happen to take enough damage in a single blow to cross that threshold). For routine "the orc hits, you take 6 points of damage" wounds during combat when you still have enough hp, you subtract it from your hp total and continue on as if nothing happened. All of the conditions are independent (stunned, dazed, shaken, etc.) of the amount of hit point damage a particular attack causes. It is a binary effect. You are either 100% effective or your hp crosses zero and you are now 100% ineffective. SWSE tries to fix this using the condition track, but I'm not certain how effective it is as I've never played SWSE.
Let's compare that to some other systems.
1. Marvel Superheroes (yellow box) - you subtract damage taken from your health. When it hits zero, you have to make an Endurance check. You either end up being unconscious or (if you make a bad roll), you start dying - every round your Endurance drops one rank until you cack it or someone helps you.
This sounds very similar to D&D. I'd argue that for a supers game, this type of mechanic works. For D&D in anything other than a superheroic mode of play, it doesn't.
2. Star Frontiers - when your current Stamina drops below 1/2 of the full amount, you can only move at half speed and carry only half, your attacks are at a -10% penalty and you can only fire one shot per turn. Any to-hit roll of 01 or 02 (%-tile system) causes unconsciousness, as does any blunt attack roll that ends with a zero (i.e. 10, 20, 30, etc.) Burn damage that is more than half your Stamina score completely incapacitates you. Not perfect, but certainly shows some intent to cause capability degradation as the character continues to take damage.
3. TORG - this system allows four types of damage when an attack causes injury - shock, knockout, wounds, or knockdown. Shock damage results in unconsciousness. knockouts are a tiered set of damage (representing getting your bell rung) that can lead to unconsciousness or add to your shock damage. Knockdown does just what it says. Wounds have four levels (wounded, heavily wounded, mortally wounded, and dead). Wounds are cumulative (have a heavy wound already and take a second - you are now mortally wounded). Each wound level provides penalties to actions. Mortal wounds also give you shock damage each round. The amount of damage you do results in a sliding scale that starts with KO damage and knockdowns at the lower end and ends up with wounds and shock damage at the higher end.
This seems a bit complicated (perhaps overly so), but it certainly tries to scale capability degradation based upon the wound severity. There is no binary "100% capable until I'm not."
4. Twilight:2013 (Twilight:2000 v3) - in this system, you have a "base hit points" that is determined by your Muscle and Fitness values (think Strength and Constitution in D&D terms). No additional hp gains at each level - you have what you have, whether you are a person, an elephant, or a lion. This system than takes that base value and sets multiples of it as "trip points"for wound levels (slight, moderate, serious, and critical) based upon hit location (so, for example, the torso area has wound trip points at 1 hp, base hp, 2x base hp, and 3x base hp while the head has trip points at 1 hp, base/2 hp, base hp, and base x1.5 hp). In this system, you compare damage from a hit to those thresholds. So - if your base hit points are 10, you have torso trip points of 1, 10, 20, 30 - an attack that hits your chest for 6 points of damage results in a slight wound (1<damage<10). A second wound of similar severity moves your wound level to the next level (so taking a 2nd hit resulting in a serious wound now moves that hit location to the critical level). Each level wound causes some type of capability degradation (from causing just a -1 penalty for a slight wound, up to -4 for a critical wound) as well as the possibility of going into shock or bleeding out and dying, with some wounds (such as a critical head wound) also causing unconsciousness.
I like this system best because it provides increasing levels of capability degradation based upon the level of wound severity along with the chance of being taken out of the fight because of the physiological effects resulting from, but not immediately directly caused by the wound. This is how most people imagine things could possibly happen in real life - when you read accounts of people who pass out from a flesh wound and other people continuing to fight after having taken a lethal wound. May not be a perfect simulation, but it provides the illusion of being a simulation - and that is better than the use of hit points, in my opinion.
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