Agreed.
Even with grit though, one has to be careful to allow the game to continue. As an example, say the unlucky PC has one resolve point left after the first encounter and a few wound points. The rest of the PCs have about eight resolve points left. Although it was a bit scary for that PC, that PC is more or less fine now. A little banged up, but easily able to fight.
But the rules still would incentivize the players to hole up for the night. Many if not most groups would do so. When the rules encourage holing up for the night after one somewhat unlucky encounter, that's not a good thing.
I like the rest of your system. But I think that bleeding should be something other than losing a resolve point every round that a save would stop.
In fact, I'm kind of cold to the entire 4E make a save to stop ongoing effects. A PC is on fire, but doesn't have to stop, drop, and roll to put it out. Ditto for your bleeding rules. A severe enough bleed in a gritty system should be wound points straight up and only a high DC Heal check or healing magic of some type should stop it.
I don't mind a saving throw for Daze, Stunned, or anything else that a PC should be able to "shake it off", etc. But I was kind of hoping that in order to stop ongoing damage in 5E, the PC or one of his allies actually has to do something. That would make ongoing damage nasty, but it should be. If you are on fire or have had acid thrown on you, it should be nasty. In 4E, it's mostly a minor inconvenience. Not even a flesh wound.
Me said:
Bleeding injuries might also occur, requiring a save each round; failure results in the loss of 1 point of resolve. No more saves are required once the bleeding is staunched, which may be accomplished by a successful Healing check, a wound healing spell, or rolling a natural 20 on the bleeding save.
Any type of wound penalty discourages an extended adventuring day. If my fighter is suffering a -1 to all rolls, that's a disincentive to keep going; if he's suffering a -4, that's a really strong disincentive. If you use gritty rules, it's simply part and parcel. Gritty is very different from high fantasy.
The saving throw is just there to introduce an element of unpredictability into the mix. That way, if you have 0 Resolve left, it isn't a certainty that you'll die on your next turn. You won't die until you actually fail a save. It's basically just asking whether you lost enough blood this round to qualify a wound, and assigning a roughly 50/50 chance to the answer.
I let a natural 20 stop the bleeding because I've heard of rare cases where an artery was severed yet the person managed to survive without first aid or immediate medical attention. I like it because, if the healers happen to be unconscious, a character still has a (small) chance to survive such an injury. That might just be my high fantasy tendencies shining through.
Weird stuff happens; people have walked away after falling out of flying airplanes. If you feel a 5% chance to stabilize each round is too common, you could always make it 2 or 3 consecutive 20s (or something like that). Personally, I feel that at that point you've made the occurrence too unlikely to justify the rule.
Realistically though, a person who's suffering from the bleeding injury (as written) will most likely die unless they receive first aid or magical healing, just like in real life. I admit that allowing first aid to help during combat is a bit of a gamist stretch, but making it so that only magical healing could save the character seemed like bad design to me. Again, my personal preferences are biased towards gamism.
IMO, it isn't unreasonable to expect an adventuring party to have some kind of access to healing, but requiring a specific kind of healing tends to make that type of healing too good. It creates groups that require a cleric but look askance at anyone even thinking of playing a non-magical healer. Marginalizing certain classes before they're even fully formed is very bad design in my book.
I like the saving throw mechanic. It's good for creating conditions with unpredictable durations. I felt that the predictable 1 round per level durations of earlier editions made spells feel unmagical; the duration was practically a battery monitor.
That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with a condition that lasts until the end of the encounter or until you can neutralize it (via the Heal skill, Staunch Bleeding spell, or whatever you like). Like Abdul said, you'd have to acknowledge the fact that it would make those conditions much more potent than save ends versions, but you can accomplish that simply by making encounter ends powers higher level powers.
Realistically, a character who's on fire should be hard pressed to do anything other than panic or try to extinguish themselves. Ongoing fire could daze/stun characters, but then it would need to be higher level. If we're willing to allow that a hero is tough enough to ignore the fact that he's on fire and just keep fighting with no penalties, I'm willing to believe that he's tough enough to wait for the fire to burn itself out. Human beings aren't really flammable after all.
A rule that allows players to spend a standard action to gain a bonus saving throw doesn't sound bad. Actively trying to extinguish a fire ought to increase your chances of being able to do so, after all. The Heal skill sort of does this already, but it doesn't cover stop, drop and roll.
I wouldn't get rid of save ends though. It's arguably overused in 4e, but I definitely think it has it's place in design.
