I'm a big fan of Yochai Gal's Cairn. In particular, the inventory mechanic. Everyone gets X slots; fill them up with items. Some take more than 1 slot, and exhaustion takes a slot. Especially that last part, having what is essentially a status effect take up a slot, reducing what you can carry and, by extension, what you can do.

The longer campaigns that I am a part of (mostly as a player; I swear this isn't a weird tangent, it'll make sense in a second) is The Dark Eye 5th Edition. In that system there is a whole list of status effects, and to some extent they all do the same thing: increase the difficulty of any roll by 1 (this stacks), and if any one status reaches 4 stacks, the character gets incapacitated.

Now, I could just combine both of those ideas and just have all kinds of statuses take up 1 slot. But you see, getting hit in the Dark Eye reduces your HP like any other game, but at certain intervals it also gives you one stack of the pain status. So in a way you can track your pain instead of your HP. (Side note: you can't; there are multiple ways of receiving pain, and HP tells you if you are unconscious or dead, etc., etc., etc.)

But since I'm usually writing my own stuff, I don't need to be bound by maybes and coulds. I could just replace the entire HP pool with statuses filling up an inventory. If you are getting out of a fight by the skin of your teeth, then you are leaving behind EVERYTHING, except possibly the sword in your hands and the glimmer in your eyes. But I do like damage. Players rolling damage and feeling joy; me rolling damage and them feeling dread. Along comes Savage Worlds.

Instead of an HP pool, characters simply have a damage threshold. Beat the threshold, and they receive a status. Beat it by multiples, and they receive those multiples as statuses. Now I'm not sure what I want the consequence to be for not hitting it, certainly don't want nothing to happen. Maybe by the end of this article I'll have had some better thoughts. Maybe just a non-stacking increase in difficulty to their next roll.

If I want to add a little death spiral, I might just say increased difficulty if you only have 5 slots remaining and another increase at 2. Fill up all slots, and you're out cold. The only real difference between being unconscious and being dead is whether the rest of the party has fled. Also allows me to smoothly pull out ye old thou-art-captured scene.

Enemies could work the same way. Let's say they all have a wound threshold of 5; don't wanna bog the game master down with differing numbers. And they can take a certain number of statuses (they don't really need inventory slots since I don't intend to have the game master create inventories for everyone). Now any combination of statuses can incapacitate an enemy or kill them if I decide that the method of application was sufficiently brutal. Give goblins 3, give orcs 6, and booyahg we got a health system.

Now I'm still just tracking damage; sure, I first divide it (can't see how that makes it any more complicated /s), but at its core the status/inventory slots have just replaced HP as the thing being reduced. And maybe I'm fine with that. I've increased the complexity of damage and health and have added it to a unified inventory system. Any design is a trade-off, really. And maybe wanting damage to remain means that I am forced to drag its dead cousin HP around as well. No shots at anyone liking HP; I get the appeal, the simplicity, the common ground that it is between systems, and the ease of use, but sometimes I just… idk, I crave something more.

I'll leave it at that. I'm tired. And I gotta do some major cleaning. Chores away.