Hit Points vs Wound levels, which is the best in what?

>implying 'blood' is of any importance in a normal fight (excepting massive hemorrage due to getting your carotid cut or some shit)

Depends on the level of realism and detail desu
But definitely, INCREASING hitpoints are shit. If they are mostly set with only minor enhancements during character progression HP can be totally ok, but as soon as you hit D&D tier of increasing them every level by significant ammount it gets shitty

Because it sucks. The moment you start using poison and similar things "not-meat-points" suddenly doesn't look so good. Not critical but sometimes unpleasant.

That actually sounds really cool. I might borrow that for a game that I'm homebrewing.

That's pretty neat, but how do you 'lose' a fight if HP and wounds don't measure that?

No one's ever said that they don't represent physical damage - the argument is that it's silly to treat them as *only* physical damage

A character can be cut up and bruised and poisoned - but they are also lucky, and tired and dozens of other things

If your Vitality hits zero, you're out of the fight. You can still suffer consequences from that loss, but your character isn't going to die. They're unconscious/captured/fall into a river and are washed away or whatever.

Hitpoints, with wound effects on hit thresholds like Anima.

IE: if you take over X% of your remaining HP, you (might) take an injury.

...

I like Warhammer FR 2 ed. A little bit of "plot hit points" like in D&D, and then wound after wound.

HP is best if you're looking to abstract in the name of speed or simplicity. Case in point 5e, where each weapon has a single value for how well you can hit, you have a single value for how well you can not get hit, and you have a single value for how much hitting you can take before you blackout and maybe die and none of them really mean anything in particular beyond that.

Wound levels are better for games where damage is intended to represent specific injuries that have specific consequences for how the character plays and are intended to be played out over time, especially if healing is rare, expensive, or time consuming.

Before you can decide which system is better, you have to decide what destination you want to go to. They're both great at what they do you just have to pick which one you want.

>Non-scaling small number of hit points
>Wound penalties accrue for every few lost
>Defense roll to represent evading attacks
>Armor and toughness rolled against incoming damage to reduce it
>Too much getting past the armor roll at once knocks you flat on your ass
>Damage and armor-piercing compared to armor to decide if it's lethal or nonlethal damage
>Roll for permanent injury whenever you run out of HP due to lethal damage
>Usually minor stuff like damaged knees, you have to fuck up the care really bad to lose a limb entirely

So, I guess shadowrun with a permanent injury table slapped onto physical damage overflow

>Hit points are certainly unrealistic, but they also simplify things and IMO allow for a more tactical way of playing, so it depends what you are aiming for really

Agreed. RPGs have a lot of rules that diverge from reality purely to make the game playable. Don't bother trying to come up an in-game justification for them. If a player can't handle the rule abstractions of HP, or whatever other rules exist instead of hit points, that player is going to run into a rule abstraction that you can't explain sooner or later. Best to get it out of the way now.

Which mechanics you use for tracking character health depends on the themes you want for your campaign. A low HP (compared to weapon damage) game with easy healing is going to feel very different to a high HP game with limited healing. The first has each battle dangerous, but you go into them fresh. The second has battles which aren't much risk, but they wear down PC resources so that the next battle is more difficult.

So what, if you're okay with having a bum leg you get to shoot things better while the fight lasts?

It's more a narrative thing than that. If you're willing to risk your wellbeing on the result of the fight, you get more narrative weight in swaying the outcome.

I don't know pal, but MAYBE, just MAYBE it is because you can write whatever you want about "what HP is meant to represent" but if you don't actually create fitting mechanics around it it is just void, unsupported statement.

Defenders of HP based systems like so much to brag about how their precious gamebook say that "those are not meatpoints those are (insert list of claims)"... but then, the game has nothing that would actually support that claim.
It may be easy to make believable if it is used in meele combat between armed opponents, but as soon as assymetrical combat, ranged combat, spells with explicit fluff-wise effects, healing, enviromental damage, criticals, assesing actual trauma, and much more are started to be taken into account it soon degenerates into terrible mess forcing everyone involved into heavy mental acrobatics to produce convincing explanations, and even with those acrobatics it often fails.
It is a cheap way of game designers to push the issue away, counting of players ability and will for self-deceit, either though turning blind eye on what happens in the game acutally or orwellian doublethinking. Or just have very high threshold of bullshit sensing. At best, for searching "creative explanations" but opinion if those are good can often differ even within a group, and secondly, if system is pushing additional, needless job of coping with it to do on DM and players, I can't say it is a good system.
"Meatpoints" is easier, more natural way of thinking about HP, that don't force you to think hard about explanation every tome someone loses it and still fail to convince half of the group when you finally come up with it. While it isn't producing much more issues than the other way, just different ones. If kept low, and not blobbing like in D&D, those issues mostly are eliminated.

Hey, hey nerd.

You're the ONLY one who "thinks hard" about it. Stop overthinking it, dipshit. I'll let you in on a secret. People who take the "HP are not meat points" stance don't OVERTHINK it. That's just you projecting. They don't think about it too hard. Are you familiar with the so-called MST3K Mantra?

...

Rune Quest uses both.

You have seven sectional HP totals for your limbs, upper and lower body and head; when one of these is reduced to zero you have an incapacitating flesh wound, under zero and it's a more serious wound that will require treatment lest you bleed out in (your con here) rounds, negative your total HP for that limb is a mortal wound, and you must save or die, then keep making resilience tests periodically to resist death (unless stabilized), whilst also counting down how fast you're bleeding out.

hit points = gamist
wound levels = simulationist (possibly narrativist too)

>Hit Points are more fun.
t. gamist

>Its not supposed to /just/ represent getting wounded.
that's what it says on the tin can. but once you look at the inner workings, you realize that it's a cheap rationale.

chainmail's and OD&D's hit points are a wargame mechanic, mainly derived from fletcher pratt's naval wargame. their whole purpose was to make characters/monsters be able to withstand more damage. the emphasis here is on DAMAGE. of course the designers of D&D realized that this mechanic isnt entirely realistic out-of-the-box, so they wrote on the tin can that HPs are more than just meatpoints. but it's just a cheap excuse to retain the simplistic (and now legacy) HP mechanic without having to admit to its shortcomings

Shortcomings that only existing in your bitching, rather than in any practical sense?

>I don't know pal, but MAYBE, just MAYBE it is because you can write whatever you want about "what HP is meant to represent" but if you don't actually create fitting mechanics around it it is just void, unsupported statement.
this. it's an excuse, a rational. HPs are the very first mechanic to model the endurance of a being. it was an improvement over having a (war)game in which no one could withstand more than one hit.

so it has to be deemed realistic FOR ITS TIME. it's not realistic in 2016 and hasn't been in a while. these days it's a pure gamist mechanic, papered over with "HPs are more than meatpoints" to make it more palatable to neckbertz.

>People who take the "HP are not meat points" stance don't OVERTHINK it.
you know this is fine. the difference to me and the user you're responding to is: we can't stomach it. we can't stomach an inaccurate mechanic like this forcing us as GMs to shoehorn in-game-world explanations of what's happening based on the dice. HPs can make things awkward. Like a barbarian being hit by 10 crossbow bolts point blank and still fighting on as if nothing happened. An extreme example but it serves to underline why it's an issue for more simulationistic like me and probably the other user.

soild counterargument, kudos!

i am explaining my problems quite frequently in these threads. pretty sure people can make up their minds without your claims trying to feed them that i don't have a valid point.

It doesn't force you to do anything, you're just getting twisted up in knots about it for no good reason and getting mad that other people don't have the same problem.

>we can't stomach it

Then don't PLAY in those games.

Ass.

Anything short of called shots in conjunction with wound tables and permanent injury/possibility of instant death is gamist bullshit and needs to be eliminated immediately.

And we've made up our minds to mock you.

Wound levels. I am currently building a combat system entirely based around it that is dorf fortress tier in terms of complexity. Its... well it makes sense after you learn it. Its very brutal and non increasing so its very... well life is short if you rush in to combat. Its play smart or die. Combined with how the body map is set up its actually pretty damn realistic and not all that hard to keep track of considering how much is actually there.

>dorf fortress tier in term of complexity

good luck running that without a computer doing the math dude

Meatpoints is even worse. How is it that people with essentially the same physique but more combat/adventuring experience can suddenly take potentially up to a hundred stabs to his body before dying?

Because it's a game dude lmao

I cut out a a shit ton of math by removing anything redundant, depressing numbers wherever i could, and making anything not immediately important to you being alive not tracked by the system unless someone aims for it and damages it. As well as turning most things into classes of things instead to further simplify shit. Basically i started with dwarf fortress and then just started tearing as much out as i could until the game fell below the line of deminishing returns. Ended better than expected actually. As long as I create templates for pcs to use for character creation everything should go pretty okay.

Alright you sold me on it. Good luck finishing it.

Thanks mate. I plan on showing it to Veeky Forums once i finish writing it all down and playtest the prototype. Still a few months out most likely.

tde
> hitpoints, upper bound about 40hp
> sword does 1d6+4 base damage
> active, defense, armour reduces damage
Now, you also have Endurance (slightly higher than hitpoints),

you will lose hitpoints, and if the loss of HP exceeds half your constitution, you gain a WOUND (or more than one),
you will also lose the same amount of endurance,
every action you take also makes you lose endurance,

Now, wounds give you mali depending on hitlocation,
also, everytime you gain a wound you need to make a check on... Selbstbeherrschung - Selfcontrol, progressively this check will get worse. If you fail it, you will become unable to fight.

If you have received 5 Wounds total, you will become unable to fight,
If your hitpoints drop to 5, you will become unable to fight,
If your hitpoints go below 50%, 30%, 25% you'll gain successively higher mali
If your endurance hits zero, you will become unable to fight,

you can regenerate endurance by spending 2 actions and gaining 1 point of exhaustion. Exhaustion will eventually accumulate ( via travel, sleepdeprivation and sprints or combat ), and eventually may exeed your constitution. then you gain Over-Exhaustion instead, which will severely hamper you.

.

All of this combined will make combat fast and dangerous:
> PC calls an attack +4, feigning for some points
> enemy won't be able to parry
> most human enemys with leather or wool will be slightly protected,
> so they'll get something like 12 points of damage on hit 1,
> HP of bandits and the like rarely reaches 30, usually around 24

So you can imagine, that a skilled adventurer will, on a random, average bandit,
with a single strike
> inflict ~ 50% of HP in damage
> cause 1 or 2 wounds
and the bandit will be going down, either from pain, or because his debuffs from low HP and Wounds fucks him.

But in that case hitpoints are better since it's a gamist mechanic.

Working on a little homebrew right now, what does Veeky Forums think?

Characters have a number of HP based on their level. All characters of the same level have the same amount of HP, and it doesn't increase much per level. It's about enough HP to survive two or three attacks from an appropriate enemy.

When your HP reaches 0, you're out of the scene - falling unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. After the scene is over, suffer a wound.

All character have the same number of wounds: 5. Each wound has an associated flaw based on how it was acquired, such as "fear of rats" if the character was incapacitated by rats or "broken leg" if the character fell from a great height. Roleplaying your flaws earns you extra XP, and you must pay XP to heal your wounds. The cost is based on how many you currently have - your first wound is 5 XP, your second is 10 XP, and so on.

When you suffer your fifth wound, you die.

This makes death unlikely but still a possibility (if you are placed at the enemy's mercy), gives weight to actually being wounded and makes wounds an avenue for XP - it may not be ideal to heal all of your wounds, depending on how severe and exploitable they are.

ok, so both are bad.
that's why blobbing HP are shit. No matter which interpretation will you choose, one thing or the other will suck
Having enough consciousness to spot that there are terrible logical holes in how the mechanics translate to the story told is "being twisted up in knots" and "problem". Yeah, whatever, mate.
I don't. There aren't even that many games that do it. Most games tend to keep HP low and relatively constant. Only D&D has this blob, because le holy cows, and I don't play D&D. I know many other systems, but can't name single one that does the same.
Still, it's a shit mechanic and I have full right to criticize it because... that's the fucking purpose of this thread.

>Still, it's a shit mechanic
Not really. So far you've failed to mention a single actual mechanic reason as to why they suck. All you've said is "they don't make sense"
A mechanic doesn't have to make in-game sense, the rules of the game aren't the rules of the physics in game.

> "being twisted up in knots" and "problem".
considering you bitch about this in every thread possible, yeah. You're getting real worked up about a simple abstract mechanic that works just fine.

I dunno mate, I think old-school hitpoints work pretty well. The only problem is that it's gotten continuously mutated since D&D and everything is based on decided to be about more than dungeon crawling but couldn't manage to create a wholly new system. Hitpoints are probably mostly used nowadays because 1. wounds/meatpoints are even worse in most cases and 2. it's stuck in the public consciousness so people grok it faster.

>Like a barbarian being hit by 10 crossbow bolts point blank and still fighting on as if nothing happened.
He's a barbarian, of course he can fight with 10 crossbow bolts in his chest.

Your issue seems more like you want fantasy games to be low power level and can't accept when those games are more like medieval superhero games.

What about a magic user with 10 bolts in him?

he's a magic user, literally anything that happened to a him can be justified by saying magic lol
you should have used a thief as an example m8 see now that one is hard to justify

>single actual mechanic reason as to why they suck
>mechanic
OK, there isn't a purely mechanical reason why they suck, but if only mechanics bother you, you perhaps should stick to boardgames and wargames and not RPGs
How mechanics translate to what's happening IS important. And blobbing HPs require either mental acrobatics to justify, or turning blind eye to obvious holes in how what's happening according to mechanics translates to what's happening. Or just being blind. Like they say, ignorance is bliss. You may be OK with being blind yourself, thing is not everyone is.
In short - it creates problems. While not offering any serious benefits other than "it was invented first and got stuck as a holy cow in the system that was also invented first and thus is still most popular one"

>considering you bitch about this in every thread possible, yeah
>standard "all people who disagree with me are actually just one mad guy" projection

>simple abstract mechanic that works just fine
"simple and abstract mechanic" works perfectly fine in simple and abstract environment. If you put simple and abstract mechanic in crunchy mechanic that is often getting super-specific... it can't work well.

Hybrid. Track Stun/Fatigue/Wound/Mortal points with differing penalty rates, as per pic related.

Or do as per Dark Heresy and make Hit Points explicitly your 'take minor hits' points and wounds come after you use them up.

>he's a magic user, literally anything that happened to a him can be justified by saying magic lol
But then it's not meat points anymore. You just abstracted the points to make sense of the fact that he isn't dead.

>you should have used a thief as an example m8 see now that one is hard to justify
Alright then, so what about a thief with 10 bolts in him?

>OK, there isn't a purely mechanical reason why they suck
Then they're fine. Everything outside of actual mechanics is up to personal taste. Some people like completely abstract mechanics, some people want the mechanics to work like the actual in-game physics. Either way is fine. Your way of thinking is too biased.

>"simple and abstract mechanic" works perfectly fine in simple and abstract environment.
Except that HP works in the vast majority of situations where its relevant.

>But then it's not meat points anymore.
Not really. Magic gave him more meat to survive.

>Alright then, so what about a thief with 10 bolts in him?
Dunno lol

>Not really. Magic gave him more meat to survive.
So a magic user with more hit points automatically becomes fatter?

>Dunno lol
In that case my conclusion from this discussion is that meat points is not as good of an idea as hit points.

>So a magic user with more hit points automatically becomes fatter?
he keeps the extra meat points in his beard

>Everything outside of actual mechanics is up to personal taste
Quite contrary. It is "pure mechanics" that are up to personal taste.
Complicity between mechanics and story, or rather ease in which such complicity can be achieved using revelant ruleset is something that can be assesed - of course, it is limited by personal continuity consciousness but continuity cosciousness =/= taste.
Level of abstraction has nothing to do with that. I actually like abstract, narrative mechanics. But this level of abstraction needs to be constant, so more abstract parts don't grind against less abstract ones.

>Except that HP works in the vast majority of situations where its relevant.
Yeah, D&D combat, with grid needed to track movements, resolutions on the level of single attacks and rigidly described spells and abilities is totally "simple and abstract" environment. kek. And as mentioned before, there aren't many systems with HP blob other than D&D.

>of course, it is limited by personal continuity consciousness but continuity cosciousness =/= taste
>continuity cosciousness
I can taste your English Major from here.

This is international imageboard, u know?
It's not like only anglos are allowed here.

>Quite contrary. It is "pure mechanics" that are up to personal taste.
What? That's ridiculous. A mechanic either works or not. Everything else is up to the players and GM.

>Yeah, D&D combat, with grid needed to track movements, resolutions on the level of single attacks and rigidly described spells and abilities is totally "simple and abstract" environment.
and yet HP works perfectly for it. So my point stands that HP works for the vast majority of cases, even in complicated and enviroments.
Also, do you even realize what abstract means?
D&D combat is abstract as fuck.

Just a suggestion: next time you try to use technical terms to make yourself sound smarter, run it through Google to make sure you're getting it right. Otherwise, you look even dumber than if you just stuck to something more simple.

Hit Points are just an abstraction that encompasses a lot of factors like meat, skill, luck, armor, divine favor, or simple plot armor. You can think of it like meta-currency if you want.

A thief may have been "hit" mechanically, but in a narrative sense he could have actually dodged enough to make it a grazing wound. In effect, his AC or dodge mechanic failed so he spent some of his (hit) points to convert the hit into a close miss or grazing shot. He was okay this time, but can't do it forever.

Or maybe he fell down the stairs or from a great height, and spent some hit points to declare that he was lucky or skilled enough to have landed "right." Perhaps the DM decides there was something there to cushion his fall so it wasn't as bad as it looked.

Then comes the question of healing. That's primarily a meat points thing, but it's easy enough to justify even with the luck or skill explanation. In the former examples, the thief lost hit points saying his injuries weren't severe, but he was still roughed up. So he can be healed just fine.

>yet HP works perfectly for it. So my point stands that HP works for the vast majority of cases, even in complicated and enviroments
It isn't unless you are either blind, purposefully act like you were blind, not paying attention to what is happening, or very good with coming up with "creative explanations". But fact of possesing ability to do any of those doesn't negate the general problem.

>D&D combat is abstract as fuck.
Compared to GURPS and the like, maybe.
Then compare it to FATE, HQ, Dogs in the Vineyard, or even some bit crunchier (than former, not than D&D) and more conventional games like The One Ring, Savage Worlds or Barbarians of Lemuria. Suddenly, not so much.

So many people tend to ignore the most common part of the HP system when it comes to figuring out wounds and damage: Constitution scores.

Constitution is quite literally your meat points. It's the state of your body and its health. A vampire's attack that drains your blood, dealing 1d4 con damage per turn, is literally an attack upon your meat points and the wounds that result. HP is then your training and skill at absorbing blows and turning them into lesser "wounds" (as your HP increases with each level with fighting men and barbarians getting the most with casters getting the least according to martial skill), along with the increasing stamina of your body due to exercise and such (as your Con modifier adds a small bonus per every level).

When your body takes too much punishment for it to remain conscious, due to being covered in minor gashes and bruises, it collapses. Here is where the D&D system shows a bit of brilliance with its simple system. The negative numbers are your con score. When an attack sends you into the negatives, you begin dying. Why? Because your health has been directly attacked. Each round you must try and pass a Con check to stabilize, or take a point of damage until you've gotten to your total con score at which point you die.

Of course your actual Con score does not suffer from this unless it's a major and possibly permanent wound. Con damage also removes HP, taking away the stamina and ability to absorb blows that the HP system affords. To regain your Con score quickly takes powerful magic, to heal actual literal wounds is a big undertaking.

Wounds turns combat into rocket tag where the first person hit more often than not loses the fight.
>P1 vs P2
>P1 gets initiative, hits P2 for 1 moderate wounds
>P2 rolls moderately but barely misses.
>P1 hits P2 for 1 moderate wound due to P2 having defensive penalties
>P2 Fails a maneuver to get out of melee range due to penalties from wounds
>P1 attacks, rolls low but P2's penalties fuck him over. P2 now has a major and two moderate wounds.
>P2 tries to flee, fails due to the 40% penalty he gets to all rolls from his wounds.
>P1 executes P2.

I am of this opinion also, and my post was contesting the concept of meat points. We have no beef.

A lot like a real fight.

It's a game.

It doesn't have to reflect reality.

Dick.

Which is BORING.

HP at least lets the fight keep going instead of the first one getting hit with a stick to suddenly keel over and die.

It's a roleplaying game. A game that is also a story.
And while story doesn't have to reflect absolute reality, it has to emulate some form of fiction. Which means it needs to reflect reality at least to degree determinated by genre and theme expectations.

I really like how Eclipse Phase does it. As you take damage, you don't necessarily get less effective, but you take too much at once, you get wounds which do make you less effective and can have other effects, like knocking you out or causing you to bleed.

This is why the wound system I prefer is the one from Reign.

Most attacks won't do that much damage, unless he's got a sword and you're unarmored, which is expected. Attacks deal 2 types of damage, shock or killing.

A limb fills with shock, it's unusable.
A limb fills with killing, it's crippled.
Torso or head fills with shock, you're incapacitated.
Torso or head fills with killing, you're dead.

Add in that attacks usually go to a random hit location, and it's surprisingly forgiving for a system where a good hit can instagib you or cripple you indefinitely.

Awesome, couldn't have said it better myself.

Glad we agree.

And in most fights where people aren't wearing padded gloves, user, one hit usually decides the entire thing.
What you are ignoring is the mechanics to the game and how the player is usually given some weight towards survival.

You're right, and the HP method is far superior for a story than there being no real comebacks possible.

Whoever starts hitting first is already at a huge advantage anyway.

>Hit points
Any more than one and you're ready for action
>Wounds
Any more than one and you're gonna fuckin die

Again it doesn't need to look like a 100% REAL fight.
Watch some movies in the appropiate genre. Observe how the fights look.
This is how you want fights in the game to look.
Not neccesary like a real fight, but certainly not like completely artificial set of "turns", "moves" or "actions" that offer no real translation into the story.

And inb4, it also not that those "turns", "moves" or "actions" are bad, it's just that they have to blend together into something that resembles the desired effect.

Sorry, my post was more addressed to the thread in general to give examples of how non meat points could work. I replied to you specifically because the thief getting hit with crossbow bolts was a good starting point.

Explanations don't need to be "creative" to serve its purpose. A simple "turns out it wasn't as bad as it looked" is incredibly easy and works in the majority of cases.

This why grittier or more simulationist systems tend to use them. It's pretty similar to how a real fight goes. Of course there are also systems where you don't take defensive penalties for injuries. This encourages you to get the fuck out of the fight while you're still standing since you aren't hitting as often as you would.

And then we end up with things like these:
diceandlives.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/fight-analysis-fellowship-of-the-ring/
mailanka.blog[h]spot.com/2016/08/martial-arts-breakdown-darth-maul-vs.html
gamingballistic.com/2013/10/06/technical-natasha-black-widow-in-iron/

Is Reign a ORE game? This sounds incredibly similar to Godlike.

Yes it is.

Hit points work by delaying the lethal hit that ends the fight. In a lot of fiction you'll see characters fight for a while before any decisive blow is made. Hit points partially represent that part where they're dodging or blocking while trading grazing hits. You aren't really "hit" until the points run out, at which point the fight ends.

I like to use Vigor and Wounds instead of HP; the character's physical capacity coupled with mental.

I like abstracting a fair bit, and I always jump at the chance to get systems where the pen can be just as mighty as the sword, even in combat.

Wounds are a different thing entirely, where they are amassed when you are hit with a debilitating blow, be it a gash or a burn.

I might dabble into TBZ:s system at some point, because my current one is a mess.

It has cyclical health bars, where every time you take 3 damage you can either get a wound or a status, such as falling on your ass, get grappled etc. It might sound neat, and it kind of works, but it lacks elegance.

Which is why HPs aren't bad in itself.
But the entire system has to work in synergy with them and that assumption about what tey represent. And that's rarely the case.

I'm thinking about trying out a 3e campaign with Vitality, Wound, and Spell Points. It has some synergies I find nifty.

If you use 1/3rd of your SP, you are fatigued.
If you use 2/3rds of your SP, you are exhausted.
OR if you are fatigued, you lose 1/3rd of your SP, and if exhausted, you lose 2/rd of your SP.
If you take any wounds, you are also fatigued, or if already fatigued you are exhausted.

So any hit past vitality on a caster depletes a large chunk of spells.

>Roleplaying your flaws earns you extra XP, and you must pay XP to heal your wounds. The cost is based on how many you currently have - your first wound is 5 XP, your second is 10 XP, and so on.

That's pretty cool.

this whole thread

>but it's just a cheap excuse to retain the simplistic (and now legacy) HP mechanic without having to admit to its shortcomings
Did you want them to write in a professional publication that someone will buy "Hit points are really just meat points that have no good explanation, so try to not think about it"?

Personally, my favorite HP system is anti-"death spiral" or as I call it, "berserking".
Basically, the less HP you have, the more bonuses you get to your attacks.

This allows to use HP strategically as a resource.

Wounds work the same. You can fight on as long as you get only light wounds. Serious wounds will bring you down, but still allow you to go on fighting for a while. Mortal wounds will outright kill you.

That said, I like the combination of wound level and HP. Wound level indicate how badly you're injured, dictate penalty to skill checks, and give an indication on how long healing takes. HP is an indication about how fast you're going to die if you're badly injured (HP loss per turn until character gets stabilized by medic or healer).

>XP as a resource to spend

please go and stay go

>no innovation or experimentation of any kind allowed

The idea sounds legit, to be honest. Not all games have to have exp work with the two predetermined ways that have existed since time immemorial.