Wounds

What is your favorite wound system? How do you like your wounds? How severe should they be?

Do you prefer wounds that can be shrugged off after some time? Or ones that slowly stack up and debilitate characters?

Legends of the Wulin has a good system, conditions which characters gain in combat provide fictional triggers for bonuses/penalties to actions. It works well in that system as a way of keeping the combat interesting, they tend to go away out of combat fairly easily though.

Dogs in the Vineyard has something similar. A conflict can change your character's stats, traits or relationships. On a nonviolent conflict this will be very short term, but from a fight, this could be a long term change or possibly permanent.

GURPS does it well

Basic man has 10 hp.
Any hit that slaps you for 1/2 hp or more risks a major wound
You roll against your HT to resist
GM's discretion, but likely candidates are broken bones, extreme recurring pain, and the need for surgeries to remove the maladies.
Very self sufficient/internally consistent application of a rule. It applies to shooting people or blowing up buildings or starship collisions.

I've never seen a system that works well for wounds. IMO it's far better to leave it as a matter of narrative agency, inflicting wounds with blows that require a little extra gravitas, instead of codifying it in a rule system that your players will inevitably attempt to exploit.

Too complicated. if you have to roll more than once to see the extent of your injury its too much.

This is why only you like GURPS, GURPS-fag

did you just watch webdm

The answer is always Nechronica. In Nechronica, your HP is the same as your actions. You have Parts, which are spread between four hit locations, the Head, the Arms, the Torso, and the Legs. When an attack deals damage to you, you have to break that many parts in the affected hit location. So, taking two damage means breaking two parts. The vast majority of things you can do involve these parts, so as the fight goes on, you and enemies are losing your options. If you're out of Leg parts, you're probably slowed to a crawl, literally, with the inefficient Shoulder movement part, if you didn't break that to save far more important Arm parts. When your Arms are gone, often that means your attack options are going to be limited, though not every single weapon will always be on the arms.The Head is generally where you find your AP parts, and if it's getting wrecked, then when the round rolls over, you're going to find that a lot of people are acting and reacting much quicker than you are. The Torso probably has the least well defined role, though there are a fair number of defensive parts that go there, so that may be closest to its niche, meaning you'll be much more vulnerable to further damage when it's gone.

The end result is a very visceral system that emulates taking legitimate, heavy damage to your body, having large chunks of yourself pasted and carved off, and doing the same to enemies. It's perfect for the undead abominations the game is about.

Honestly user, that sounds dumb as hell.

Why does it? I'm curious, because this is legitimately the first time I've ever heard anyone say this. Generally, if anything catches flak regarding Nechronica, it's the whole zombie little girl thing, wishing that some actually cool mechanics weren't tied to it.

It just seems like a recipe for combat to be boring and prescriptive. You have your intrinsic priority list for the actions associated with each body part and sacrifice in exactly that order. It's a great set-up for combat to just turn into creatures running at one another and hacking away at priority body parts until one drops which somehow seems even more boring than 3.5's "set up shop and full attack until dead" combat system. Then again, maybe I'm way off base and I'm just not seeing it because I haven't looked at the system in depth.