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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Grim Portent]

No love for Dark Heresy/WFRP's wounds and armor system?

The critical hit system does stand out in my mind, but how did the normal damage and armor work?  If I remember, it had a damage threshold based on your toughness, right?

I don't remember how it scaled in those games explicitly, but I do know a few systems where that tends to end up making your body count for as much or more for damage reduction than armor.

You have toughness bonus and armour. Any damage you take is reduced by both, but weapons with the right stats reduce armour value, but almost nothing gets to ignore toughness bonus. Armour is easier to boost though.

With enough reduction you just ignore damage that can't get over it, so a tanky character can be literally immune to basic mook attacks. Goblins with knives bounce off a knight in plate armour and a space marine can walk through endless hails of basic civilian grade weapons fire.

[Trekkin]

I just went through the critical damage tables for Dark Heresy, and it looks like it takes between 7 and 8 points of Critical Damage, depending on type, to actually kill a character. With the notable exception of explosion damage, almost nothing even has a permanent effect below 5 points. So there's also innate HP in the form of temporary crit results.

[Grim Portent]

The damage rules include a line about most things dying at 0 wounds rather than needing a crit to kill them. Similarly they take 5 corruption to die from rampant mutations and 5 insanity to become helplessly catatonic rather than 100 the way an important NPC or a Player Character does.

Basically critical damage is for bosses, major NPC allies, very high end minions and PCs. A basic soldier just drops at 0 wounds with no flashy stuff like their head melting.

[Sirus]

Not that you can't melt their heads or whatever. It's just unnecessary.

[Hanslanda]

Not that you can't melt their heads or whatever. It's just unnecessary.

It's Warhammer so you absolutely should melt heads whenever possible. Preferably not your own.

[scriver]

I think it helps if you don't consider HP to be a measurement of directly how healthy a person is but how much they're still able to fight. HP systems would benefit a lot if it wasn't taken so for granted that 0 HP automatically means death or unconciousness. For example, if you remember the scene where Ned Stark fights Jaime Lannister in GoT, you could say that both Stark and Jory Cassel are equally at 0 HP at the end of it. But one of them is decidedly more dead that the other.

[Egan_BW]

Though if combat is the focus of the system, you could afford to make damage a more complex system than a single number that goes down.

Like, you could have separate numbers for "able to fight-ness" and "not being dead-ness". If you lose all of the former without losing any of the latter, you're beaten down and unwilling to keep fighting, but not hurt. If you lose all the latter without losing any of the former, someone probably just begun the encounter by blowing your head off~

[scriver]

That's the two Stark guards getting javelined immediately at the start of the fight I guess

[Criptfeind]

Plenty of systems do that, D&D even does it to an extent with nonlethal damage. Tbh in most cases I think it ends up being just more book keeping without making combat more satisfying.

[Trekkin]

Exalted 3e works like that. Initiative is your ability to control the fight and is gained and lost through attacks, while damage levels are a separate thing, and the attacks that actually do health damage reset initiative.

[SOLDIER First]

Nonlethal damage in Pathfinder and I think DnD works like "able to fight-ness", on top of HP already being an amalgamate of how injured you are and how much morale you have and etc.

Nonlethal damage is basically extra exhaustion slapped on top, but it doesn't do anything until you have equal amounts of nonlethal damage and HP, or when the former exceeds the latter, at which point you fall unconscious (but aren't making stabilization rolls and all that junk). I think it's pretty cool but a tad cumbersome when you have to track it alongside regular damage in a fight.

[Jimmy]

It's a great way of letting a player decide not to kill enemies, be it for morality reasons or less savory intentions. It allows options such as 'capture this target alive' without getting into grappling rules, which were written by sadistic authors intent on punishing anyone who tries to do something other than hit point damage in combat.

[Rolan7]

They simplified it rather dramatically in 5e.  Instead of a separate counter for nonlethal damage, and usually a -4 attack modifier when striking nonlethally, the player performing the final blow simply decides whether the target dies or falls unconscious.  It's another case where I liked the detail of 3.5e, but the 5e system works almost identically in practice and is easier for new players.  It'd also be trivial to houserule temporary hitpoints back in.

[delphonso]

I've only liked Shadowrun's way of handling this - although it's as cumbersome as the rest of the game.

Players have two health tracks - stun and physical. If either drops to 0, you're down. Stunned means you're unconscious, and fine until someone walks up and blows your brains out. Physical to zero means you're down and are rolling to stay alive. But every time you lose 3 in either track you take a -1 modifier to all skills. (there's an average of 10 in each of these tracks for most players) This gives some benefit to hitting both tracks - in 3.5 DnD, it felt pointless to do anything but focus on either track.

[Criptfeind]

This gives some benefit to hitting both tracks - in 3.5 DnD, it felt pointless to do anything but focus on either track.

Uh. That's sorta the opposite of true. In 3.5 D&D nonlethal damage knocks you out when it goes above your current hp, so nonlethal and lethal damage stack perfectly, if someone has 60 max hp any combination of lethal and non lethal that reaches 60 knocks them out. There's no issue with mixing it, unlike in shadowrun where it really sucks when players have different types of damage output.

Like they aren't even really separate tracks, I'm a bit surprised that people here are talking about them as if they are.