Once you have the realization that HP is your margin of error, you might ask yourself how much HP is too little, too much, or just right? One odd question you might ask yourself is what else can be treated as a margin of error? This is where game mechanics get creative. A game called Crown and Skull doesn't have HP. Instead, your skills temporarily go down from hits. This represents how your characters wounds and injuries affect them. When players take a hit, players get to decide which skill gets diminished, and so players have some say in the narrative, and the game doesn't have to burden the GM with everything.
So, for instance, let's say sword is a skill and your sword skill is 5. You get hit, you lower it to 4. When all your skills are 0, this represents an accumulation of wounds that finally end you. When you get an opportunity to improve a skill, you're also improving your toughness in a manner like HP. Sounds logical, right?
With game mechanics and systems, what I'm concerned with is not how they work, but how they feel. Does the game feel fun, does the game feels tense, or does it feel like too much bookkeeping. Does the mechanic make me overthink the concept to the extent that its distracting?
Importantly, would I rather be using another or a simpler mechanic?
So, let's say I had a game where gold replaces HP. The first thing I ask is what sense does that make? What if characters had magic hour glasses. The hour glasses turn gold and golden treasure into gold dust. The gold dust drains away at a rate of one gold piece per day. If you run out of gold dust, you die. The magic of the hourglass makes you indestructible, but in exchange it takes gold away when you should be hurt. In effect, your life is dependent on gold. The scarcity of gold is what makes the game tense. Too much gold, no tension. No tension means you have a boring game. Too little gold, players become too risk averse, and the game is too stressful.
From the GM side, the tracking and allocating of gold becomes a major function. It sounds like finding the goldilocks zone is really, really challenging and once players discover the formula, does that spoil the illusion of the game? How do you feel like you improve? By being able to carry more gold than before?
I think the reason why HP or health is so ubiquitous is it’s ease of use which comes from its intuitiveness, in spite of its other problems like being an over-abstraction of damage and healing. And also, taking a hit and subtracting HP feels better than taking a hit and subtracting skills or items or money or armor. Even though gold as HP basically eliminates the need to spend gold on healing items and other supplies, and skills as HP eliminates a need for a wounds and injuries system, at the end of the day, HP feels better than other mechanics, probably because it's familiar, simple, and easy to visualize.
There are different ways to do HP. In D&D for instance, HP models luck, skill, and fatigue as a buffer until 0 HP which implies a single, serious wound has KO'ed you and threatens your life. You can sleep off a major fall or massive beating. Because it's an easily relishable resource, it has less value. Because you can have 10 HP at level 1 and 100 HP at level 10, it doesn't objectively describe or model actual harm in the world. D&D 5e makes HP feel like a cartoon character or cinematic action hero getting beat up. It makes combat feel like a sport or a game to live out a power fantasy. It's intended to be fun. The opposite is GURPS which explicitly describes HP as a measure of your body's capacity for injury. There is a low HP cap. If you take a massive hit, you roll for shock and knock down. If your HP drops to 0, you roll against incapacitation and death. GURPS makes HP loss feel like sustaining actual harm, and it makes combat feel deadly and frightening, and consequences can last.
GURPS HP inspired Bright-Dark 3d6 HP, not D&D HP. Bright-Dark 3d6 uses low HP to keep tension high and consequences meaningful.
If you're going to create or critique a game, I want you to think in terms of what do the mechanics model, how do game mechanics feel, and how do all the mechanics feel when used together. That's important because the way a game feels is ultimately why people play it. If it feels good, they play it and they enjoy playing it. If it feels bad and they're still playing it, are they enjoying it? What do they enjoy about it? How much enjoyment are they getting, and is it worth the parts they don't enjoy? The way a game feels is part of the value of the game to the participants.
But also remember that everyone has their own kind of fun; see also: Types of Fun (MDA Framework)
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