Editing Hit Effect Vs Hit Damage (section)

==The Hit Accumulation Paradigm==

The real objetive of a damage system is to determine how long can characters keep fighting and when the fight is over. As ending a fight at the first blow landed would be too drastic, games need a way to calculate how many hits (and how strong) can a character take before falling unconscious or killed.

In many popular RPGs you note down the hits each character keeps taking, for example substracting hit points from a predetermined pool, or ticking off damage levels, or whatever. This follows the logic that a strong character might take a single hit and keep fighting, but taking several of them can bring him down. We can call that idea "Hit accumulation paradigm".

Here I will propose an alternative to the "Hit accumulation paradigm", as there are three things of it I dislike:

*First-Hit Invulnerability: You have many hit points. You are hit by a sword and take a few of them. You should not be afraid of the sword because you know for sure that you are going to keep fighting afterwards, impervious to the damage.
*Last-Hit Vulnerability: You have fought a big red dragon, surviving its powerful fire-breath, its column-shattering tail attacks and its sharpened claws and teeth. You only have 1 HP left. But you made it, the dragon is dead, the treasure is all yours... until a kobold comes, throws a rock at you and does what the dragon could not, vanquish the proud hero.
*Book-keeping: This is the worst thing. The "hit accumulation paradigm" needs that you note down every hit you sustain, and watch continously if you have HPs left or not, in the middle of the battle. This bogs the gameplay down, in my opinion, specially when you have to manage 100+ HPs pools and dozens of unique hits per battle round.