Bump in the Dark breaks from the tradition FitD harm system and has conditions in the vein of Masks or Thirsty Sword Lesbians. These conditions are afraid, angry, exhausted, void-touched, and wounded. The first four all have narrative triggers to clear; I really like this because it pushes play toward certain kinds of scenes that might reinforce some of the themes of the game or just be especially fun. Wounded, on the other hand, can only be cleared in downtime through acquiring assets or a long-term project. I think this makes wounds feel a bit more serious in a way than the other conditions. Additionally, you can mark wounded up to three times; when you mark it the third time, you are incapacitated and cannot act without assistance.

So most of my existing ones have HP in that D&D kind of way where it's not a big deal but there's some kind of tracking over time and resource drain to go along with it. I'm sketching out 3 new games for a new engine and taking the opportunity to mess with that idea for each of them:

• Valiant Horizon is intended to be JRPGish and treat combat as No Big Deal. Vigor (HP) isn't tracked between encounters, much less long term, healing is extremely easy, PCs can be revived in-combat easily if they drop, etc. It's very LUMEN in high level concept.
• Liminal Void is a "shit going bad for normal people in space" style of game so I wanted HP to mean something. So instead of one HP you have Health and Endurance, where Endurance is non-lasting Harm that can be recovered easily with resource expenditure, and Health is your physical health and can be recovered at a much worse ratio with that same resource expenditure. Hitting Health has a chance to be qualitatively meaningful (you roll against it whenever it's decreased, if your roll is higher you gain some kind of condition or injury which lasts until physically healed). Also one type of Harm (Hazard, which is like extreme heat/cold/vacuum/etc) hits Health directly, necessitating more caution near that kind of thing. This all totals up to a setting where you really, really want to avoid or mitigate danger, choose fights, think hard about taking risks, etc.
• Machinations of Court and Frame is a game about one-on-one mecha duels and politics, and HP only matters numerically in the former (but losing all of it matters for the latter). Integrity (HP) can't be healed during a duel because it's bits getting knocked off of your mech (and you can use less of its weapons/etc as it gets decreased) but it can be repaired once you return to your home hangar. Once it hits 0 some more lasting consequence happens: the pilot gets injured, the mecha is damaged in a more lasting way, someone else takes the fall for you, etc. The tension here is whether the pilot risks that outcome for potential victory or ejects before that happens and faces potentially being called a coward.

None of these are like groundbreaking (or entirely nailed down lmao) but I think it's a good mix of uses for texture, world-building, and vibe-setting.

The main game I'm working on, Downforce, has a somewhat usual focus - car racing! - so this might be a little less relevant. Or maybe more interesting, who knows?

When it comes to player characters, it aggressively rejects tracking physical damage to player characters. To quote myself:

Damage to cars - sure, but when it comes to their drivers it’s just not really the focus of the kind of stories this game is telling. Putting a character in hospital stay after a crash should be a major plot development and driving fast enough to make eyes bleed definitely shouldn’t be something to penalize.

Even if a driver does get hurt, hell, take a look at Niki Lauda. The injuries from his near-fatal 1976 crash at Nürburgring had been severe enough he was given last rites at the hospital. Yet in the end, he only missed two races and competed again mere six weeks later at the Italian Grand Prix where he took fourth place, despite the burns on his head still being fresh enough to bleed.

The closest HP equivalent Drivers have is Stress - a sort of temporary stacking debuff, indicating the mental pressure they're under. It's mostly about what it says on the tin and all physical injuries are just subsumed into it - treated just as something to persevere. It doesn't matter where Max Payne got shot, it only matters that he's popping pills, you know? Stress mechanics follow this mental state logic - you can just try riding it out or cross out one of your personality-based stats (such as Boldness or Teamwork) to ditch Stress quickly. The recovery of stats erased this way is dependent on achieving personal goals. In a (hopefully) cute touch, the stats are organized in opposed pairs and you don't necessarily have to recover the exact one you erased earlier own - maybe you regained your confidence to get that Boldness back, or learned your lesson and started approaching the track with more Composure?

Knowing that the above will be insufficient for some games (looking at you, inevitable post-apo death rallies), an optional Wound mechanic has been provided - but it's basically just a way to repurpose another mechanic from the system to put a number on the physical harm, to tell you when's a good time for some badness to happen or the player to finally get knocked out.

As for the cars (which essentially comprise half of one's character sheet), they suffer Strain. This term had been chosen to encompass actual-getting-tailboned-damage and the general wear and tear of high performance competition, such as burning rubber or choking the engine past its limits. It's essentially attribute damage suffered by car and is intentionally open to some interpretation - is a worn tire impairing one's acceleration, speed or grip? It's meant to go for the end result of damage and let everyone be a little loose with the exact justification.

This ease of interpreting fiction is something I believe to be quite important for the subject matter. With car action being the game's legitimate focus (and not just a throwaway coat of paint over some mushy storygame), I believe a race has a lot of rote maneuvering (in the sense where ttrpg combat is generally rote), but once it goes off the rails, it goes there hard - y'all aware what Ross Chastain pulled off in NASCAR earlier this month? So it was important to me to build a framework ensuring the right inputs and outputs and thus allowing you to easily bullshit a little about the exact throughputs.