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Originally Posted by Varyon
Or maybe it's just something that arose organically during play.
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Yeah that's the idea but there is a problem: many combat oriented systems have really poor mechanics to simulate anything that's not a way to kill your enemy. In D&D/Pathfinder the options to knockout or applying non-lethal damage are almost always class restricted and ALWAYS less efficient that going for the kill: in those Worlds choosing anything that's not reducing your opponent to 0 HP is a tactical failure.
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Originally Posted by whswhs
The willingness to take a chance of these things happening is, among other things, a source of drama; it asks the players, "Does your character care enough about X to risk permanent impairment?" It's the "skin in the game" that puts tension in an RPG.
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Exactly! A Fight is a source for drama! Tension, Risk, Danger, Choices and Consequences.
In many D&D (and many Videogames) instead "fight" is the only possible activity and murder = XP. It's unnerving (and quite troubling) how one of the most heinous act possible is converted in just a token for power grow. I personally find this not only plain WRONG but also extremely boring.
And Hit Points are just the embodiment of this process, in some Pathfinder games I joined they were, at best, a time optimization resource: "we cannot withstand another round so we need to thin the baddies ranks" more often than that they were just a way to sort the marching order and/or the engagement distance.
I understand who wants to play a tactical skirmish game but, frankly, it's not my cup of tea: I prefer to play a game where every choice (even combat ones) have interesting effects more than a random "roll dices and subtract numbers until you run out" game.