How do you folks feel about health levels?

[NichG]

I'll have to take a look at those, as part of my unending quest to find a system that doesn't make me want to pull out my hair in frustration.

If I end up inspired by the ideas, would it offend you to see the basic concepts reused?

Not a problem, go right ahead!

[geppetto]

I like health levels a lot and houseruled in a system for them for pathfinder a few years ago as part of my E10 campaign. Personally I consider the doom spiral a feature rather then a bug.

Part of the point of setting an ambush and making sure a fight happens on your terms is to damage the enemy and reduce their ability to fight back. The doom spiral brings a little bit of extra realism to combat, especially in the planning stage.

[Knaight]

I'm pretty neutral on them. I can do distinct wounds, I can do penalty/threshold systems, I can do hit points. They serve different purposes to some extent.

That said, the word "replacement" in the OP is worrying. All of them are different enough that they tend to work better if they're designed that way from the beginning - one system being hacked into place for another will probably work poorly. The exceptions to that rule have pretty much all been in systems designed from the get go to be extremely modular.