Still want a system where you recover all your health after every fight, but getting injured gives you a debuff of some kind until you have a chance to rest, and that debuff is tangible but doesn't ruin your entire day it just makes things harder

like "oh you got set on fire, no you're fine, but until you put some ointment on that you're gonna take a -1 to any kind of athletic maneuver because your skin hurts"

"Looks like you got stabbed, okay so here's how it goes, you're absolutely fine, but if a fight goes on for more than three rounds, you drop like a stone and we have to revive you"

"You got hit with some lightning, which could mean any number of things but for now let's say you've got a growing headache, and it makes you super irritable but you're doing your best not to let it get in the way

No there's no other penalty here, go take some advil or smth"

Think it would play out like this:

If you just take damage, no biggie, lower your HP total and move on

If you take a "heavy hit" from damage, then we look up what kind of damage it is, and there's your debuff

So then we've got a table of damage types that means more than just its impact on damage resistance or armor penetration, we actually start to think about what that damage *does*.

I wouldn't want to be responsible for figuring out that table of damage effects, but it might also have entries for what it takes to recover

and some damage types might be semi-permanent? Maybe? Not sure.

the idea is getting fuzzy again, check back in a few weeks lol

But I did have a thought of like

a vorpal sword that does vorpal damage and the effect of vorpal damage is "a limb is severed" and you can't just sleep that off but making it a damage type makes sense?