[KaVir]

Personally I'm not fond of assigning hit points to specific body locations. If people can choose to target specific body parts, it tends to result in much shorter fights (because they'll focus on one location), while if they can't, combat becomes much more luck-based than usual. Furthermore, it's much more difficult to gauge your overall condition in a fight if you're trying to keep track of several sets of hit points.

Instead, I prefer to keep track of limb condition through a separate wound system, so that your hit points go down as normal when you get struck, but particularly deadly blows can also inflict additional penalties. The primary goal is still to reduce your opponent to 0 hit points, but you can cripple them with additional wounds to make the process easier. Although you still have wounds to keep track of, they are typically boolean; your overall condition is represented by a single integer.


This is very much a matter of personal preference, as both extremes have their pros and cons, although sometimes you'll find that certain abilities only make sense for a specific subgroup of character types - in such cases, a class/guild system is a pretty neat solution.

My own approach was to try and combine what I felt was the best of both worlds; I have five classes, each with their own distinct abilities, but each player can highly customise/specialise their character within the range of options available to their class. It's very rare to find two identical characters, and some of the variations within each class are extremely different.