Health bars of some sort are used in just about every type of game from racing games to first person shooters to role playing games. It's rare to find a game without some form of health bar system and it's easy to see why. Health bars are simple. They only require a few variables (max health, current health, possibly health regeneration). They are simple for "math crafting" purposes and players can understand them at a glance (that dude's health bar is low, he's almost dead; that dude's health bar is full, he's as fine as frog legs). They have a "heroic" model of the universe in that, until you reach 0 health, you're just as capable as if you had full health. Your avatar moves just as quick, can still fight just fine, and even sit on a coach drinking tea without any of it leaking through the holes in your carapace.
This heroic model is important, because it is often the ideal of a game's design. Epic fantasy world? Check. Swords taller than people? Check. Hair less practical than our massive swords? Of course. Not needing months to heal between each fight? DUH. A truly realistic model would actually be rather frightening and annoying for most games. In a health bar system, a house cat can't normally pounce on your face and break a nail off into your brain killing you instantly. In real life? Well, they have Darwin Awards for a reason.
It is certainly not the only model, however, and not suited for every purpose (unlike Duct Tape). The other most common model is that of our favorite old 80's arcade games. A state-based model! Ok, that probably means nothing to you. This is the system wherein everything holds a tiny warning label saying, "Hey, yo, dude, this'll totally kill you if you, like, touch it. At all." Then you go, "Pfft, it's just a rock." And you trip over it and your kidneys become external organs. This also illustrates the main downside to it as well, there is no punishment besides death. This means your world is filled with mountains of spiky death, because chickens are just as deadly as Ogres. Every time you screw up in the slightest, your squishy bits fly across the screen. This can be rather frustrating because those squishy bits are keeping your spiky blue haired character alive.
So, what if you don't want your character to die to nasty spit balls, but also don't want them to be wading through fireballs going, "Well, that was mildly warm, I suppose." There's a whole host of other systems out there for your designer's heart to gnaw on. These are just the two "juggernauts." Other systems will better model bleeding, recovery, injury, even fate. Some of the stuff generally ignored in a normal health bar system. And here I will model one of my favorite contenders (meaning I didn't come up with it). I was planning to use it for a semi-realistic WW2 pen and paper RPG (that did nothing but get me a cool scholarship).
In this system you have different categories of pain possible such as: near-miss, boo-boo, "Ok, that really hurt," bad injury, and fatal death. They need to be arranged in a hierarchy. The ones higher in the hierarchy, you get more of (e.g. you can take 3 body shots but only 1 headshot). And now is where the interesting mechanics comes in. When someone attacks you, they inflict a certain category of damage. A Nerf bat may inflict only "light damage," but a truck hitting you inflicts "extreme damage" (though I used a system with bullets whereby, the more accurate the shot, the more your vital organs are compromised). However, if you've used up all of your "scratches" health, then it deals damage of the NEXT CATEGORY. You die when you can't mark off a lower category because none exists (or when the category of damage is "instant death").
This base idea is also ripe for modification like a Borg drone. I had personally modified it so that whenever you lost all of a category, you got an injury which did Bad Stuff (tm) to your hearty little warrior. Also, I had a category of damage (the highest) called "Blood" that you couldn't receive directly, only by having untreated bullet holes. Such that continually bleeding would eventually turn your body into a cold lifeless husk (unless a medic smacked you with an Ace). This is a great compromise between state-based and health. You basically just have different kinds of health. You can die instantly or slowly, be injured, but not out, be dangerously low but press on. It's especially good for a turn-based system.
What else is there? Well, there are also condition tracks. Anyone nerdy enough to have played or heard of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game: Saga Edition (because we all know you wanted a Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition sneak peak, what? That was only me?) will probably get the basic gist of my insane ramblings. A condition track is really nothing more elaborate than a state-based system with more than two states. Allowing you to actually be injured instead of "enjoying the sunshine" or "enjoying the hereafter." Someone pokes you with a pointy stick and you move down the states, slowly getting more impaired, until your family can no longer recognize your mangled corpse. This is for people who want to have a couple of steps between breathing and not breathing where each has significant repercussions for your hero.
These are just a few ideas. Trying to list even all the types of health systems they tested out for the aforementioned 4th Edition would probably fill up a Dark Grimoire From Beyond the Deep with knowledge. Hopefully you have achieved enlightenment and will now be able to unlock the Seventh Gate or just realized that you take health systems for granted in games and they are imperfect (as is everything, especially Computational Linguists).
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