Treating different HP as different tiles would be really fun to try out! So there's different interactions at different stages. Maybe some of what I experienced as dull could be solved through level gen though. Yeah I was thinking like one more vector of interaction max, because you're completely right it'd get very confusing.
I think tile interactions changing based on XP could add a lot of depth in a pretty simple way so I'd be interested in trying that out. Could see going from person to warrior to skeleton or something haha. Probably having a mix of ones that are a quantity of a single thing vs a quantity of stages of things could be cool. Applying real temporality to something player-stepped sounds pretty interesting though maybe slightly disorienting. That dynamic could be cool of having to beat the clock in real life vs making minimal sub-optimal decisions from rushing to maximize that temporary benefit.
Definitely weird to think about this idea of a subgame, straight up a ruleset without a clear labeling of what the player is doing as good or bad, winning or losing. Thinking about this in context of minigames like the FO4 password hacking, or skyrim lock picking. You can probably get better at this, but it doesn't have a clear win/lose condition. I think if you had it as you have to reach the door, or reach the 3rd door, or something, would make it a game. If you had limited resets it's a game of how many doors do you make it through. If it's 1 room it's how much gold can I get / space can I clear (SpaceChem graphs and all). But since there isn't an end and there's this notion of suboptimal decisions (higher # resets = bad) and optimal decisions (maximizing destructive interactions towards gold / exits) but no clear labeling of an overall performance that makes it disorienting. I wonder how you can take relative-limits based goals away from things that currently exist.
- Mario lives as a ++ counter instead of a -- counter
- Halo deathmatch -death +damage score
I've gotta get going but I'll be chewing on this for sure :)