In wargaming, there's an interesting struggle of wanting to play with your toy soldiers while also wanting to see your toy soldiers die in a blaze of glory. The problem is, obviously, that once a toy soldier is dead and removed from the game, you don't get to play with it for the rest of that game session. The source of the problem is health points, or hit points, or wounds, or whatever your game of choice calls them. When a toy soldier doesn't have enough of them, it gets removed and the game is sad. When a toy soldier has too many of them, it never dies and the game is boring. Is there a solution?
Token removal is a standard concept in tabletop gaming, but in wargaming the token getting removed is a model you've spent actual hours building and painting. And once that token is removed, the game's not over. You have to keep playing with the rest of your toy soldiers without the ones that have gotten removed. Far from being a consolation, that makes you feel like you've gotten to eat half of your proverbial cake while having the other half, when what you really want is to eat all of your cake and have it, too.
I'm a fan of low wound counts in wargames. First of all, it feels realistic. My soldiers are at war, and when you get stabbed or shot, realistically you're probably hitting the deck. You might not want to, but biology has some pretty strict rules.
I personally find it confusing when I've got toy soldiers running around a battlefield and they're all able to endure 6 or 8 or 12 or more wounds. Literally, what are they doing out there if not killing each other? Admittedly, there are mental exercises to suspend disbelief. Maybe a "point" of "damage" doesn't actually mean the soldier's body has taken damage, but their armour has. Or maybe it means that the metaphysical countdown to that soldier's end-of-life has just ticked a second closer to midnight. I can (and in many games, I do) accept those explanations.
However, there's also a mechanical problem with soldiers that can endure lots of wounds. Maybe I'm a lazy gamer, but I don't love managing life counters for multiple tokens. I do it for some games, and I have to admit it's not that hard to do, but I also have to confess that I feel a sense of liberation when I play a wargame in which 1 wound means removal. It's like a weight off my shoulders when I see a soldier on either side of the battle get taken off the table. That's one less variable I have to think about. What a relief. I love it when damage in my dice pool has a direct correlation to token removal.
I have found that I can tolerate 3 wounds for each soldier, and there's a good reason for it. When a soldier acquires 1 wound, it gets a wound marker. At 2 wounds, the marker gets flipped over. And at 3 wounds, the marker and the soldier get removed. For me, that's a reasonable amount of bookkeeping, and metaphysically it seems like a reasonable number of times to cheat death.
Of course, soldiers possessing only 3 or fewer wound slots dictates game design. A weapon that deals 3 wounds with one success is really powerful. An area effect dealing 3 wounds to multiple targets is a weapon of mass destruction. Realistically, a game either has to make success harder to achieve, and assign low damage to weapon that succeed often.
A game that embraces high casualties have a few different controls.
A high casualty game is likely to use a relatively small board, lots of soldiers, weapons with low damage values, and few saving throws. It's a relatively fast game because a hit is a hit, and a hit is often a kill.
A low casualty game is likely to use a big board with lots of miniatures or else a small board with just a few miniatures. Weapons can have high damage values because there are saving throws and armour values and everybody can take lots of wounds before being removed.
The way I see it, there are 2 ways to keep a player's miniatures on the table.
There are some interesting examples of both game styles being melded into a single game.
In Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant games, players controlling characters are usually getting a low casualty experience. Their characters last for several sessions (often even a year or more of real-time), and even when a character dies there are usually spells for resurrection. The Game Master is getting a high casualty experience, with monsters designed to be disposable.
Battle in Balin's Tomb is a wargame with the same split. The Fellowship player plays low casualty, and the goblin player plays high casualty. Again, this is very much by design, and each time a goblin token gets removed from the board, it returns in 1 or 2 turns as an ostensibly different goblin reinforcement.
These two gaming styles cater to a different mood, or maybe to a different kind of player. I think that's fine, and I myself am sometimes in the mood for one or the other. And probably many players are.