I don't think reporting player wound status is redundant, it's not obvious what part of the bar corresponds to "moderately", "critically", etc.

I think that a much more useful thing would be to know from the description the amount of loss of health from the attack, when the PC is the target. It could use a simple scale, something like this (first one is for cutting type weapons, second one is for blunt trauma like clubs):

less than 1%: "are nicked" or "are grazed"
1%-5%: "are cut" or "are thwacked" (or maybe "are bruised")
5%-15%: "are sliced" or "are bashed"
Anything above 15% would then get more generic:
15-40%: "are seriously wounded"
40-70%: "are severely wounded"
70%+: "are mortally wounded"

Keep in mind, these are amount of damage done in attack, not total HP level. So if you're at 30/100 HP, and you're hit for 10 HP by a club, it would say "was bashed", not "was mortally wounded". On the other hand, if you were at 170/200 HP, and you're hit for 150 HP damage (down to 20/200 HP), it would say "was mortally wounded", since 150/200 = 75%.

For NPC targets, it should report on damage done *and* total damage... but it should be a much simpler system. Something like this for damage done:

less than 2%: "trivially"
2-10%: "lightly"
10-30%: "moderately"
30-60%: "heavily" or "deeply" (depending on attack type)
60-100%: "powerfully"

And then I'd make the total damage described by the *reaction*. For instance, for a common humanoid (like a goblin):
less than 10%: "winces"
10-25%: "recoils"
25-50%: "yelps"
50-75%: "screams"
75-98%: "screams in agony"
98%+: "screams with pure agony"

All of these could have multiple styles of sentence to maintain some variation.

Let me give an example bringing them together. You are fighting a male goblin. You have 120 HP total, and are wielding a sword. The goblin has 70 HP total and is wielding a club. You attack the goblin, hitting it for 6 HP in the first attack, following which it attacks you, hitting you for 14 HP.

"The goblin winces as you slice him trivially with your sword. You are bashed with the goblin's club."

On the next turn, you attack the goblin, hitting it for 25 HP, while the goblin hits you for 50 HP.

"The goblin yelps as you slice him deeply with your sword. You are severely wounded with the goblin's club."

On the next turn, you attack the goblin, hitting for 35 HP, while the goblin misses you.

"The goblin screams in agony as you slice him deeply with your sword. The goblin misses you with his club."

On the next turn, you do a piddling 4 HP damage to the goblin, which then hits you for 45 HP.

"The goblin screams with pure agony as you slice him lightly with your sword. You are seriously wounded with the goblin's club."

On the next turn, you kill the goblin, of course. It could perhaps be colourful even there, something like "you deal one final slice, killing the goblin."

Bump. The redundancies in battle messages are still kinda annoying. TB has also said that the battle messages are generated on-the-fly, so that limits word order. Currently the order of events (and word order) seem to be like this:

*attacker
*physical damage type
*victim
*attacker weapon
*hit or miss
*possible critical hit
*how much damage

I think the first four can be easily shuffled around the sentence, because they are independet of other parts. So, my suggested battle message generation pseudocode:

So a situation where the player delivers a critical hit to a fire beetle and wounds it into critical status, would be:

"You slash the fire beetle with full force, critically cutting it."

Missing it would be:

"You miss the fire beetle".

Also, "...to death" would be more fun than "...killing x". "You bash the orc to death!" :-) Sadly I can't think of similar replacements for "lightly/moderatly/ect wounding x".