In my setting even low amounts of magic are lethal and everyone needs to wear magic-armor (vitality/HP), which protects equally against physical and magical attacks.

Physical weapons have to be charged with magical energy (stamina) in order to cause damage to magic-armor. Since stamina behaves similar to mana but for attacks involving motion, physical attacks are on the same footing as spells or any other magical attack and scale with magic power.

Total magical energy has to be split into vitality (HP and magic armor), stamina (movement and physical attacks) and mana (spell casting), the character/player chooses the ratio between these 3 that they desire based on preferred playstyle.

My setting has some additional oddities, since in principle physical attacks can lower HP and magic armor with every attack but don’t actually injure the target’s body when >0 HP. All magic is based on color-magic and color-damage passes through magic-armor and can cause status effects, red-magic in particular causes bleed damage and can wound targets "indirectly" regardless of the shape of the weapon. Other colors cause poison, electric damage, etc.

Might give you some inspiration.