Hit Points - TV Tropes

BAM! You just got Tyrannosaurus Wrecked!

Karashi: Had enough?Khrima: You know very well that by the definition of hit points that I haven't yet had enough. — Adventurers!

In most video games centered around combat, Hit Points are a measure of how close to death or incapacitation a character is.

Rather than bothering to simulate realistic injuries, players get a number or Life Meter attributed to their character to indicate their current condition. It's like a time-irrelevant take on Exact Time to Failure in that only losing the last one causes any real harm. Some games (especially Tabletop RPGs) may Hand Wave it as an abstraction of non videogame tropes such as Plot Armor and Heroic Resolve, or actual health vs. injury: As a character's HP drops, it's ostensibly their talent/luck at dodging, deflecting and absorbing the worst blows dropping as they get more tired and desperate, until they actually get hurt badly enough to be out of combat.

This trope can be directly traced from the original Dungeons & Dragons, right down to the name. Since then, it's been used in genres as diverse as First-Person Shooter, Role-Playing Game, and Real-Time Strategy, and is nigh-universal for each, due to its usefulness for programmers (the alternative is One-Hit-Point Wonder where any damage is immediately fatal). On some occasions, the number itself is hidden and only a Life Meter is shown to represent damage. Survival Horror games favor foregoing even that, and simply displaying one of three to four colors in the status screen to indicate the player's well-being.

In First Person Shooters, this number is often exactly 100, and is taken to be a percentage of the player's normal uninjured health, with "mega health"-type items that cause your health to go above 100 often resulting in your health slowly ticking back down to 100. Ever since GoldenEye (1997), players and enemies often take multiples of damage based on where they are hit, but in the end, a bullet in the head is exactly the same as twelve in the foot, or what have you. This also means that eleven hits to the foot will not only not kill you, but often not even impair your movement - after all, it's Only a Flesh Wound. It's a good thing there are so many water fountains and Healing Potions spread about.

In many Role Playing Games, you usually get a higher maximum number of Hit Points with each Character Level.

They're not always called "Hit Points," sometimes they are called "Health Points," or are collectively referred to as "Health Power." For spaceships and other vessels, they are often "Hull Points". If they have an on-screen abbreviation, it's almost always HP. If individual body parts have hitpoints, that's Sub System Damage. Sometimes entities have Multiple Life Bars, layered in combinations like Regenerating Shield, Static Health or for different types of attacks.

One common Role-Playing Game variation is to have two separate hit point values, one tracking fatigue and exhaustion while the other tracks wounds and injury. If the fatigue value goes to zero, the character may fall unconscious and/or start passing damage on to the wound total.

They're often displayed in a Life Meter, which is a subtrope. There's also Vague Hit Points for when a game has these, but the player doesn't know how many they, or the enemy, has.

Occasionally you'll see something similar in non-game media, like when the Cool Ship in the Space Opera measures its integrity as a single number which represents the status of its Deflector Shields or something.

Exceptions:

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Action Game

• ANNO: Mutationem: The Life Meter is displayed on the Action Bar, enemies have their own meter with attacks displaying the numerical damage inflicted. Health can be restored with Gradual Regeneration items made by crafting. The Mysterious Console DLC uses hearts as health for the roguelike dungeon.
• No More Heroes: Travis's health is represented as an pixelated heart losing a bit each time he takes damage.
• Superman Returns: The titular hero doesn't have hit points ... rather, the city does.
• In Star Fox 2, the entire planet of Corneria has a percent-based hit point count.
• In TRON Deadly Discs, the player is given a single life, but can take a few hits before he is derezzed. In the Atari 2600 version, the player character changes colors whenever he gains or loses a hit point.

Fighting Game

• In normal gameplay of the Super Smash Bros. series, each fighter's damage is tracked in percentages rather than Hit Points, ranging from any decimal number between 0% to 999% (the display only shows damage as integers). Reaching 100% damage is somewhat arbitrary, as players with damage above that number can still survive and continue fighting. However, the various Bosses (Master Hand, Crazy Hand, and the Subspace Emissary bosses) utilize Hit Points, and the fighters themselves also utilize Hit Points in Stamina Mode/Special Brawl "Stamina" from Melee onward. In Classic Mode, the Hit Points of Master (and Crazy) Hand are visible in numerical values. However, the Hit Points' numerical values of Brawl's Subspace Emissary (Adventure) and Boss Battles modes are hidden from the player's view, instead being displayed by a red numberless Life Meter.
  • Additionally, it's thought that the "Hit Points" of the games are actually measured as negative percentage damage.
• The Bushido Blade fighting series used aversion of this trope as a selling point. Unlike most fighting games that use HP bars, Bushido Blade lets you fight just until you receive a lethal injury. A solid hit to the head or body ends the match right there. Hitting an arm or leg would disable that limb—if both your legs are crippled, you can't even stand up.
• All traditional Fighting Games have hit points but very few of them actually show this information to the player. The numeric value of a character's vitality is typically only shown in training mode, with the main modes simply opting for a Life Meter to represent vitality (some games do reference numeric health values to show combo damage). However some games do make this information persistently available. Examples include Battle Fantasia (in an effort to simulate turn-based RPG battles) and Injustice 2.
  • How fighting games adjust hit point values across the cast can also vary: the most simple approach is to make the number the same for every character. However, games like Street Fighter can give each character unique health values and others offer a more in-depth system: characters in Guilty Gear for example nominally share the same total HP number but can combine unique base defense modifiers and Guts ratings (a value which determines the magnitude of an additional defense buff which grows as the character's lifebar lowers) which effectively make them more or less durable both from round start and situationally (eg. a Glass Cannon like Chipp Zanuff can have a higher Guts rating than the more broadly durable Mighty Glacier Potemkin to give him a fighting chance at low health).

First-Person Shooter

• Pretty much any First-Person Shooter released before 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved will use traditional Hit Points. Most, but not all, released afterward will use Regenerating Health. A few, like the aforementioned Halo will use both, typically represented with a second Life Meter, usually called something like "Stamina" or "Shields." For the most part, healing items will only improve the non-regenerating side.
• Left 4 Dead has the survivors with the standard 100 hit points. However, once they hit 40 hit points and below, they start to show the signs of their injuries, moving slower and slower, until they hobble along painfully at 1 hit point.
  • Pain pills will give survivors a temporary health boost and it wears down over time. When someone is down, their health for being down starts at 300 points and drains by 3 points per second and more if attacked. Survivors die if the incap health reaches zero.
  • Special infected have their own amounts of health as well but they can only be actually seen when playing as them in VS mode.
• Killing Floor does much the same, though instead of an "incapacitated" status, players instantly drop dead when their health reaches zero. It should also be noted that attempting to heal causes HP to roll upwards, while Specimen attacks will instantly deduct HP and can interrupt healing attempts.
• Befitting its class-based model, Team Fortress 2, much like Team Fortress Classic, gives the classes differing levels of health. Lightweight support classes like the Sniper, the Spy, and the Engineer can expect to go in with only 125 points of health. Combat classes like the Soldier and the Heavy are graced with 200 and 300 HP, respectively. The most unusual feature about health, though, is that it is possible to gain more than your class' maximum value courtesy of the overhealing function from Medics, but also actively change the base total through input on the part of the player's choice in weapons. This idea of changing the base health value of a player is atypical in first person shooters. The most dramatic case of this is the Eyelander, a massive two-handed sword for the Demoman, which initially decreases the Demoman's health down to 150 HP (from 175 points), but with every kill made by the sword, he will take heads and gain a boost to speed and maximum health.
• In No One Lives Forever, there are separate meters for health and armour. Armour can be repaired during a mission, but health can not.

LARP

• In the Otakon LARP, Characters (and items) have hit points assigned on a case-by-case basis, and can be restored by an hour-long trip to the Hospital (Out of game waiting period), or at Noon and Midnight.

MMORPGs

• In Mabinogi there were wounds represented by un-recoverable health, when wounded. Players could only recover health up to where a faded red bar is (either by using healing spells, health potions, or gradually recovering it). First aid can be performed by many classes. But only heals wounds, not health. And only if the player is carrying bandages with them.
  • The game does a good job at combining the "hit points aren't health" concept with the idea that even in-universe you're an extraplanar creature using a nigh-immortal avatar (NPC communities depend on doctors and herbalists for healing rather than priests and healing magic). HP recovery is very plentiful (and healing potions, while mildly toxic, have no cooldown or usage limits), but recovering from actual injury tends to require more preparation, rather more so if you can't combine it with extensive rest. And no amount of damage can actually drop you until you fail a willpower check - though it still accumulates past the 0-HP stage. The game's designed so that a player who's enough of a Determinator can push through threats way out of their character's weight class at the expense of increasingly ugly long-term costs.

Platformer

• Sonic the Hedgehog is something that manages to fall into the gap between the two health systems: a One-Hit-Point Wonder without rings, invulnerable to most things with them. Rings are usually plentiful, and you even get a chance to grab some back if you get hit. The Shield power up stacks with the rings, giving the player an extra hit point on top of their rings.
  • SegaSonic the Hedgehog is the first and so far only game in the series to use a true Life Meter for the characters. Rings restore the meter.
  • Tails Adventure is one of the first games in the franchise to use Rings as a health bar. Tails carries a limited amount of rings on him, and dies when he loses all of his rings. Chaos Emeralds function as a Heart Container, increasing the max amount of rings Tails can have.
  • Sonic Adventure 2. Tails' and Eggman's Mechs use both a Life Meter and Rings at the same time. You lose both health and rings when hit, but you can gather the dropped rings back to recover some lost life. Rings do not prevent death however, you lose a life when the life meter runs out regardless of your ring count.
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog, the ring counter functions more like a typical life bar: You lose 10 rings instead of all of them when struck.
  • In Sonic Generations, if Sonic has more than a certain number of rings in his possession, he will lose a considerable percentage of them. Less than that, and he will lose all of them.
• Mario in the various Super Mario Bros. games have a simple hit point system. If Mario is in his super (big) form or has a power up like a fire flower, he can take a hit and shrink in size. Get hit while small and it counts as a lost life, so Mario essentially has 2 hit points. Some games has Mario go from powered up to super form when hit before going to small form, giving him 3 hit points.
  • Super Mario Bros. 2 had a Life Meter where the characters could only take 2 hits, but finding mushrooms extended the life meter by one point, up to a maximum of 4 units of health (the GBA port extends the limit to 5 hits).
  • The 3D Mario platforming games like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine have a traditional Life Meter that allow Mario to take a certain amount of hits before losing a life and health lost depends on the enemy or hazard. Super Mario Galaxy uses a more simple life meter where Mario can only take 3 hits before losing a life or 6 hits if he finds a health extending mushroom. Super Mario Odyssey also has a three-hit meter, but doubles it to six if Assist Mode is turned on (and Assist Mode lets the HP regenerate too). There's a Life-Up Heart that adds three more points to the meter and is automatically added when Mario controls Bowser.
  • The Mario RPG games (Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario series, and Mario & Luigi series) refer to all player characters' health as Heart Points, which are represented by little stylistic hearts.
  • Wario Land is all over the place with this in the series. The first two games follow Mario elements, with Wario shrinking when he gets hit and reliance on power ups. Wario Land II and Wario Land 3 however make Wario completely invincible, with finally Wario Land 4 and Wario Land: Shake It! giving him a heart meter.
• The original Donkey Kong Country trilogy has a pretty unique way of going about this. You control two characters at once, but both of them are a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Getting hit doesn't cost you a life, however. You just lose whomever you are controlling and take control of your partner, making your partner essentially your extra hit point, and you can get your lost character back by finding DK Barrels, "returning" your hit points from one back to two. Donkey Kong Country Returns and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze play this more straight, where you are given a simple life meter with two hit points.
• In Ghosts 'n Goblins and its sequels, the player character Arthur's body armor is the players' only means of protection. Taking damage results in losing his armor and being stripped down to his undies, where another hit kills him. Later games, like Resurrection and the international version of Ultimate alter this so that Arthur can take more hits before being stripped to his undies. (the former only loses pieces of his armor when he gets hit instead of losing the armor completely depending on difficulty, while the latter plays this trope more straight where the armor can take more hits before breaking).
• In the Crash Bandicoot games, Aku Aku Masks are the players' hit points. Collecting one mask grants one extra hit point. Getting a second mask upgrades Aku Aku into a golden form, granting two extra hits, and getting three masks results in brief invincibility. Otherwise, Get hit without a mask and Crash (or Coco) is done for.
• Spyro the Dragon: Spyro's dragonfly buddy Sparx serves as the players' life meter, turning different colors as he gets weaker before disappearing, at which point any further damage to the player is fatal.
• The Banjo-Kazooie games has "Honeycomb energy" to represent the player's health, that can be restored by grabbing Hexagon-shaped Honeycombs, usually by whacking enemies or breaking beehives.
• Yooka-Laylee uses heart-shaped butterflies as the players' health.
• Ape Escape: The players' health is measured by shortbread cookies, that can be replenished by gathering cookies. 2 and 3 alter this so that the cookies break a little at minor damage instead of losing it completely when getting hit.
• Clarence's Big Chance: You can restore them by eating literal hearts. Lampshaded; "Like so many cyberland characters, Clarence, you can rejuvenate your vim by devouring the hearts of your fallen victims. Go on. Give 'em a scoff to fill up your lovely heart points and stave off death for another day."
• The first Bubsy game averts this by making you a One-Hit-Point Wonder. The sequels, however, give you a health meter. Bubsy II gives you 3 hit points (represented by Bubsy's expression by the lives counter, ranging from cool and cocky at full health, to slightly nervous on his first hit, to an Oh, Crap! expression when another hit will take him out). Bubsy 3D gives you a numerical counter which starts each life with 3 "Paw Points," which can be boosted up to 99 by accruing enough Scoring Points (every 40,000 was good for another “Paw Point,” while every 100,000 carried an extra life).
• Ratchet & Clank has Nanotech as HP, explained as a nanobot charges that heal wounds that Ratchet receives. How precisely this works varies from game to game:
  • In the first game Ratchet had 4 nanotech points, and could find a vendor machine allowing him to buy 1 and 3 more points, up to 8 of total. Any wound in the game costs exactly one HP, minus things that instantly kill Ratchet.
  • The next game overhauled the system substantially. Ratchet now gains supplementary nanotech by gaining experience up to a certain maximum, but last 8 of them must be obtained through the upgrades hidden in levels, some of which are fiendishly hard to get. Also, the damage this time scales up and can be reduced by armor. The next games kept this system but ditched the collectible upgrades.
  • Most games have also vehicles who each have their Armor/HP bar (not implied to be nanotech) and if they come with shield like Ratchet's Star Explorer, those have their own HP too (though not shown).
  • When playing as Clank, his health is almost always set at 4HP and does not upgrade, ever.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy: Jak has 3 hitpoints that are refilled by green eco, though you can technically have four if you have full HP and are maxed on green eco as well, which has separate counter. This HP is also shared with vehicles.
  • Jak II: Renegade: Jak has 8 HP, though most attacks do 2HP damage except some weaklings, and he is also invulnerable when in vehicle, which have their own HP (not visible for hovercars, but their state can be guessed by how much its engines are burning).
  • Jak 3: Jak can upgrade his HP from 8 to 16 by collecting pieces of Precursor Armor, but some endgame monsters deal 4 HP. Buggies show their actual HP, as do most Escort Mission vehicles.
• Mega Man: Most of the 2D platformers give the playable characters a long life bar (consisting of 28 units) that is not a set number (You don't have 28 actual hits). The meter is depleted by a certain number of units depending on the enemy or attack and can be restored with random life drops from killing enemies, and the Energy Tanks give you a free full-heal. In almost all situations, spikes are an instant-kill. This changes depending on the game/subseries.
  • Mega Man (Classic) plays it pretty basic. You have a standard energy meter that stays the same.
  • Mega Man X: X/Zero starts out the game with a painfully small health meter, that can be extended with Heart Tanks.
  • Mega Man Legends: Volnutt has a regenerating Single-Use Shield to cover his Life meter that goes away when he gets hit, at which point the meter turns red. Any further damage eats away at his health.
  • Mega Man Zero: Similar to X, Zero has a very small life meter that can extended with Cyber-Elves.
  • Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force feature total health points on the top-left of the screen.
• Muri: It's called Energy and displayed in a Life Meter at the right of the screen.
• Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! has a similar life system to Sonic: Tim doesn't have a life meter, instead he loses his collected nuts and bolts he's carrying when he gets hit.
• In McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, Ronald's health is measured by the red magical jewels he's carrying and loses one or more depending on the enemy or the difficulty level. He can carry up to seven, and loses a life if he loses them all. The games' handheld spinoff Ronald in the Magical World gives Ronald a simple heart meter instead.
• Tiny Toon Adventures games:
  • In the NES game, everything kills the player in one hit, unless they a carrying a heart on them.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure has a heart meter that can be extended with bells. Dying resets your hearts back to three.
• Castlevania: The Classic-vania titles give the player a long segmented health bar that is depleted by certain sections depending on the enemy or attack and can be restored with Meat. Hearts surprisingly aren't used to restore health, are used for weapon ammunition instead. The Metroidvania games aim for a simple life counter with a number determining the players' health.

Puzzle

• PsyCard: In the Friend's Quest Role-Playing Game-type Mini-Game, it's called HP, and they are refilled after every battle, even on a loss.

Real-Time Strategy

• In the UFO: After Blank series, the soldiers in your squad have hit point bars, but the mechanism behind getting shot/stabbed/exploded is more complex than just a substraction. Soldiers start with a completely green health bar. If they take damage, part of this damage is temporary damage, indicated by making part of the green bar red. This damage can be healed (red part of the bar turned to green) during the mission. But part of the damage is semi-permanent and can only be healed outside of the mission, indicated by a shortening of the health bar. When the complete bar is red, the character is knocked out.

Roguelike

• The ludicrously detailed (and getting more so every day) Roguelike Dwarf Fortress instead has individual hit-point counts for each and every one of every single character's limbs and organs, even down to little things like fingers and toes. And separate tracks for 'blood loss', 'pain', and 'exhaustion'. The newest version can track each layer of tissue. ASCII graphics gives you a lot of extra space to play with.

Roleplay

• Destroy the Godmodder uses these MOST of the time, but some entities instead have an integrity meter (especially when the Virus got involved), others you simply had to find pieces or complete a certain artifact to kill, and still others were completely invincible and you had to defeat the event they were timed with to kill.

Role-Playing Game

• Several of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms games give you "hit points" in the form of units: The modifier equals thousands of able-bodied soldiers fighting for your general.
• An extremely creative version the EarthBound Series. Instead of damage dealt instantly decreasing a character's HP, the HP meter is an "odometer" that runs down to the new value gradually. Allowing fatally wounded characters to get off one more hit or survive if they get healed before the meter hits zero and they die. This run-down gets slower the higher the character's "Guts" statnote which also controls the chance of a Smaaaaash!, and even survival of a fatal blow! is. This makes players react quickly instead of anticipating death.
  • This is referenced in Undertale, where on the genocide route, a similar mechanic is applied during the final boss fight.
• Assassin's Creed II: Represented by Life Meters, filled with what are called "health squares". Ezio, his enemies, and the people he escort / follows have theirs marked in the Heads-Up Display.
• Helen's Mysterious Castle: Helen's health is represented at the bottom of the battle screen as a fraction of current / maximum.
• So uh, a spaceship crashed in my yard.: Both characters in the party get them listed, even though there's no combat in this game.
  • Mark starts with 562 HP.
  • ARIA has 450 HP.
• Born Under the Rain: As shown in this official screenshot of a battle, hit points are represented numerically where the current number of them is at the right of a green Life Meter.
• Oracle of Askigaga: In the main menu, party members' hit points and Stamina a.k.a Mana Points, are shown as both numbers, and orange and blue bars, respectively.
  • Hiroji Askigaga starts the game with 550 max HP.
  • Oharu Ishihara starts the game with 850 max HP.
• The Heart Pumps Clay: It's called HP and is displayed both numerically and with a Life Meter in the combat screen◊.
• Quantum Protocol:
  • The operator's max health equal to the number of cards in their deck. If an enemy attacks an undefended column, the operator will take damage, making it important to defend columns.
  • All cards have their own health stat, even cards that one would normally think as as effect-only cards. This means it's possible to have effect-only cards act as meatshields after their effect is used up.
• The Other Rabbiton series, of The Other: Airi's Adventure and The Other: Rosie's Road of Love, as part of the RPG system, the party members have HP, displayed in the battle screen and the party menu.
• Prayer of the Faithless: Called "Health Points" in the Guide's Stat Breakdown.
• Tales of Symphonia: Seen in battle as the current value, and in the party menu, as a [Current] / [Max].
• Transistor: Enemies have their life totals listed as Current / Max.
• Parameters: Displayed in the Life Meter in a fractional method: [Current Life] / [Maximum Possible Life]
• Fresh Minty Adventure: Using Heart Symbol-type Hearts Are Health, and each of the hearts are one hit point.
• Eternal Senia: Current value is always near the Life Meter:
  • Eternal Senia: Meter is in the upper left.
  • Eternal Senia: Hydrangea After The Rain: Meter is in the bottom left.
• In the computer game dnd, your hit points are determined randomly by your class and your "Hits" stat that is randomly generated at the beginning of the game. Your hit points increase only with certain magical treasures you find in the dungeon or when you level up outside the dungeon.

Survival Horror

• Early Resident Evil games had an EKG meter that could only be checked on in the pause menu that gave only a vague impression of how much health the player has left. The players' condition ranged from "Fine"(Green) to "Caution"(Orange) to "Caution"(Yellow) and finally "Danger"(Red). Resident Evil 4 and onward switched to a traditional Life Meter that replaced the EKG. Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and Resident Evil 3 (Remake) use the EKG again, much like their original versions. In Resident Evil 2, the player character moves more slowly and clumsily as he/she gets more and more injured, until they're barely hobbling along even while ostensibly "running." It really puts the horror in Survival Horror when the player character can barely stay ahead of the slow, shambling zombies.
• World of Horror has two separate Hit Point meters representing Stamina, your physical health, and Reason, your mental health. Run out of Stamina, and you die. Run out of Reason, and you go insane and end up institutionalized. Either way, it's Game Over.

Tabletop Games

• Fudge, a tabletop game/ game toolkit has a default mechanic called a wound track, which keeps track of individual wounds, albeit with a roll-over for wounds to go up a level in severity. The non-linear wounding system, presented in the 10th anniversary edition also keeps track of individual wounds, where there is no rollover, and is intended for grittier games. The only time hit points are even mentioned is when dealing with vehicles.
• Instead of HP, the True20 roleplaying system makes you roll a saving throw any time you are injured to determine what happens to you. Multiple injuries make the difficulty rating higher, but there's always a chance of surviving any injury.
• The BattleTech board game and most of the Mechwarrior computer games based on it, use section-specific hit points (split between armor and structure points) to track damage to individual hit locations of both BattleMechs and combat vehicles in addition to allowing for damage to specific internal components once an attack reaches the internal structure proper or a lucky hit manages to slip past still-extant armor protection. There are also fairly specific rules for each particular case of component damage; for example, lost leg actuators reduce speed and make it more difficult to keep one's footing, gyro damage makes keeping the 'Mech's balance much harder or even impossible, limbs can be blown off entirely by a bad enough hit even if there is still internal structure left, and a hit to anything suitably explosive (like most but not all ammunition and some weapons) will obviously cause it to blow up, potentially taking the 'Mech with it.
• Games using White Wolf's Storyteller or Storytelling systems (and variants thereof), such as the Old and New World of Darkness games and Exalted, differentiate between normal damage, lethal damage, and "aggravated" damage (usually supernatural); while they do have hitpoints ("Health Levels"), unconsciousness and even permanent injuries occur well before you are down to your final hitpoint. They also have wound penalties and different healing times for different levels of damage.
• In games using the D6 system, such as Star Wars, you typically have one health level. Damage that exceeds your damage resistance roll either makes you stunned (at penalties for one round), wounded (at penalties for a long time), incapacitated (staying down), mortally wounded (down for 12 rounds if you're lucky, then dead) or dead. Some add "wounded twice" wherein you have massive penalties and fall over.
• In the short-lived TSR RPG Alternity, players kept track of four separate degrees of HP - fatigue, stun, wound and mortal. Stun represented bruises and pulled muscles, wound broken bones and deep cuts, and mortal grievous bodily harm. Fatigue was a measure of exactly what it says on the tin. Losing half of your stun or wound caused the player to take a penalty on all actions, and any point of mortal or fatigue loss gave the player a penalty. All these penalties stacked, meaning that characters could get to the point where, having taken enough damage and fought for a long enough time, they wouldn't even be able to stand.
• Mutants & Masterminds throws out Hit Points and replaces them with a Toughness save. Success means the character shrugged off the attack/rolled with the punch/whatever fits the situation, while failure could result in anything from a bruise to a one-hit KO, depending on the margin.
• Melee combat simulation RPG The Riddle Of Steel has "bleeding", which depletes hit points over time, is caused by minor injury and can cause eventual loss of consciousness (and rapidly thereafter, life), but a solid hit from a weapon will more than likely end the fight in one fell blow. The resulting combat system is extremely high fidelity in terms of simulating melee fights, but a little clunky and slow once more than two people are duking it out.
• Hero System uses the two-value variation—there is "body" and "stun"; stun recovers fast and body recovers slowly and represents real damage. Body points also don't scale to ridiculous values as your character "gains levels"; they're supposed to represent actual physical toughness, period, not the abstract "magical protections and evasive skill that slowly get eroded away" that D&D hit points represent. A more powerful version of Spider-Man, for example, wouldn't have more Body points, he'd instead be better at avoiding damage in the first place. Similarly, a more powerful version of the Hulk might only have a couple more Body points than a weak version of the Hulk, the difference instead being how high his Physical Defense and Energy Defense were (a character's defenses are subtracted from all incoming Stun and Body damage before it has a chance to affect them).
• Shadowrun, likewise, has two separate meters for keeping track of damage. The physical damage track keeps track of actual damage from swords, guns, etc. while the stun track keeps track of mental fatigue from spellcasting, being punched in the face, and tranquilizers (among other things). If you take enough stun damage, then you fall unconscious, and excess stun damage carries over into and is cumulative with physical damage. This does mean that a powerful Sleep spell that should theoretically just knock someone unconscious, when used on someone who has missed a few nights of sleep and was suffering a minor wound, could kill the person outright.
• Palladium, including Rifts and PFRPG, also keep separate track of lethal and non-lethal wounds. Hit Points represent actual injury, while S.D.C. (Structural Damage Capacity) represents the wind that can be knocked out of a football player without causing permanent damage. Most attacks go through your S.D.C. and only get to your Hit Points once those are depleted, and armor adds another layer on top of that. To make things even more confusing, very tough creatures and objects (especially in Rifts) have M.D.C. (Mega Damage Capacity); despite the name, this represents the same physical integrity as Hit Points (not S.D.C.), but orders of magnitude higher.
• Prose Descriptive Qualities games have your skills and abilities as your hit points. Your abilities (called Qualities or Fortes, depending on the game) are ranked, and points of damage translate into penalties on those ranks - one point of damage means decreasing one Quality by one rank. It's up to the player which Qualities get penalized at the time, so in a fight you can decide your combat Qualities are the last to go - or the first, if you really want to throw the fight. Later games in the system added Story Hooks - whichever Quality took the first point of damage in a fight is also used to suggest plot elements of the next adventure (and allows players to vote for the kinds of adventures they want to see). This has lead to at least one description of Truth & Justice (the superhero PDQ game) as "a game where you can punch Spider-Man in the Girlfriend" and that's why Mary Jane is always in trouble.
• Warhammer uses a characteristic called "wounds" (W) for this purpose. The vast majority of models in the game have only a single wound, and are removed as casualties when they suffer a wound. Hero-level characters tend to have two wounds, meaning they can take twice as much damage as the rank and file, while Lords tend to have three (with some supernaturally tough exceptions, such as Mummy Tomb Kings). Monstrous Infantry, such as Ogres and Trolls, also tend to have three wounds, as do most war engines like cannons and catapults, while huge monsters like Giants, Dragons etc. often have as many as six.
• The Dresden Files, using the Fate system, distinguishes between "stress" and "consequences". Any given successful attack that deals damage can potentially take a character out of a fight or other conflict if that damage is not fully absorbed, which can be done by (a) marking off one stress box of sufficient capacity or higher, (b) accepting one or more consequences, or (c) both; stress is basically ablative plot armor that resets between fights but is limited both in overall capacity and by that prohibition against marking off multiple boxes at once, while consequence slots can actually absorb more harm but must then be filled with fully-featured negative aspects that with increasing severity can last from at least through the next scene to several entire game sessions (making the respective slot unavailable against future attacks until cleared again) and can like any aspect be used against the character while they're there.
• Ironclaw had a hit point system in its first edition, which rendered one unconscious and rolling to avoid dying at half their total HP. The 2nd edition instead has attacks inflict status effects based on the damage points they deal, which can be reduced by saving throws and armor. So if a character took two damage from one attack they would be "Hurt" and "Afraid", but if they then took one damage from the next attack they wouldn't be any worse off because they already had the statuses.
• Authority points serve as this in Star Realms. Makes sense, as the players are trying to set up a new interstellar empire, and need support and influence to stay in power.
• The One Ring: "Endurance Points" are a slight variant in that they represent the character's overall will and ability to carry on. Endurance loss in combat represents general strain and demoralization rather than outright wounds, and a character starts to flag when their Endurance score falls below their Fatigue score. However, a character at zero Endurance is only unconscious, not dying, and can quickly recover.
• Dragon Quest uses the two-track system, with Fatigue tracking exhaustion and Endurance tracking wounds. A roll under 15% of an attacker's target attack roll is an 'endurance hit' that goes straight through to endurance; in addition, when a character runs out of fatigue, they take a penalty to all actions and further hits to directly to endurance.

Other Video Games

• flOw: Attacking is by literally attacking the round representations of these in enemies' Life Meters, a.k.a literally parts of their body.
• Pulse does not have a traditional HP system. Rather, the main character, Eva, can be injured (she doubles over in pain and cannot move for several seconds) and soft red borders (like those in some FPS games) appear. If Eva is hit again, she dies immediately. But after the borders disappear, Eva can be injured but not killed again, then wait until the borders disappear. If the game doesn't decide to kill her in one hit (this sometimes happens), the cycle of injury and waiting can continue indefinitely.
• The Wounds quality in Fallen London acts as sort of a reverse hit points meter; when it gets up to 8, your character dies... but death is notably not permanent in the Neath, so dying isn't really any more inconvenient than raising any of the other Menace stats to 8. (In fact, dying actually has far fewer negative consequences than going insane.)
• In Stern Pinball's Star Trek, the Vengeance is shown with a Life Meter during "Vengeance Multiball" showing its strength; it takes damage based on how many points the player scores.
• In Head Boxing, characters have hit points, and are knocked out when they reach 0.
• Head Basketball has an HP meter for each character; however, should it reach 0, the character is only momentarily stunned.
• Hearthstone: They're actually called "Health," but the concept is the same. In traditional Hearthstone, you start the game with 30 Health and if you get down to 0, you lose. Your goal is to kill your opponent by bringing their Health down to 0. Also, both players can summon minions that also have Health. In Solo Adventures mode, players can have different amounts of Health, and getting a character down to 0 Health sometimes represents something other than death, such as forcing your opponent to surrender or proving yourself to be a Worthy Opponent.
• Trick & Treat: They are shown in the party section of the main menu, and Amelia loses some if she gets hit by some of the traps. They're different for each playable character:
  • Amelia starts with 300HP, boosted up to 350 if the question at the start of the game is answered correctly.
  • Charlotte has 390HP at all times.
• ''Time Crisis 4", in addition to the usual lives, has also a health bar that only appears if you get bit by a terrorbyte.
• Yume Nikki: The player character, Madotsuki, begins the game with 1HP out of a max of 1, and you can increase it as much as you want by buying drinks at soda machines within her dream world. However, Yume Nikki has no environmental hazards of any kind, and the closest thing in the game to an enemy simply teleports you away upon touching you, rather than hurting you. As a result, the mechanic may as well not even exist, as there's absolutely no way to take damage. Like everything else in the game, this oddity has no explanation, in-universe or otherwise, and could very well be symbolic in some way.

Other Media

• Oversaturated World: Group Precipitation: "Finger on the Button, by FoME": Button Mash is presumably playing Pokémon, since keeping an enemy at low health and asleep is only relevant for catching, and the author note references the anime's opening song. Hit Points are referenced when it's spelt out as HP, a.k.a "aitch-pee". "Come on! It's at one aitch-pee and it's asleep!"
• Vainqueur The Dragon: In a RPG Mechanics 'Verse, this is the meaning of the HP abbreviation.
• Unraveled featured an entire episode dedicated to quantifying the HP of the viewer's real life pet. Brian also briefly lampshades the origin of the term in battleship warfare simulators, and using the original definition of the term (how many missiles you can take before sinking), points out that the usual number of HP for a person or pet is One.