Health (game mechanism)

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Health is a gameplay mechanism, used in various forms of role-playing and video games to give a value to characters, enemies, NPCs, and objects related to death and/or the defeat of the player, enemies, or NPCs, or the destruction and/or ruination of the object. This value can either be numerical, semi-numerical as in hit points, or arbitrary as in a life bar.

Hit points

Hit points, also known as life points, HP, damage points, life bar, or just health (and countless other synonyms), are points used to determine a character's health and show how much damage attacks deal in role-playing games, computer and video games and wargames. These terms are usually shortened to two letter acronyms such as HP.

History

Hit points are such an integral part of almost all games that depict violent conflict that it is hard to imagine that they were invented. In an 2004 interview with Allen Rausch of GameSpy, David Arneson talks about how the origins of hit points can be found at the very beginning of role-playing games. While Arneson and Gary Gygax were adapting the medieval war game Chainmail to a fantasy setting, a process that would lead to the game Blackmoor and eventually Dungeons & Dragons, the two men saw that the emphasis of the gameplay was moving from large armies to small groups of heroes and eventually to the identification of one player and one character that is so essential to role-playing as it was originally conceived. Players became attached to their heroes and did not want them to die every time they lost a die roll.

Use in role-playing games

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game and D&D-derived games, player characters' hit points are determined by character level, and monsters' hit points are determined by a mechanism similar to character levels called "Hit Dice". Characters with high constitution will have an advantage when hit points are assigned.

In console role-playing games, the objective is to deplete the HP of enemies while maintaining the HP of the main characters. Health can typically be refilled by using a restorative item, staying the night at an "inn", or using healing magic. In most games using this system, when a character reaches zero hit points, the character dies, becomes unconscious, or is destroyed.

Use in video games

Life bar

A health bar is used in many video games to display a character's health and how close the player is to failure (death, being knocked out, etc). A typical life bar is a horizontal rectangle which begins full of color. If damage is taken or mistakes are made, the colored area gradually reduces. There are many variations on the life bar:

In Street Fighter and other fighting games, the bar doesn't immediately decrease when damage is taken. Instead, an area representing the damage is marked, and the health lost quickly drains away. This is useful in assessing the amount of damage caused by a particular attack.

Some games use an incremental bar, composed of many smaller bars. Each attack will remove a certain number of these bars. This system is used in the Mega Man series.

Some video games also feature a recharging health bar (sometimes depicted as an energy shield). In these games, the player character cannot usually take as much damage as a player with a traditional life bar, but health regenerates over time (Usually when the player is hiding from enemy fire). Notable examples of this are the Halo series, Call of Duty 2, 3, and 4, Destroy All Humans! and Gears of War.

In order to create an immersive gaming experience, some games do away with the health bar (and other on-screen displays) completely and try to present a player's health in other ways, such as showing the player character limping or displaying visible wounds when they are injured. In the Resident Evil video games, health is shown both with the player character limping and pressing his/her wounds in pain, and with an EKG display in the inventory screen. Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie has no life bar; instead, the screen flashes red, and vision becomes blurred (more damage indicated by a deeper red coloration). In more recent games, characters usually slouch over and breathe heavily (as a result of low health) when left idle.

Icon based health

Icon based health tends to combine both hit points and a life bar, where the value is arbitrary, but can be counted. For example, in the video game series The Legend of Zelda, the main character’s health is represented as small hearts, located near the top of the screen. While the number of hearts can be counted, the amount of hearts lost can vary depending on how strong the attack is. Weak attacks against the player will take only a fraction of a heart (usually one-quarter or one-half) and stronger attacks may take many whole hearts at once. HP may also be displayed with icons rather than numbers.

Several games make use of similar heads-up displays. Super Mario Bros. 2 uses small red icons (in 16-bit versions of the game, they're changed to hearts) in the top left corner to designate how many hitpoints the player has remaining, and Dracula for the Sega Genesis uses small flasks of liquid.

Other games, such as Deus Ex, show a HUD of a human body, which is green to begin with. As the player takes damage, the respective region of the body turns yellow, orange, red, and eventually disappears altogether. For the head and torso, this is fatal.

Incremental health

In the Sonic the Hedgehog series, the player collects rings, which are used as a life indicator. They are shown as numbers at the upper left side of the screen. When an enemy hits the player character, Sonic, his rings scatter around. If the player is fast enough, he can catch some of the scattered rings. If Sonic loses his rings, he is vulnerable and will lose a life when an enemy hits him.

Percentage meter

In the Super Smash Bros. series, instead of health bars featured in most fighting games, percentage meters are used. When attacking an opponent or being attacked by an opponent, the percentage meter rises based on the damage inflicted; as the percentage meter increases, the character gradually becomes easier to knock away with strong attacks, possibly getting knocked out of the arena.

Special uses

Two special uses of HP involve zero and negative HP. They are two special conditions for certain role-playing games that allows for special actions that must be done in order to disrupt normal battle rules.

Zero HP

Zero HP is related to some cases when an enemy's HP is visible, it's reported to be zero. In this case, some enemies in games are invulnerable, because their HP is 0 to begin with and its maximum HP is 0. Since the enemy isn't dead at 0 HP, doing more damage will not do anything, and healing it will not do anything either because it's at its maximum HP.

In Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, the "Dry Bones" creature is an enemy that has zero HP. Both it and the upgraded "Vomer" counterpart are immune to regular attacks, but they are defeated instantly by any special attack. This is probably due to their being undead enemies.

In various Final Fantasy games, characters inflicted with the zombie status effect will have zero HP. Games in this family have also carried the characteristic of having undead characters and enemies taking damage due to restorative items and spells.

Negative HP

In some games, a character or monster can be "alive" although their HP are below zero. Usually, the character is unable to do anything; they are considered to be unconscious or similarly inactive. In the case with enemies, some of them must be brought down to a negative HP level before they can be defeated. Negative HP are most often found in role-playing games.

A Player Character in some editions of Dungeons & Dragons with HP of zero is not dead; they are knocked unconscious at zero HP. In the range of -1 and -9, they are considered to be mortally wounded and dying, and their HP will steadily drop unless stabilized (naturally, or through healing). At -10, the character dies. Note, however, that a player who takes 50 points of damage or more in one blow (according to the "Death from Massive Damage" alternate rule), must make a saving throw based on the amount of damage even if they are not reduced to -10; failure of this check causes the player to die regardless of remaining HP. The exact value of the "Massive Damage" amount is based on the size category or total hit points of the character/monster being attacked. Notably, in some editions of Dungeons and Dragons, once a character is reduced to zero hitpoints, they perish.

In the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games by BioWare (and then by Obsidian), a character that has been knocked out will often be displayed with a negative amount of health, if they have taken more damage that is necessary to knock them out.

In EverQuest, a player is knocked out cold at zero hit points, and is killed below -9.

References

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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 20:40:44 PDT (GMT -0700)
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