Hit Point
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Hit points, also known as health points, damage points, life points, 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 and DP.
Although many video games use a life bar to display a character's health and how close the player is to failure (death, being knocked out, etc), many wargames, role-playing games, and combat-oriented video games instead use numbers to show more accurately the amount of damage an object or player in the game can take before becoming ineffective.
In some games, hit points are determined by the type and strength of the attack, and when an attack succeeds hit points are deducted from the target's remaining supply. In most games using this system, when a character reaches zero hit points, the character dies, becomes unconscious, or is destroyed. One limitation of hit points is that in reality people generally lose combat effectiveness as they are hurt. However, conveying that realistically has proven very difficult for the gaming industry, (especially with "living" characters; robots or vehicles, which also have Hit Points, can register damage as systems going offline). Also, the use of hitpoints instead of more realistic, yet violent gauges of "health", may help a game get a lower ESRB rating, as showing blood often raises the ESRB score.
HP may also be displayed with icons rather than numbers. For instance, 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 hit points the player has remaining. The Legend of Zelda series are other good examples of this method. In such games, often some 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.
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".
Other games, such as Deus Ex, show an image of a human body, which is all 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.
Some games give bonuses or enhancements to players if they have or attain a specific amount of HP. Final Fantasy VII's secret "All Lucky 7's" feature causes a character that has 7,777 HP to start attacking enemies automatically for 64 hits, dealing 7,777 points of damage with each hit. However, if the player wins the battle, that character will then have only 1 HP.
Zero and negative HP 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. They both involve hit points (HP), a numerical representation of a unit's health.
Zero and negative HP
Zero and negative HP 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
Some enemies in computer role-playing 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 terms of programming, there's no condition put when the enemy will die based on its HP. Zero HP allows for immortallity and gives the illusion to an unsuspecting player that the enemy has a ridiculously high amount of HP.
- Examples
- In Super Mario RPG, the "Dry Bones" enemy is one enemy that has zero HP. Both it and the upgraded "Vomer" counterpart are immune to regular attacks, but will instantly die to any special attack.
- In EarthBound, Giygas in its third form cannot be defeated by simply attacking. Despite when Paula uses her Pray command and the result is damages in the hundreds of thousands, this is probably just to show hyperbolically that when other people pray for the characters, Giygas cannot withstand it.
- In Breath of Fire 3, when battling Balio and Sunder for the first time, they cannot be defeated no matter what.
- In various Final Fantasy games, characters inflicted with the zombie status effect will have zero HP.
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 unconscious or similarly inactive. Negative HP are most often found in role-playing games. For example, a Player Character in Dungeons & Dragons, with HP in the range of -1 and -9 is not considered dead, rather, they are dying. For a character usage, in the Starship Troopers RPG, a character can be brought to a negative HP level and yet still be revived by a field medic.Another application of negative HP can be seen in Breath of Fire during boss fights. The boss continues to live and fight for a certain finite HP limit even though it's indicated life bar has depleted.
You can also see negative HP in the FPS game Doom 3 if you happened to die from a highly damaging event (being at the center of an explosion or being crushed), in which the life display reads a negative number, though this is probably just for a comic exaggeration. In the Quake games, negative HP can tell the player how much damage the player character took. Between 0 and -40 the player model is intact and in one of several premade death poses; beyond -40, the player model is gibbed.
See also
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