Hit point
Categories: Computer and video game gameplay | Role-playing game terminology | Wargames
Hit Points, also known as Health Points, Damage Points, Life Points and countless other synonyms are points used to determine a characters health and show how much damage attacks deal in 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, the loss of hit points has little effect until a target reaches zero hit points, at which point the character dies, becomes unconscious, or is destroyed. This shows the limitations of hitpoints, as in reality people generally loose combat effectiveness as they are hurt. However, conveying that realistically has proven very difficult for the gaming industry, especially with people, as space ships can register damage as systems going offline. Also, the use of hitpoints as opposed to more realistic, yet violent guages 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 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".
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, dealing 7,777 points of damage with each hit. However, if the player wins the battle, that character will then have only 1 HP.
References
- "Final Fantasy VII Side Quests." Final Fantasy Shrine. Accessed on October 6, 2005.de:Trefferpunkte