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!!CriticalExistenceFailure in Tabletop Games:
* ''TabletopGame/AlbedoTheRolePlayingGame'' doesn't have HitPoints; instead, there are "threshold checks" to see if you die or take body point damage.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/ArsMagica'': every wound a character sustains imposes wide-ranging penalties that stack and scale to the severity of the wound. Since you roll for everything, including defense, [[UnstableEquilibrium each wound makes it more likely that the next attack will drop you]], and it gets harder and harder to hit your opponent. After a fight, all injuries have a chance of becoming worse through infection or exertion unless medically/magically treated, and heavy wounds require months of recovery time.
* Zig-zagged in ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'':
** {{Justified|Trope}} with battle armor infantry: the last point of armor represents the trooper inside, and, at that point, even the weakest weapons in the game are powerful enough to invoke the ChunkySalsaRule on a human body.
** Averted with your {{Humongous Mecha}}s. As they take damage, they can lose weapons, take engine hits, their gyros can be disrupted, and quite realistically [[SnipingTheCockpit the pilot can be killed with a headshot]]. Ammunition can also explode, critical heat sinks destroyed... whenever a 'Mech runs out of armor in a location, bad things happen. A mech ''can'' go from to full to zero with mostly center torso damage, but it is justified as the center torso houses the mech's fusion power plant and stabilization gyroscope, and is also the structural core of the whole machine.
** The pilot hitpoint system seems to play it straight at first, until you get to the consciousness system. As you take damage, it becomes harder and harder for your pilot to keep conscious after taking more injuries. So while you can technically fight at full power with only one HP left, you'll probably fall unconscious long before that happens.
* Averted by ''TabletopGame/BurningWheel''. There's something that looks like a wound meter, but it's only used to determine just how incapacitating each wound is. Wounds aren't cumulative, but the penalties they impose are. It's very hard to land a single blow that kills an enemy. It's easy to keep hammering on a foe until it gives up, or to beat it into unconsciousness/immobility and then cut its throat at your leisure.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/{{Cyberpunk}} 2020'': the more damage your character takes, the higher both the penalties to what he/she can do and the chances to fall unconscious or die are.
* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' has no wound penalties, thus ensuring that any character with at least one hit point remaining (and several without that) is capable of any kind of action and exertion. This is {{Handwaved}} in some editions by the claim that hit points don't actually represent health, but the "ability to avoid injury" (despite the fact that they are recovered through bandages and magical curing spells).
** In [[TabletopGame/AdvancedDungeonsAndDragons1stEdition 1st edition]], this is inconsistently applied. Most sourcebooks state that a character at zero hit points is dead, but the ''Dungeon Master's Guide'' suggests that a dying character can be raised to 0HP with medical care and be back in the fight after weeks of rest.
** In [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragonsThirdEdition 3rd Edition]]:
*** By default, you aren't dead until you reach -10 hp. At 0 hp you are disabled, and will lose HP with any action except movement that doesn't heal you. At -1 to -9, you are dying, meaning you fall unconscious and begin bleeding out at a rate of 1 hp per turn (unless you have an ability like Die Hard), but any form of healing will stabilize you.
*** Due to this, a [[invoked]]PopularGameVariant is to have characters die after being dealt a truly massive amount of damage. (3.5 does have "[[ChunkySalsaRule Death by massive damage]]" rules -- any hit that deals over 50 damage needs a fort save)
*** Even funnier when a character with the Delay Death spell and -1000 HP or so gets tossed into an Antimagic Field.
*** Or when you take a Barbarian with a character option that explicitly says you ''do not die'', no matter how deep into negative integers you go, so long as you are still fighting and still raging.
*** Also, drowning immediately sets your HP to zero. There are at least three ways to exploit this. One of them involves transfinite numbers. (This ended up being patched in errata.)
*** This is taken even further by users of the Diehard feat or the Ferocity ability (boars, for instance). They're allowed to continue fighting at negative hit points as long as they're above -10, meaning that they have two settings--fighting mad, and dropping dead.
** In [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragonsFourthEdition 4th edition]]:
*** You are unconscious and bleeding out at -1 HP or below, and need to roll a save every turn to not die. If you are healed at all, your HP is set to 0 before healing, the same if you are stabilized. If you fail 3 saves, you are dead [[DeathIsCheap until further notice]]. In-universe, [[SchrodingersGun no-one knows]] if you're critically injured or NotQuiteDead: if your death saves run out, you were bleeding out the whole time; if you get healing or roll a nat 20, then the injury was OnlyAFleshWound.
*** This edition takes the HandWave of HitPoints as general "ability to avoid injury" to its logical conclusion, allowing characters to restore hit points by hearing a rousing speech or just taking a minute to catch their breath.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'':
** The original game averts this... in theory. The more health levels you mark off with damage, the greater the penalty on rolls, and [[UnstableEquilibrium the worse your odds for the rest of the fight]]. However, due to RocketTagGameplay, the availability of cheap [[ManaShield Essence-fueled]] [[NoSell Perfect Defences]] to Exalts, and the [[MadeOfPlasticine fragility]] of [[{{Mooks}} Extras]], it's relatively uncommon for wound penalties to come into play, since attacks tend to be either harmless or a OneHitKill.
** Following the 2.5 errata, Exalted is now a full aversion, with no qualifiers whatsoever. With decreased lethality across the board, [[ArmorIsUseless armour actually being useful now]], and perfect spam being beaten with the nerf goremaul until it stopped twitching, those health level penalties are now actually relevant.
* Averted in games based on the UsefulNotes/{{FATE}} system, like ''TabletopGame/TheDresdenFiles'' and ''TabletopGame/SpiritOfTheCentury''. Characters can absorb a limited amount of Stress [[AfterCombatRecovery per scene]], representing their physical, mental, and/or social resilience. Beyond that, damage turns into Consequences of increasing severity (anything from "Winded" to "Severed Leg"), which don't go away without treatment, have lasting effects (life-long ones, at worst), and can be exploited by opponents to hamper them further.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasy [[http://www.finalfantasyd20.com d20]]'', a homebrewed conversion of ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'', makes this a special rule for "Shindroids" (read: {{Magitek}} robots): They don't follow the usual incapacitation/bleed-out rule the other races are subject to, dying when their negative HP equals their constitution score due to the fact that they're robots. They're still broken at 0, but they don't hurt themselves by moving like everyone else.
* ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' averts this trope by including shock penalties for every landed attack, specific rules for dismemberment and allowing characters to survive down to -5xHP as long as they make HT rolls at -1, -2, -3 and -4xHP. In fact the rules note that it is only as -10xHP that there is nothing left of the character. In addition, called shots can target the vitals (for extra damage), a limb (where a given amount of damage will cripple that limb), or the groin (because crushing attacks inflict double the amount of shock on male characters). Note that the above-mentioned dismemberment rules are basically an extension of crippling rules--usually for use with really sharp blades.
* Used on a few levels in ''TabletopGame/{{Infinity}}''. Most units, when they receive too many wounds, will become unconscious and can be revived with proper medical skill or killed by enemy attacks. However, there are a few [[ZigZagged different ways this can go]].
** [[InstantDeathBullet Shock ammunition]] will {{One Hit Kill}} models with one wound, which is standard. Some other nonstandard ammunition can have the same effect, skipping the Unconscious step and invoking this trope.
** Models with [[HeroicWillpower Dogged]] will continue functioning with critical injuries for as long as you keep assigning them orders. When you run out of orders or decide to focus elsewhere, they'll drop unconscious on the spot.
** Models with [[ImplacableMan No Wound Incapacitation]] ''completely'' run on this trope. Until they die, these models will continue to fight at full efficiency. Amusingly, a No Wound Incapacitation model can seek out medical care long past the point when they should be taking a nap, possibly by sprinting across the map to a safe place. If the doctor botches their Willpower roll to heal the injuries, the NWI character pauses for a second, notices their injuries and [[PuffOfLogic collapsing dead on the spot]].
* ''TabletopGame/{{Ironclaw}}'': There are HitPoints, but if you take too many wounds, you have to start rolling checks against blacking out, and you can die with only six wounds if you fail a death test.
* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'':
** You start with twenty life, and can gain into the hundreds with the right deck. Except for a few cards that respond to life totals at other levels, the only thing they do is say that you die at zero and that you can't [[CastFromHitPoints pay life you don't have]] for abilities. There are even a few deck builds based around a card that lets a player effectively pay life as mana coupled with an X-pay burn spell(which deals damage based on how much {{Mana}} you pay) to precisely kill the opponent on turn 2-3 with 1 point of life left.
** Likewise, creatures die when dealt damage greater than or equal to their Toughness in a single turn. Anything less is shrugged off. There are ''some'' exceptions. For example, many black kill spells penalize Power ''and'' Toughness, meaning the creature both deals less damage and dies from less damage. In addition, being reduced to zero Toughness by a penalizing effect destroys the creature on the spot (and because it's not damage, kills creatures that cannot be slain in battle).
** Averted with Planeswalkers. Planeswalker hit points are an abstraction called "Loyalty," meant to represent how much damage they're willing to suffer for their ally (the player) and what services they're willing to offer. Most Planeswalkers have an ability that gains loyalty, another, more powerful one that costs loyalty, and a very powerful one that takes several turns of building loyalty to call on (and often de facto wins the game). Importantly, a Planeswalker can't use an ability that costs more loyalty than it has. Dealing damage to a Planeswalker reduces its loyalty, putting some of its abilities out of reach.
* {{Averted}} in the ''[[TabletopGame/MistbornTheOriginalTrilogy Mistborn Adventure Game]]''. If an attack deals more than a quarter of your current Resilience in damage, you take a Serious Burden, which anyone attacking or opposing you can invoke to add a die to their pool. If the attack deals more than half your Resilience, you take a Grave Burden, which is worth two dice to your opponents.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/MutantsAndMasterminds'', which doesn't even ''have'' HitPoints. More specifically, you make a special toughness save to avoid damage, with failed saves imposing a penalty on future saves. Characters who fail by a large enough margin are staggered, crippling them to the point where they can only take one action per round. Characters who hit the staggered threshold twice are immediately defeated.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Nobilis}}'':
** Downplayed in 2nd edition, where the characters are basically gods. All Nobles have one or more deadly, serious, and surface wounds they can take before death. A Noble suffers no ill effect for ''any'' lesser damage until they have used up all their wound ranks of a higher level.[[note]] Therefore, you can't beat a Noble to death with your bare hands without miraculous strength because a Noble can take an infinite number of surface or serious wounds as long as that Noble has a single deadly wound left. Gets worse when multiple gifts like Durant and Immortal increase the minimum threshold of damage needed to inflict each level of wound.[[/note]] Even the weakest Noble could survive three gunshots to the head without being significantly impaired. You do however have to spend slightly more miracle points on miracles when out of deadly wounds (and more when out of serious wounds).
** Nobles are also nearly immune to non-miraculous damage thanks to the Rite of Holy Fire, which blocks mortal "insult" against you. The higher your Spirit, the more fine-grained the block, so while any Noble would be immune to the outrage of a mortal tactical nuclear strike, an Inferno would also be immune to a mortal's petty fists as well. At middle tiers, this means that you could walk out of a car bombing, shrug off machine gun fire, and then be taken down by a punk with a switchblade.
** Third edition mixes this up a bit. You take wounds when you resist the impact of a miracle, but each wound brings with it a bond (for surface wounds) or affliction (for those higher up the tree), and taking a wound of a certain level heals all the ones below it. This means, among other things, that players with Bonds of low combat utility sometimes go out of their way to take surface wounds that provide Bonds such as "I'm mad that he ruined my suit (1)", and that nuking a Noble might in fact make them hugely resistant to physical damage when they take an Affliction of "I'm a ghost (4)". However, Afflictions activate miracles when the HG thinks they should, and are under no restriction preventing them from being massive inconveniences, so unless a player is very careful they are likely to start running into self-originating harmful miracles as long as they're wounded - the guy who took ghostliness now has to possess an Anchor to make his physical actions relevant, for example.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Numenera}}'' averts this with ''three'' health/energy bars, each representing a different pair of ability scores. Damage of a specific type carries over to the other bars once a bar is exhausted. If one of the bars drops to zero, you're injured, and everything is harder to do. If two bars drop to zero, you're reduced to crawling on the floor. You die when all three bars drop to zero.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/TheOneRing'':
** [[PlayerCharacter Adventurers]] become Weary when their [[HitPoints Endurance]] total falls below their current Fatigue score, causing all rolls of 1, 2, and 3 on any of their six-sided skill dice to count as zero.
** At zero Endurance, adventurers are only unconscious unless they've also become Wounded from a CriticalHit or similarly serious harm, in which case they're dying but can still be saved by prompt medical treatment.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' derives its death mechanics from ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragonsThirdEdition'': Characters are in full form at positive HitPoints, are incapacitated at 0HP, start bleeding out at negative HP until they receive healing, and die when their negative HP is equal to or greater than their Constitution score. It also features optional rules for averting this trope, in which characters take scaling penalties depending on how damaged they are.
* Zig-zagged in ''[[TabletopGame/PokemonTabletopAdventures Pokemon Tabletop United]]''. A pokemon is equally dangerous at full hit points, as it is at 1 hit point, but repeated hurting and healing over time will lead to [[DentedIron degrading durability]]. Dropping to any multiple of 50% Max. hit points, or taking at least 50% hit points in a single hit causes an "Injury" which can only be healed by dedicated medical attention, and time. Five or more injuries begins to cause damage every turn, and ten injuries means death.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/RocketAge'', with damage taken off the character's statistics, drastically reducing their effectiveness. If it wasn't for [[PlotArmour Story Points]] most characters would walk around permanently crippled.
* Averted in [[https://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/tsoy2/book1--rulebook.html The Shadow of Yesterday]]/[[https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/311958/Solar-System Solar System]]. Individual instances of Harm stack up. When you reach the "Bruised" level you incur a temporary dice penalty on your next action, then at the "Bloodied" level the penalty sticks around until you're healed. Hit "Broken" and you have to spend [[ResourcesManagementGameplay metagame currency]] to even act at all. Suffer any Harm past Broken and you're utterly defeated--this could mean death, but it depends on your opponent's intention, and Harm can be [[MaliciousSlander social]], [[PsychologicalCombat mental]] or [[BreakThemByTalking emotional]] as well as physical.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' averts this, adding increasing wound penalties to all actions after the character is down to about half health. However, this is played straight if a character purchases the "Pain Editor" bioware, which allows them to ignore wound penalties in exchange for not knowing how close they are to unconsciousness/death.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/Sorcerer2001''. Not only aren't there any HitPoints in this game, but taking any damage in a fight is modeled as a reduction of the victim's dice pool for the upcoming actions, making its effects immediately palpable long before the character is taken out.
* Averted in some [=d20=]-based {{Tabletop RPG}}s, most notably ''TabletopGame/StarWarsD20'' (the Revised Core Rulebook edition), as well as ''TabletopGame/{{Spycraft}}'' and its derivee, the ''Series/StargateSG1'' RPG.
** Hit points are split into vitality points, which represent the type of damage a character can shrug off relatively easily, and wound points, which represent serious injury. After running out of vitality points, the character is fatigued, suffers ability penalties and cannot run, but is still alive, and further attacks will damage wound points. (Vitality points increase with level; wound points do not.) Only after running out of wound points does a CriticalExistenceFailure occur. Some types of damage, like fall damage, affect wound points directly and ignore vitality points, as do critical hits. So if you roll well, it's entirely possible for a first-level character to one-shot Darth Vader.
** The ''Saga Edition'' of the [=d20=]-based ''Franchise/StarWars'' RPG would use hit points (for characters, vehicles, structures and objects alike), but both a damage threshold and a condition track. (Do damage equal to or greater than the damage threshold, the recipient moves down one step on the condition track, with a corresponding penalty to certain rolls: -1, -2, -5, -10, and then unconscious or unwilling-to-fight/resist.) Your character becomes unconscious if the damage is below its damage threshold, and killed or destroyed if the damage is equal to or greater than its damage threshold. An explanation in one of the preview articles was essentially that every blow failed to be serious or connect... except the one that dropped you to zero hit points.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'' averts this by having damage directly reduce your physical stats. You fall unconscious when two hit zero, and [[StatDeath die when the third one joins them]].
* Zig-zagged in ''TabletopGame/TunnelsAndTrolls'': a wounded monster fights less well than an unwounded one, but player characters consider all wounds but the last one (when the character dies) to be superficial.
* Averted in ''TabletopGame/UnknownArmies'': instead of players keeping track of hitpoints, they are tallied by the GM, who then describes the players' injuries back to them. Each injury must deal at least one hit point naturally, regardless of first aid, and heavy damage leaves permanent skill penalties.
* PlayedWith in ''TabletopGame/VictoryInThePacific''. On the one hand, any damage whatsoever removes the gunnery bonus from ships that have it, and each tick of damage reduces a ship's speed by 1. On the other hand, as long a ship's damage is less than its armor, it still gets the same gunnery factor and if it has airstrikes, they aren't affected at all. But then one more tick of damage such that damage equals armor, and any gunnery factor is reduced to 1 and any airstrike to 0.
* The ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' franchise:
** Averted in ''TabletopGame/WarhammerAgeOfSigmar'' and the 9th (current) edition of ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' for the most part. Units with a large amount of [[HitPoints wounds]] (generally 10+), like monsters and vehicles, have some of their statistics reduced when wounded, becoming slower, weaker, and/or less accurate. Units with few wounds (1-3) do not degrade in the same way, but they rarely survive more than a few successful attacks anyway, so it doesn't really matter. The trope is only ''really'' played straight for the select few units that lie somewhere in the middle (6-9 wounds), such as the Daemon Prince, the Dreadnought, or the Hive Tyrant: tough enough to survive for a while, but not tough enough to warrant a degradation table - these units are particularily dangerous on the battlefield as a result.
** This trope ''was'' played straight for multi-[[HitPoints wound]] models in previous editions of ''Warhammer 40000'' and ''[[TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}} Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]''. Only a few units had any special rules that were based on the wounds remaining/taken - a Steam Tank had more chance of blowing up if you push it hard when it's already taken damage, a Doomwheel had a greater (even more than usual...) chance of going out of control the more it gets damaged, and Hydras had their number of attacks linked to the number of wounds (read: heads) left. Of course, it worked both ways as there were also items or special rules that give bonus attacks or powers as the model or unit gets closer to death.
** ''Horus Heresy'''s general rules both avert and play this trope straight, depending on whether or not you are talking about vehicles or monstrous creatures. A vehicle will avert the trope, losing hull points and taking damage to the weapons/motivational units (whatever they may be, it IS a big galaxy) or having crew react poorly to having bullets or worse (usually worse) ping off the hull, even having various destruction options based on the severity of the killing blow. On the other hand, monstrous creatures will suffer no ill effects until the final wound is lost, at which point the trope is displayed brilliantly and they are simply removed from play, rarely with any damaging effects to the battlefield around.
** In ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasyRoleplay'', creatures don't automatically die at zero HitPoints. Any attack that deals more damage than they have HitPoints remaining causes a random CriticalHit effect based on the [[SubsystemDamage location]] and severity of the blow, ranging from "die instantly" to "suffer a minor penalty for one round".
** Averted in ''TabletopGame/{{Inquisitor}}'': Unless armour totally stops damage to a body part there are repercussions, both immediate and long-lasting. For example, a minimum-damage wound to the head will still cause minor stunning, whereas a heavy shot to the groin will knock them prone, stun them, make them bleed heavily, slow them down and possibly send them into system shock. The only chance of not having a negative effect is taking a weak hit to a limb (you can shrug off the first few points of arm or leg damage), but anything more than a graze will cause bad things to happen. And that's before you factor in blacking out from accumulated pain, or simply having them go [[FreakOut Totally Batshit Crazy]] due to post-traumatic stress. However, tthe only way to die is via headshot or massive damage, and it generally takes dozens of shots to inflict massive damage. Heck, you can shoot a Space Marine in the head with an anti-tank gun and he'll only have a 1/70 chance of dying.
** In ''TabletopGame/DarkHeresy'' and its sibling ''TabletopGame/RogueTrader'', you can take a good amount of damage without any ill effects (apart from having problems with healing it back), but as soon as you've lost the last wound, each wounding hit makes yet more nasty things with you. And of course, there's no difference if you're hit in the head, or leg, while you still have more than zero wounds - apart from difference in armour on those locations(see usual Warhammer "no helmet" problem).
* ''TabletopGame/TheWitcherGameOfImagination'' averts it in a really painful way. The less [[HitPoints Vitality]] a character has, the more penalties are added, as a way to [[RealityIsUnrealistic emulate effects of real injuries]]. Authors gave players a choice if they want to use this aversion as a rule, as it leads to HarderThanHard territory.
* In ''TabletopGame/TheWorldOfDarkness'' [=RPG=]s by Creator/WhiteWolf:
** Averted by default: the more damaged you are, the more dice you lose from your actions, to the point where sufficient injury denies you the use of your skills entirely. When all a character's health boxes are full of [[DamageTyping lethal damage]], they're unconscious and will quickly die unless stabilized.
** ''TabletopGame/PrometheanTheCreated'': {{Justified|Trope}} to emphasize the rampaging engine of destruction a Promethean can easily become. They take ''no'' penalties from damage, and unlike other supernatural creatures, do ''not'' risk falling unconscious when all their Health Levels are filled with damage, fighting to the very death. And if they ''do'' die, they can come back.
** In ''TabletopGame/WraithTheOblivion'', a wraith's corpus (its physical form) is only a shell surrounding its psyche, so damage doesn't hinder you and pain is at most psychosomatic (you can even voluntarily sacrifice a corpus level to become temporarily intangible, which lets you walk through walls). If you lose every point, however, you are instantly in deep trouble, because the ''real'' purpose of the corpus is to anchor you to the Shadowlands, and without it your psyche is tossed into the Tempest (the "next level") where you're an open target for psychological attacks from your Shadow and its allies.
** ''TabletopGame/PrincessTheHopeful:'' The Practical Magic of Storms lets members of that Court (Noble and Sworn alike) invert the usual wound ''penalties'' into ''bonuses'' and not have to roll for unconsciousness.
** The {{Sourcebook}} ''Innocents'' for child characters has wound penalties that start sooner (e.g.: a -1 to all dice rolls starting at their fifth-to-last wound, rather than third-to-last for adults) and add extra effects, like losing the ability to use HeroicWillpower. The [[SkillScoresAndPerks merit]] "Tough" lessens these penalties, with all the implicit fears for anyone who sees how inured to pain the kid is.
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