History CriticalExistenceFailure / TabletopGames

*** Though TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} following the same default rules for death and dying as in D&D 3.5, it also features an optional ruleset for averting this trope, in which characters take scaling penalties depending on how damaged they are. It's similar in concept to 4e's "bloodied" rules.

* Used on a few levels in [[TableTopGame/Infinity 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]].

* In ''TabletopGame/BleakWorld'' you are as strong at 1 hp as you are at full HP. Oddly enough, some weapons damage limbs for exactly 1 turn and then your leg magically fixes itself... [[AWizardDidIT Somehow.]]

** Averted with the Doom of Malai'tai and inverted with the Clawed Fiends. The former gets proportionally stronger with each wound it has (it can gain wounds during the course of the game) as its wound statistic is directly tied to it's strength (both its innate strength, and the strength of its weapon). Clawed Fiends, on the other hand, gains attacks when it loses wounds.

** In addition, it's possible to perform called shots (by taking penalties to the roll) so that you can shoot (or stab) someone in the vitals (for extra damage) or in a limb (where a given amount of damage will cripple that limb). Note that the above-mentioned dismemberment rules are basically an extension of crippling rules--usually for use with really sharp blades.

* Both Played Straight, and Averted in ''[[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 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.

* 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. Viral ammunition does the same thing but bypasses different resistances, whereas some ammo such as [[SharpenedToASingleAtom monofilament]] will kill [[UpToEleven regardless of remaining wounds or structure]].

* Used on a few levels in [[TableTopGame/Infinity 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.

* Played strait in 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.

* Averted in some [=d20=]-based {{Tabletop RPG}}s, most notably ''StarWars'' [=d20=] (the Revised Core Rulebook edition), as well as ''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.

* While most {{Tabletop RPG}}s have some kind of wound penalties, ''DungeonsAndDragons'' does not, 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). This, of course, inspired on RPG.net {{Fauxtivational Poster}}s of bloodied and beaten (but still standing) characters with a caption of "I've still got one HP left!" (Or of Creator/MontyPython's Black Knight, captioned "Anything over 0 means I'm good to go, baby!")

*** In 4e, if you fall below 0 hit points and are healed, you ''start'' healing from 0 hit points. This is especially good with surgeless healing (except for regeneration, which specifically does not work if you are below 0 hit points). There are cleric powers that can create a "zone" of healing that will continually revive PCs that fall in it.

* Averted in ''BattleTech'', a sci-fi miniatures game. As your 'Mechs (huge bipedal war machines of death) take damage, they can lose weapons, take engine hits, their gyros can be disrupted, and quite realistically [[AnyoneCanDie 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.

* ''TabletopGame/PrometheanTheCreated'' plays it straight 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.
** Justified, however in ''TabletopGame/VampireTheRequiem'' where vampires don't fall unconscious after having their health bars filled with bashing damage, and can still fight on as long as they have even a single health slot of non-lethal damage left. This is justified, however, because Vampires can control their blood flow, to prevent themselves from bleeding out, and as the undead, their wounds don't get better or worse.
** 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.

* Averted in most of ''TabletopGame/TheWorldOfDarkness'' [=RPG=]s by White Wolf: 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. It even varies from supernatural to supernatural, where vampires are able to ignore more wound penalties than humans, and so on.
** ''TabletopGame/PrometheanTheCreated'' is the exception, playing the trope straight: Prometheans are ''literally'' held together by their own life force. In fact, they don't even suffer wound or injury penalties until they have taken so much damage that they are only a few hitpoints away from permanent death, and even then, if they get healed, there's no real lasting damage. And even if they ''don't'' get healed, they can still ''rise from death''. And every Promethean gets ''one'' "Get Out Of Death Free" card.
** ''{{Exalted}}'' averts this...in theory. The more health levels you mark off with damage, the greater the penalty on rolls. However. Due to the low number of health levels even for people who invest heavily in Charms to get more, and the insanely high amounts of damage Exalts can dish out, and the availability of cheap [[NoSell perfect defences]], you end up with a situation in which two Exalts leap around for twenty minutes in a battle of attrition, perfectly evading or parrying each other's attacks, until one of them runs out of [[{{Mana}} Essence]] and [[OneHitKill dies instantly]], neither side having felt a wound penalty that wasn't instant death. Against most opponents without perfect defences, you skip the battle of attrition and cut straight to the instant death, ''still'' without the involvement of a wound penalty (and [[{{Mooks}} Extras]] [[MadeOfPlasticine die so easily]] almost nobody remembers they ''have'' wound penalties because you can kill them with harsh language or a [[FingerPokeOfDoom finger poke]]).

** This new Exalted system of combat (which is known for it's brokenness, to the point where a selling point for the 3rd edition is a complete overhaul of the combat rules) leads to a thing called "The death spiral" where, a player, having taken damage, takes penalties to rolls, and thus, continues to take damage, which make the penalties to rolls even worse...
*** Most Exalts have a Charm that allows them to bypass wound penalties, but not all of those are actually ''good''.

** Averted with the Doom of Malai'tai and inverted with the Clawed Fiends. The former gets proportionally stronger with each wound it has (it can gain wounds during the course of the game) as it's wound statistic is directly tied to it's strength (both it's innate strength, and the strength of it's weapon). Clawed Fiends, on the other hand, gains attacks when it loses wounds.

* Averted in ''{{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. And due to having their scrotum turned into steak tartare.

* {{Pathfinder}} Oracles can more literally do this to ''other'' people; one of the mysteries they can study is Time, which gives them access to a revelation ability that removes targets from spacetime altogether for a number of rounds if the target fails their Fortitude save.

* {{Pathfinder}} Oracles can play with this by doing it to ''other'' people; one of the mysteries they can study is Time, which gives them access to a revelation ability allowing them to banish targets from spacetime altogether for a number of rounds if the target fails their Fortitude save.

* [[Tabletop/Pathfinder Pathfinder's]] Oracles can play with this by doing it to ''other'' people; one of the mysteries they can study is Time, which gives them access to a revelation ability allowing them to banish targets from spacetime for a number of rounds if the target fails their Fortitude save.

* [[Pathfinder Pathfinder's]] Oracles can play with this by doing it to ''other'' people; one of the mysteries they can study is Time, which gives them access to a revelation ability allowing them to banish targets from spacetime for a number of rounds if the target fails their Fortitude save.

* Averted in [[ProseDescriptiveQualities PDQ System]] games like ''Dead Inside'', ''Truth & Justice'', and ''Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies''. Your skills and traits (called "Qualities" or "Fortes" depending on the game) ''are'' your health, with damage gradually eroding your capabilities. The defender gets to choose which Qualities suck up the damage (with or without {{Handwave}} as to why getting punched reduces your Accounting skill), letting you preserve relevant skills in a contest at the expense of irrelevant skills.

** Several implementations of the system (including all from Evil Hat Games, its original creators) also avert this trope by allowing a character to be taken out by a sufficiently severe hit even though he or she may still have open stress boxes remaining -- because rather than being a simple linear track, each stress box corresponds to a given level of hit ''severity'' and they're marked off only one by one, "rolling up" if an already filled-in one would be hit again as necessary. So an open 1- and 2-stress box won't do a character who just took a second 3-stress hit any good (unless they can still take consequences enough to reduce it to a lesser one or eliminate the stress altogether).