Every Tales of the Valiant character is defined by a stack of important numbers: six ability scores and their modifiers, level, proficiency bonus, hit points, hit dice, spell slots, attack bonuses, armor class, experience, and many more. Arguably, the single most important of those numbers is hit points. That’s arguable only because roleplayers never agree on anything without arguing; if we could all be reasonable, there’d be no “arguably” about it.

Despite their importance, hit points are also (OK, arguably) the least understood of all those numbers. Not because they’re complicated—they could hardly be any simpler—but because, what the heck are they, anyway?

Curiosity Put the Cat to 0 HP

If you’ve ever wondered about hit points, you’re not alone. Players and GMs have been asking that question (and arguing about it) since the earliest days of roleplaying games.

Most people, when they first start thinking critically about hit points, quickly conclude that they don’t make sense. Hit points don’t seem to correspond to anything in real life. “Injured” characters don’t behave at all like injured people. If your leg is broken, if you have a concussion, or if you’ve been badly burned, you don’t function at peak efficiency.

Not so for our tabletop heroes. While they live and breathe, they fight horrific monsters, perform gravity-defying acrobatics, and cast complex magic spells that would snarl a Ph.D. mathematician’s brain into spirals of hopelessness. And they do it all at 100 percent effectiveness. They are tip-top until the moment they die.

How?

Nothing about the answer is deep or complicated or secret. The stumbling block is that you need to accept it at face value and believe the answer really is as simple as it sounds.

The answer is, hit points are an abstraction. They’re a countdown meter measuring how much misfortune an adventurer can endure before collapsing from injury and fatigue.

Note that word, misfortune. It’s important.

Ridiculous Questions

It seems more complicated than it is because the number one way characters lose hit points is through combat. So it’s easy to assume all those lost hit points represent injuries. After all, an ogre swiped its club at me and I lost 9 hit points. It’s reasonable and natural to assume the club smashed 9 points of life out of me.

In other words, hit points somehow measure our characters’ physiological matter. A hit from a weapon, a spell, or a trap causes a physical injury, and the severity of the injury is represented by how many hit points were lopped away. Following that line of reasoning, hit points must represent your character’s physique and losing hit points represents all the cutting, stabbing, smashing, burning, biting, electrocuting, freezing, poisoning, bleeding, and other horrible things that happen to adventurers.

Those are all reasonable conclusions, but being reasonable doesn’t make them correct. In fact, they’re mostly incorrect.

If that were the case, how does a 4th-level fighter survive four times as many stabbings as a 1st-level fighter? Does it really take four times more physical injury to bring down someone who’s killed thirty giant spiders compared to someone who’s killed only five? Did the 4th-level fighter grow multiple hearts and livers that allow them to survive wounds enough to kill four “normal” people? If you’ve lost 12 of your 18 hit points, are you two-thirds dead? What would it even mean to be partially dead?

The questions themselves are ridiculous and barely make sense, which is a good indication we’re on the wrong track.

Misfortune and Glory

Forget the idea that hit points represent flesh, blood, bone, or any sort of biological matter. Forget the idea that every time your character gets hit, they are seriously injured. Forget the idea that losing hit points equates to any kind of injury at all and that having more hit points means a character can survive more, and more severe, injuries.

Focus on the idea that hit points represent your character’s ability to withstand misfortune.

Being clawed by a troll is a misfortune. So is falling into a pit, stumbling into a spear trap, pricking your finger on a poisoned needle, being infected with choking pox, eating spoiled rations, and sleeping out in the cold rain. A hardy adventurer could face every one of those misfortunes in a single day without being reduced to a hobbling invalid swathed in blood-soaked bandages, provided they got through it all with at least 1 hit point remaining.

Which brings us back to the question: what does it mean to be down to 1 hit point? It means our adventurer has taken all the misfortune they can take. They are battered, bruised, bleeding from a dozen small injuries (but nothing as crippling as what you might expect from being savaged by a troll), and exhausted. Their armor is dented, their shield may be cracked. Nothing is left in the tank, and one more reversal will push them past their physical breaking point. One more piece of bad luck and their counter goes to zero.

A counter is exactly what hit points represent. A gas gauge; a charge indicator; a dipstick in the reserve tank. When it hits zero, the reserves are gone, defense falls apart, and the system collapses. Our hero falls unconscious. They’re in serious trouble, and without quick aid, they may die.

Is that system realistic? No, not a bit. Flesh-and-blood creatures don’t work that way. But it is exciting and tense, easy to track, and fun, which is exactly what we want from a game.