Health (game mechanism)
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Health is a game play mechanism, used in various forms of role playing and video games to give a value to characters, enemies, NPCs, and objects related to death and/or the defeat of the player, enemies, or NPCs, or the destruction and/or ruination of the object. This value can either is numerical, or semi numerical as in hit points, or arbitrary as in a life bar.
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[edit] Hit points
Hit points are numerical values that represent the health of a character, most often used in Role playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, in which the value it determined by the character’s level. This form of measuring health is more common in Role playing games, as most RPGs tend to be more technical in nature then other forms of games. While hit points make it easy to see precisely how many hits a character can take, the purely numerical value can easily lead inattentive players into losing track of their capability to take damage, leaving the character in danger of death or defeat when the player least expects it.
[edit] Damage ranks
Some systems have eliminated the use of HP, preferring instead to reflect damage through its effect on a character's ability to perform by reducing the effectiveness of a character's attributes, skills, personality, and other abilities, allowing a fighter and a wizard to have roughly equal staying power during a fight. In Truth & Justice, for example, conflicts result in the accumulation of either “failure ranks” (which recover at the end of the contest) or “damage ranks” (which may take longer to heal). Each point of either type means that the loser must choose a stat to downgrade by one rank. While this type of system is more realistic in the effect injury/damage has on a player, enemy, NPC, or object, it can be annoying to the player if his or her character loses capabilities every time his/her character takes a hit.
[edit] Life bar
The life bar is an arbitrary form of health, in which the amount of health a character or enemies has, is determined by the length of the bar, rather than a number. These bars are common in Video games, rather than in real life games, because a life bar must be animated. Life bars make it easy to see roughly how many hits one can take before being defeated, but they can also make it difficult to determine precisely how much damage a character, enemy, NPC, or object can take before being killed/destroyed.
[edit] Icon based health
Icon based health tends to combine both hit points and a life bar, where the value is arbitrary, but can be counted.
For example, in the Video game series Legend of Zelda, the Main character’s health is represented as small hearts, located near the top of the screen. While the number of hearts can be counted, the amount of hearts lost can vary depending on how strong the attack is. One attack may take half a heart, and another attack may only take a third of a heart. Icon-based health combines the best attributes of hit points and life bars; not only do they show precisely how much health a character has remaining, they also make it easy to find a rough estimate of how many hits one can take.
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