The Lantern Hall
Painting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.
TermTabletop term1974

Hit points

A number measuring how much damage a character or creature can take before it is defeated. Attacks subtract hit points and rest or healing restores them, turning the drama of a fight into a steadily falling total. Nearly every Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) and Japanese RPGs (JRPG) inherited the idea, usually as a shrinking health bar.

A number measuring how much damage a character or creature can take before it is defeated. Attacks subtract hit points and rest or healing restores them, turning the drama of a fight into a steadily falling total. Nearly every Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) and Japanese RPGs (JRPG) inherited the idea, usually as a shrinking health bar.

Origin

Coined by Dave Arneson while adapting Chainmail's one-hit-kills into longer fights for single heroes in his Blackmoor campaign; codified in Dungeons & Dragons (1974).

Quick answers

What does "Hit points" mean?
A number measuring how much damage a character or creature can take before it is defeated. Attacks subtract hit points and rest or healing restores them, turning the drama of a fight into a steadily falling total. Nearly every Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) and Japanese RPGs (JRPG) inherited the idea, usually as a shrinking health bar.
Where does the term "Hit points" come from?
Coined by Dave Arneson while adapting Chainmail's one-hit-kills into longer fights for single heroes in his Blackmoor campaign; codified in Dungeons & Dragons (1974).

Nearby in the archive

Dave Arneson

Game designer1947–2009

The Minnesota wargamer whose Blackmoor campaign of 1971 put single heroes, dungeons and hit points on the table, and who co-created Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax.

Blackmoor

Campaign setting1971

In a Twin Cities basement in 1971, Dave Arneson sent his wargaming friends beneath a model castle to hunt monsters and gold — and invented the dungeon adventure.

Painting: three small plain tan rulebooks in a wood-grain cardboard box beside strange new polyhedral dice, pencils and a graph-paper dungeon map.

Dungeons & Dragons

Tabletop RPG1974

Three little booklets in a woodgrain box, hand-assembled in Lake Geneva in January 1974: the first published roleplaying game, and the template for every tabletop and computer RPG since.

Armor Class

Tabletop term1974

A rating of how hard a target is to hit, combining armor, shield and agility into one number. In early D&D lower was better (plate and shield was AC 2), which made attack math notoriously confusing; third edition (2000) flipped it so that higher is better.

Experience points

Tabletop term1974

Points awarded for defeating foes, finding treasure or achieving goals, which accumulate until a character gains a level and becomes more powerful. In original D&D much of a character's experience came from treasure recovered, rewarding cunning over combat; later games shifted rewards toward fights, quests and story milestones.

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