Injury and Death

Your hit points measure how hard you are to kill. No matter how
many hit points you lose, your character isn’t hindered in any way
until your hit points drop to 0 or lower.
LOSS OF HIT POINTS
The most common way that your character gets hurt is to take lethal
damage and lose hit points, whether from an orc’s falchion, a
wizard’s lightning bolt spell, or a fall into molten lava. You record
your character’s hit point total on your character sheet. As your
character takes damage, you subtract that damage from your hit
points, leaving you with your current hit points. Current hit points
go down when you take damage and go back up when you recover.
What Hit Points Represent: Hit points mean two things in the
game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going,
and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one. For
some characters, hit points may represent divine favor or inner
power. When a paladin survives a fireball, you will be hard pressed to
convince bystanders that she doesn’t have the favor of some higher
power.
Damaging Helpless Defenders: Even if you have lots of hit
points, a dagger through the eye is a dagger through the eye. When a
character is helpless, meaning that he can’t avoid damage or deflect
blows somehow, he’s in trouble (see Helpless Defenders, page 153).
Effects of Hit Point Damage: Damage gives you scars, bangs up
your armor, and gets blood on your tunic, but it doesn’t slow you
down until your current hit points reach 0 or lower.
At 0 hit points, you’re disabled.
At from –1 to –9 hit points, you’re dying.
At –10 or lower, you’re dead.
Massive Damage: If you ever sustain damage so massive that a
single attack deals 50 points of damage or more and it doesn’t kill
you outright, you must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If this saving
throw fails, you die regardless of your current hit points. This
amount of damage represents a single trauma so major that it has a
chance to kill even the toughest creature. If you take 50 points of
damage or more from multiple attacks, no one of which dealt 50 or
more points of damage itself, the massive damage rule does not
apply.
DISABLED (0 HIT POINTS)
When your current hit points drop to exactly 0, you’re disabled.
You’re not unconscious, but you’re close to it. You can only take a
single move or standard action each turn (but not both, nor can you
take full-round actions). You can take move actions without further
injuring yourself, but if you perform any standard action (or any
other action the DM deems as strenuous, including some free
actions such as casting a quickened spell) you take 1 point of damage
after the completing the act. Unless your activity increased your hit
points, you are now at –1 hit points, and you’re dying.
Healing that raises your hit points above 0 makes you fully
functional again, just as if you’d never been reduced to 0 or fewer hit
points. A spellcaster retains the spellcasting capability she had
before dropping to 0 hit points.
You can also become disabled when recovering from dying. In
this case, it’s a step toward recovery, and you can have fewer than 0
hit points (see Stable Characters and Recovery, below).
DYING (–1 TO –9 HIT POINTS)
When your character’s current hit points drop to between –1 and –9
inclusive, he’s dying.
A dying character immediately falls unconscious and can take no
actions.
A dying character loses 1 hit point every round. This continues
until the character dies or becomes stable (see below).
DEAD (–10 HIT POINTS OR LOWER)
When your character’s current hit points drop to –10 or lower, or if
he takes massive damage (see above), he’s dead. A character can also
die from taking ability damage or suffering an ability drain that
reduces his Constitution to 0. When a character dies, his soul
immediately departs. Getting it back into the body is a major hassle
(see Bringing Back the Dead, page 171).
STABLE CHARACTERS AND RECOVERY
On the next turn after a character is reduced to between –1 and –9
hit points and on all subsequent turns, roll d% to see whether the
dying character becomes stable. He has a 10% chance of becoming
stable. If he doesn’t, he loses 1 hit point. (A character who’s unconscious
or dying can’t use any special action that changes the initiative
count on which his action occurs.)
If the character’s hit points drop to –10 or lower, he’s dead.
You can keep a dying character from losing any more hit points
and make him stable with a DC 15 Heal check.
If any sort of healing cures the dying character of even 1 point of
damage, he stops losing hit points and becomes stable.
Healing that raises the dying character’s hit points to 0 makes
him conscious and disabled. Healing that raises his hit points to 1 or
more makes him fully functional again, just as if he’d never been
reduced to 0 or lower. A spellcaster retains the spellcasting capability
she had before dropping below 0 hit points.
A stable character who has been tended by a healer or who has
been magically healed eventually regains consciousness and recovers
hit points naturally. If the character has no one to tend him,
however, his life is still in danger, and he may yet slip away.
Recovering with Help: One hour after a tended, dying character
becomes stable, roll d%. He has a 10% chance of becoming conscious,
at which point he is disabled (as if he had 0 hit points). If he
remains unconscious, he has the same chance to revive and become
disabled every hour. Even if unconscious, he recovers hit points
naturally. He is back to normal when his hit points rise to 1 or
higher.
Recovering without Help: A severely wounded character left
alone usually dies. He has a small chance, however, of recovering on
his own. Even if he seems as though he’s pulling through, he can
still finally succumb to his wounds hours or days after originally
taking damage.
A character who becomes stable on his own (by making the 10%
roll while dying) and who has no one to tend to him still loses hit
points, just at a slower rate. He has a 10% chance each hour of
becoming conscious. Each time he misses his hourly roll to become
conscious, he loses 1 hit point. He also does not recover hit points
through natural healing.
Even once he becomes conscious and is disabled, an unaided
character still does not recover hit points naturally. Instead, each
day he has a 10% chance to start recovering hit points naturally
(starting with that day); otherwise, he loses 1 hit point.
Once an unaided character starts recovering hit points naturally,
he is no longer in danger of naturally losing hit points (even if his
current hit point total is negative).
HEALING
After taking damage, you can recover hit points through natural
healing or through magical healing. In any case, you can’t regain hit
points past your full normal hit point total.
Natural Healing: With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or
more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. For example, a
5th-level fighter recovers 5 hit points with a night of rest. Any significant
interruption (such as combat or the like) during your rest
prevents you from healing that night.
If you undergo complete bed rest for an entire day and night, you
recover twice your character level in hit points. A 5th-level fighter
recovers 10 hit points per 24 hours of bed rest.
Magical Healing: Various abilities and spells, such as a cleric’s
cure spells or a paladin’s lay on hands ability, can restore hit points.
Healing Limits: You can never recover more hit points than you
lost. Magical healing won’t raise your current hit points higher than
your full normal hit point total.
Healing Ability Damage: Ability damage is temporary, just as
hit point damage is. Ability damage returns at the rate of 1 point per
night of rest (8 hours) for each affected ability score. Complete bed
rest restores 2 points per day (24 hours) for each affected ability
score.
TEMPORARY HIT POINTS
Certain effects, such as the aid spell, give a character temporary hit
points. When a character gains temporary hit points, note his current
hit point total. When the temporary hit points go away, such as
at the end of the aid spell’s duration, the character’s hit points drop
to his current hit point total. If the character’s hit points are below
his current hit point total at that time, all the temporary hit points
have already been lost and the character’s hit point total does not
drop further.
When temporary hit points are lost, they cannot be restored as
real hit points can be, even by magic.
Increases in Constitution Score and Current Hit Points: An
increase in a character’s Constitution score, even a temporary one,
can give her more hit points (an effective hit point increase), but
these are not temporary hit points. They can be restored, such as
with cure light wounds, and they are not lost first as temporary hit
points are. For example, Krusk (now a 3rd-level barbarian) gains +4
to his Constitution score and +6 hit points when he rages, raising his
hit points from 31 to 37. If Krusk takes damage dropping him to 32
hit points, Jozan can cure those lost points and get him back to 37. If
Krusk is so wounded at the end of his rage that he only has 5 hit
points left, then when he loses his 6 extra hit points, he drops to –1
hit points and is dying.
NONLETHAL DAMAGE
Sometimes you get roughed up or weakened, such as by getting
clocked in a fistfight or tired out by a forced march. This sort of
trauma won’t kill you, but it can knock you out or make you faint.
If you take sufficient nonlethal damage, you fall unconscious, but
you don’t die. Nonlethal damage goes away much faster than lethal
damage does.
Dealing Nonlethal Damage: Certain attacks deal nonlethal
damage, such as a normal human’s unarmed strike (a punch, kick, or
head butt). Other effects, such as heat or being exhausted, also deal
nonlethal damage. When you take nonlethal damage, keep a
running total of how much you’ve accumulated. Do not deduct the
nonlethal damage number from your current hit points. It is not “real”
damage. Instead, when your nonlethal damage equals your current
hit points, you’re staggered, and when it exceeds your current hit
points, you fall unconscious. It doesn’t matter whether the nonlethal
damage equals or exceeds your current hit points because the
nonlethal damage has gone up or because your current hit points
have gone down.
Nonlethal Damage with a Weapon that Deals Lethal Damage: You can
use a melee weapon that deals lethal damage to deal nonlethal
damage instead, but you take a –4 penalty on your attack roll
because you have to use the flat of the blade, strike at nonvital areas,
or check your swing.
Lethal Damage with a Weapon that Deals Nonlethal Damage: You can
use a weapon that deals nonlethal damage, including an unarmed
strike, to deal lethal damage instead, but you take a –4 penalty on
your attack roll because you have to strike only in the most
vulnerable areas to inflict lethal damage.
Staggered and Unconscious: When your nonlethal damage
equals your current hit points, you’re staggered. You’re so roughed
up that you can only take a standard action or a move action in each
round. You cease being staggered when your current hit points once
again exceed your nonlethal damage.
When your nonlethal damage exceeds your current hit points,
you fall unconscious. While unconscious, you are helpless (see
Helpless Defenders, page 153).
Spellcasters who fall unconscious retain any spellcasting ability
they had before going unconscious.
Healing Nonlethal Damage: You heal nonlethal damage at the
rate of 1 hit point per hour per character level. For example, a 7thlevel
wizard heals 7 points of nonlethal damage each hour until all
the nonlethal damage is gone.
When a spell or a magical power cures hit point damage, it also
removes an equal amount of nonlethal damage.