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In many role-playing games, hit points for characters are assigned/rolled based on a class and continue to increase based on levels achieved or the relative difficulty of the monsters and the characters who will likely be facing the monster. This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the play does seem to work out fine by assigning higher and higher amounts of hit points to enemies and to the damage done by both sides.
In Dice Mob, hit points are assigned more like they are for the monsters they are facing–based on the size of the creature themselves. If they want to stay alive, they aren't given more hit points. They load themselves up with better and better defenses to prevent themselves from taking as little damage as possible. Larger characters will have more hit points than smaller ones and can take more of a beating. But with a fixed number of hit points, there's more of a point of not taking damage (like real life) than knowing you can jump off the roofs of buildings but with your hundreds of hit points, it's no big deal.
So won’t we get to a point where everybody is dying in one hit if they are never gaining in hit points? Not necessarily. The point is to improve defenses to a point where characters are very difficult to hit while monsters have continually improving offenses to hit them. And vice versa. As there are no real rolls to hit, just to damage, the point is to try to receive little to no damage every round by using a character’s or monster’s skills or weapons or armor. Or to regenerate hit points quickly enough as to essentially accomplish the same thing.
That’s not to say that hit points can never increase. The GM has the ability to create skills that improve hit points as well as to introduce potions that temporarily increase hit points or magical items that increase hit points while they are worn or used.
Rather than erasing hit points as a character takes damage, it is recommended to write down the “damage taken” near the hit points, so as not to forget how many maximum hit points a character has. The current hit points would then be the difference between the maximum hit points and the damage taken.
When a character reaches zero current hit points, they are considered unconscious. Unlike other systems, in Dice Mob the GM determines when a character ACTUALLY dies. This could be immediately, considering the situation and the poor actions of the player, or it could be some time later, depending on what might be the most enjoyable for the adventuring players.
Monsters die when they reach zero unless they have some sort of regenerative or other skill that prevents them from dying by the means by which they were reduced to zero. For example, trolls, vampires, werewolves, and other opponents might need fire, stakes, or silver respectively to permanently kill them. For opponents the players are trying to capture alive, the GM and players decide if they die, based on the situation and what they were trying to accomplish with the defeat.
Hit points for characters are replenished (or damage reduced) at the rate of one per hour of low activity or two per hour of sleep unless otherwise modified by skills or magical items. A player will regain all hit points after a day of low activity or at least six hours of sleep no matter how many hit points they have.
Regeneration is simply the special ability to automatically regain hit points not just while resting but at any time, even during combat. Regeneration is generally only available to certain races (e.g. trolls) or conveyed through certain diseases (e.g. lycanthropy, vampirism) and is not something that can be learned.
Regeneration adds a lot more complexity to hit points than just standard hit points and damage because it adds the concept of a finite Regeneration Pool where recovery is pulled from.
Character with this special ability regenerates at a rate of two hit points per round until the Regeneration Pool is depleted. They can also regrow lost limbs, though not after death. They can even return from the dead if not destroyed with fire, acid, or some other weakness the character might have.
No mana cost is required for the use of this skill.
Regeneration pulls from a limited pool of available hit points called the Regeneration Pool. After the pool is depleted, no hit points can be recovered through regeneration until the pool is replenished. The pool contains twice as many hit points as the race normally has. 1) Regeneration cannot pull from the regeneration pool if the damage was caused by fire, acid, or the weakness of the character.
The pool replenishes after the character sleeps at least six hours (including sleeping due to being unconscious or even dead).
A regeneration weakness is a substance that adversely affects the character when it comes in contact with them and prevents their regeneration ability from recovering from damage taken by this weakness. Suggestions on weaknesses include those from folklore (i.e. silver for werewolves or sunlight for vampires) if available. Most importantly, they just have to be something a character could come in contact with. Any time a character comes in contact with its weakness, it takes five dice of both damage and mana used in addition to whatever other damage might be caused (e.g. from a silver dagger). The hit points and mana caused by these weaknesses can only be recovered by non-natural means.