In many role-playing games, hit points 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 based on the size of a character rather than some sort of arbitrary class or profession the player has chosen for their character. Medium-sized races are generally assigned ten hit points to start, and they don’t increase based on level. Large characters will have more hit points. Small ones less. We’ll talk more about this when we talk about races.

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 of skills is often 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.