Hit Points

Hit points

The term "hit points" was coined by Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson. While developing the tabletop role-playing gameDungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax based on the latter's previous game Chainmail, Arneson felt that it was more interesting for players to manage small squads than a large army. This also allowed them to act out the role of each squad member. However, this approach had one drawback: according to the rules of Chainmail, the player rolls the dice during each battle, and depending on the number rolled, the character either kills the enemy or is killed. Because players did not want to lose the characters they had become accustomed to, Arneson created a "hit point" system based on similar mechanics previously used in the wargames Don't Give Up the Ship and Ironclads. According to this system, each character has a certain number of hit points, which decreases with each blow dealt to them. This allows the character to survive several hits from an enemy. Arneson commented that when they made the shift from players controlling armies to individual characters, players "didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow".