5.3 Taking Damage

When you take damage, the damage reduces your hit points. If you are dealt damage that reduces your hit points below 0, you gain one or more vital wounds. Monsters typically do not gain vital wounds like player characters do. Instead, they simply die or fall unconscious when they reach 0 hit points.

5.3.1 Injury

If your remaining hit points are at or below your injury point, you are injured. Some attacks require you to be injured to have their full effects.

When you take damage from an attack, if you are injured, the attack inflicted an injury on you. This also applies if you only become injured after resolving the attack’s damage. Some damaging attacks have extra effects when they injure you. This is usually indicated by “Injury:” text in their descriptions.

5.3.2 Negative Hit Points

You can have negative hit points, but only briefly. When your hit points drop below 0, you gain a vital wound (see Vital Wounds). You gain an additional vital wound for each increment of half your maximum hit points that you reach in negative hit points.

If you would regain hit points while you have negative hit points, you first reset your hit points to 0 before applying the healing. In addition, your hit points are reset to 0 at the end of the round if they are still negative. This is checked after applying all healing and damage that takes place at the end of the round. This also resets vital wound thresholds, which means you’ll suffer a vital wound if your hit points go negative again in the next round.

5.3.3 Subdual Damage

Some attacks and environmental effects deal subdual damage. Subdual damage works in the same way as normal damage, except it cannot inflict vital wounds. If an attack that deals subdual damage would inflict a vital wound, the target increases its fatigue level by three instead. Whenever you make a strike, you can choose to deal subdual damage instead of normal damage. If you do, you deal half damage with the strike.