How many hit points do you have?

Poll question cut off. Should read: "In your D&D game, how much does a character know about his own hit points (his total, how much damage he has, and how it compares to other things)?"

I don't know that anyone's ever asked this here directly before, but it seems interesting.

The question is specific to what the character understands, not the player (if you're drawing a distinction).

The first response is not to be taken that you know the exact number, but may be something close to that. For example, it would indicate that if you have 15 hit points, you know that a 20 ft fall won't kill you, but a more serious fall might. If you have lost 20 hit points, you know that a Cure Light Wounds isn't sufficient to heal you up, but Cure Moderate might be and Cure Serious definitely will. These are the kinds of decisions I'm talking about.

The second is to indicate that you know something, but very little. For instance, you might realize if you dropped below half hit points, you had some damage, but you probably wouldn't be able to recognize your remaining health to any more specific level than a quartile. You couldn't necessarily make reliable judgments like the above regarding specific sources of damage and healing and exactly how close you are to death, but you know something.

The third is fairly radical, and would indicate that you can only observe objective consequences, like being dropped or perhaps (in 4e terms), being bloodied. You could be at 1/100 hp and not know that you were close to dying. At most, you'd realize you'd almost been stabbed a few times recently, but you wouldn't have any sense as to when your luck is about to run out.

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This has significant play implications, so I'm interested to see how people feel about this.

hit points, thematically, is just plot armor. it's how much abuse your character can take before they drop unconscious or die.

for the most part, when it comes to combat, it tends to fall into a weird inbetween realm of "how consistent is the GM going to be" and "how do i want to portray my character"

basically a character that's rather agile is treating HP as close calls whereas your john-mcclain-esque PC treats every HP as meat points: every hit is a wound and blood is drawn.

outside of combat it's simple threat assessment: "should this go wrong, do i think i can come out of it relatively safely?" as seen through your own personal view. a big old pendulum axe trap, for example could be a close shave as the PC jumps back/forwards at the last second, giving his cloak a nice shave or it could be that the character manages to get through but is left with a wound on his leg as it grazes him before he fully passes the threshold.

basically, my view of HP is "whatever plot armor fits your character better, you know the PC better then I do"

We've always treated hp as a meta game thing. It's never really been strongly linked to anything in game afaik.

In character we usually have it as fairly vague - "oh, I'm down some but still good to go" or "I'm at about half my usual fighting form" - until you get into body points, at which time the characters know they're getting really banged up and have a pretty good idea what they're at.

The players, of course, know exact numbers as they are who track such things.

Corollary question: when characters level up do they know they now have a higher hit point maximum if not at full? We have it that they do not, until they wake up (or are cured up) feeling better than ever before. They also don't get the new h.p. as if healed that amount - instead of being at 13 out of 24 you're now at 13 out of 31. (most video games have it that you'd go frm 13/24 to 20/31; this makes no sense in the rpg world)

Lan-"and if you've any h.p. you don't think you'll need, I'll take 'em"-efan

The character has a divine insight in what his player knows about the status.

I once (1e or 2e era) tried to employ a descriptive method, but it broke down pretty quickly after the first level. My descriptions became to samey ("the orc's sword hit you, you barely managed to jump away, suffering only a minor wound"). It became an HP description with other words.

The other point is that tracking PC HP is just another task I'm not keen to handle. And having the players distinguish between their knowledge and that of the character wouldn't work, I guess.

My players have their sheets in hand, and they know how much damage they take, so it's really just a meta-game thing. I certainly do reward RPing it up, especially when communicating it to the other players. I understand the need for specifics and to be tactical about the use of healing in any game, but I appreciate players saying "Help me I'm bleeding out over here!" when they're low on health, rather than "I'm at 5 HP, heal me!"

Players do not know the specific HP of anything other than their own character though...except for that stupid 4e ability that lets them know the exact number​. >.>

Somewhere between one and two.

Just like I know a 10ft fall won't kill me if I don't land weird, the PCs can guess whether something can kill them.

A fighter with 50HP knows he can hold off a single common orc for 20 seconds because it can't kill him for a few rounds.

Well, considering [or, at least, assuming] the players are not robots or suffer from multiple personality disorder, the character is not ever capable of acting without some player knowledge.

That said, the PCs are not in the heat of battle yelling to each other, "Assistance please, I've only got 3 left!!!" "GAH, that attack just knocked me down to half in one shot!!!" The players, sure. All the time. But I've never sat at a table where that sort of comment was taken as actually "in character."

But something akin to Lanefan's post, I suppose, would be what/how it works for me/my tables: a "vague understanding" of their general health and well being, sure.

The character, assuming they are even mildly self-aware, has knowledge and can discern when they are "barely/somewhat/badly/GODS HELP ME I'M DOOMED!" hurt.

Some characters, with this knowledge, make the "heroic last stand/final charge" trusting their abilities and the gods to see them through and/or intend to go down in a blaze of glory. Others, with the same knowledge, go/limp/crawl "Wee wee wee, all the way home."

Both hit points and levels are treated as pure metaconstructs. Neither exists in the game world and its not possible to discover hit points or level, nor have any magical effect be triggered on or by hit points. For that matter, class per say is also a meta-contruct, but in some cases there is a very tight relationship between the metagame class and the character's in game station in life, relationship to the world, and chosen profession. A character with the cleric class knows he is a cleric and is in the game world a cleric. A character with the cleric class doesnt' know in game whether he is a multi-classed cleric/expert though, nor does he really understand what that means (because it doesn't mean anything in game, class being just an abstraction of concrete in game world skills that are usually acquired together), but to the extent that multiclassing reflects specific periods of his life history he might know that.

Characters know how seriously they are wounded, and can convey this to other characters. In general, I don't squash players telling other players how many hit points they've lost because not everyone is of such a thespian inclination and it tends to slow down gameplay in larger groups if you are that hardnosed about being IC. But their characters can't refer to hit points in character, and NPCs never do so.

It is possible to use a heal check to tell how seriously someone else is wounded, but the same result is obtained if a person with 10 hit points has 2 hit points left or a person with 100 hit points has 20 hit points left. Both are assumed to have more or less equivalent injuries - in both cases quite serious and ugly looking but not crippling or life threatening. Although often we could make distinctions about how the injuries were obtained, even that is not certain. The characters know that they are feeling tired, achey, or pained by their injuries but they can still grit through them (although presumably a less than heroic character would not want to and would require motivation to do so). Neither character would exactly know that the next blow they took was likely to be quite serious (and after all, in the case of the character with 20 hit points, it might not be), but they'd certainly both understand that they couldn't take much more of this, their luck was running out, and they'd have a hard time fighting through the pain to avoid any more danger.

It is also possible to appraise whether or not someone is more skillful than you at a particular task if you observe them performing the task for a reasonable period, and in D&D this implies level but does not prove it nor does it obtain an exacting figure. For example, if you watch another character fight or spar against them, you can reasonably quickly establish if they know what they are doing or if they know more than you do. But you can't establish their level (which could be multi-classed)

Although levels don't exist, it is possible for spellcasters in game to effectively know the level of other spellcasters because the level of a spell is something that explicitly exists in the game world. A wizard that can cast 5th level spells is said to have "penetrated the 5th circle of mysteries". The title Archmage can be claimed by a wizard that has "penetrated the 9th circle of mysteries". The particular path of learning to reach the next circle of understanding is formalized among wizards, but no one thinks or talks about it in terms like levels and if you asked wizards about graduations among wizardry they'd say that there were 10 - it doesn't really occur to them that a Wizard that can cast 4th level spells might be 7th or 8th level. For one thing, a potent hedge mage might be 9th or 10th level, but if he only has a 14 Int, he won't penetrate the 5th circle of mystery (5th level spells) and so as far as the wizards are concerned 7th, 8th, 9th, or 10th level all look the same. Being able to cast a certain number of spells of a given level doesn't prove anything either, as that's dependent on Intelligence, Feats, and so forth. Inside the game world, the level of the wizard is still an abstraction for the concrete thing of being of a particular skill in his chosen profession.

My character always knows when the next hit is going to finish him off (3 hp or less). Makes charging in anyway that much cooler.