Vague Hit Points

Hit Points are a numerical measurement of how much damage can be taken before some negative state occurs (usually either a Non-Lethal K.O. or outright death). They can be explicitly stated, or since they're usually done by computer code, they can be hidden from the audience.

This trope is for Role-Playing Games and other statistically-based games, that, based on damage mechanics, clearly track damage dealt, but do not clearly indicate to the player exactly how much damage or how many Hit Points each attack deals, nor how many the character or enemy has left. Since most enemies don't have Regenerating Health, if a player really wants to figure it out they could get a rough estimate just by tracking how many hits with a given weapon it takes to down an enemy or be downed by an enemy. Some games may use health bars to indicate how many hit points a character has, but the damage shown is usually only a rough percentage rather than an exact amount. The Shows Damage trope also applies a visual cue to how badly anyone is damaged.

This doesn't count examples where the work shows the exact current number of Hit Points of something, or there's a gradated Life Meter where each gradation is one Hit Point. It does, however, include games that may only start as this trope until you acquire an Enemy Scan ability or something like it down the road.

In Tabletop RPGs, this is a personal choice. The Game Master may sometimes obfuscate the exact amount of damage the player's characters have taken, instead using descriptive terms to evoke the general level of damage. So rather than Bob knowing his warrior has 40 out of 50 hit points left, the GM might say "Advar is feeling a bit knocked around but it's not too bad", but if it's 5 out of 50 they might say "Advar is feeling really awful, he's got a lot of nasty cuts and painful wounds and thinks he should definitely get some healing and rest" to stop players metagaming as much.

Similarly, applying that vagueness to other types of games can make it more realistic and increase the tension a player experiences as real life doesn't have such precise measurements. This, this trope has a higher chance of appearing in fast paced action games that skew more towards realism than other kinds of games. On the flipside, tactical games that require the player to methodically keep track of a myriad of minute details in order to best their opponent are least likely to feature this trope. Roguelikes, where death is permanent and requires the player to restart from the beginning, can go either way to either help the player know just how close to death they are or obscure that info for the sake of tension.

This trope is similarly common in Survival Horror games, where the uncertainty as to how much more the player character can withstand adds to the fear-inducing atmosphere of the game, as a player who's vaguely low on health becomes afraid that the next hit they take could be their last.

There are also games with enemies who die too quickly to be worth noting their Hit Points that this trope would also apply to. Some Shoot 'Em Up-s, Metroidvanias, or Platformers fall into this: Mooks don't usually last long enough for people to think they're actually Invincible Minor Minions. And in other games that feature big boss battles, the game may simply tell the player to Attack Its Weak Point without telling the player how many Hit Points the boss has, forcing the player to keep attacking until the boss falls, only having the boss's behavior as indicators that they are even close to the end.

Vague Stat Values is the Super-Trope.

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Examples:

Video games:

Action-Adventure Game

• The The Legend of Zelda franchise:
  • Hyrule Warriors uses quarter hearts as the smallest visual unit of the Life Meter, it's not the smallest actual unit. Every quarter heart is worth 100 HP, which the player will only be able to notice if they enter a keep with a damage barrier, which deals small increments of Hit Points per second, so they're damaged without otherwise visual change. If the character is hit by an attack that activates the Last Chance Hit Point, that would leave the character with 1 hp, but it would be displayed as 1 quarter heart. The exact number of Hit Points is shown in the pause menu/results screen for the Wii U only, as the Nintendo Switch uses percentages instead.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: While Link's hitpoints are evident by his heart meter, the hitpoints of his weapons are not. The only visible indicator of how much durability his weapons have before they shatter is a sparkle on the inventory screen when they're brand new and a red flash on that same menu when they're a hit or two away from breaking.
• Ōkami and its sequel, Ōkamiden, health is represented with orbs of solar energy. You can earn up to 20 orbs in Okami, or 10 in Okamiden, but each orb is worth 300 Hit Points. The orbs progressively deplete themselves when Hit Points are lost, but it's never said the exact amounts that are there. Enemy HP, on the other hand, is represented by health bars with an indeterminate amount of HP.

Fighting Game

• Super Smash Bros.: The series shows damage in whole percentages but actually deals damage to the tenth of a percent, although that wouldn't become clear until Super Smash Bros. Ultimate which would show the first decimal place.

First-Person Shooter

• ARMA: If hit by a bullet that doesn't kill, you are wounded but not shown by what degree and are only shown the results of the attack. In case of vehicles, they do take damage but the exact status isn't always known to the passengers.
• DOOM: Enemies have Hit Points, as seen when looking at the source code, but there's no way to measure it in the regular game. The player can only remember how many hits of each weapon it takes to take down specific enemies, but even then, damage is still subject to the whims of the P_Random function.
• Operation Flashpoint: If hit by a bullet that doesn't kill, you are wounded but not shown by what degree and are only shown the results of the attack. In case of vehicles, they do take damage but the exact status isn't always known to the passengers.
• The Portal series, Portal and Portal 2, has exact Hit Points only known through console commands that enables that bit of Heads-Up Display information. Otherwise, Chell dies after an unclear amount of turret shots and heals up when not being shot.
• Quake II has alternate skins for its enemies and bosses that are activated once the boss's health has been reduced by half. The skins, obviously, shows them being quite damaged, and since enemy/boss damage is never displayed in numbers at any time in the HUD, this is the only feedback players get to know whether an enemy/boss is near death or not.
• Unreal: Enemies are shot until they just suddenly die. How many Hit Points they have isn't indicated.

Hack-and-Slash

• Astral Chain: Although enemy health bars can be viewed with the IRIS, their exact HP is impossible to determine without looking up a guide or hacking the game.
• Bayonetta: The only characters that have health bars are the player, tougher enemies, and bosses, and even then, their exact HP is unknown without datamining the game.
• Devil May Cry: Only Dante and bosses have health bars, but their exact HP is impossible to determine without datamining the game. Regular enemies don't have health bars, but rather displays their health in segments if the player targets them, but that is only an approximation rather than an accurate amount.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge: Enemies and bosses have health bars with an indeterminate amount of HP. Averted for Jack himself, whose health is represented by pumpkins, which are worth 1 or 2 HP each depending on the difficulty.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants In Manhattan: Player health is represented by slices of pizza, while enemy and ally HP is represented by health bars. It's not clear how much each slice is worth, but it's clearly more than one as can be seen when you are hit by a weak attack or healing allies using the Healing Circle ability.
• Transformers: Devastation: Enemy health is represented as health bars with unknown amounts of HP.
• Viewtiful Joe: While the player's health is pretty clear-cut (The games use hearts as health where each heart=1 HP), the same can't be said for enemies and bosses. Enemies don't display their health, while bosses have health bars but don't tell the player what their HP is.
• The Wonderful 101: Health is generally represented by health bars with indeterminate amounts of HP for both the player and enemies, with the exception of weaker foes, whose health can only be determined by the color of their helmets.

Platformer

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: When checking how much health a food item restores, the exact numerical vague cannot be determined from the menu, since it's just a vibrant coloration of how much of the health meter is restored. To figure out its exact healing, it has to be used, calculated, and memorized.
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance: The acquirable Soul Orb allows user to recognize how much damage an enemy has received, but it can be turned off.
• Copy Kitty: Enemies die in just a few hits, so Life Meter isn't necessary to keep the player from thinking the enemies are invincible.
• Cuphead: The bosses have Hit Points, technically, and if a battle is lost, the screen that's displayed shows the boss's Life Meter, but since you're supposed to hold down the fire button and focus on dodging attacks, the Life Meter is more meant as a record of how far the player got instead of acting as a useful in-combat piece of information.
• Donkey Kong 64: The second half of the rematch against Dogadon has Chunky briefly turn gigantic to punch Dogadon to defeat him before Chunky's platform sinks into the lava. However, there is nothing resembling a health bar for Dogadon during this phase, making it stressful, given that there's a time limit and invisible progress.
• Hollow Knight: The game tends not to offer any consistent tells for enemy health other than pattern changes.
• Iji: The enemies have specified Hit Points in the official enemy data, and attacks deal defined damage, but in-game, Hit Points can only be determined by trial and error. Downplayed for the game's bosses, as their life bars are 2 pixels per hit point and use layered life bars if their health is especially high.
• Most games in the Kirby franchise use a damage-based health meter for both Kirby and bosses. Different attacks can do different damage to enemies, although most regular enemies die in too few hits for it to be noticeable.
• The bosses in Maldita Castilla have health bars represented with discrete hearts, but these hearts do not represent the exact number of hit points; With some bosses it takes a few direct hits to reduce their health bar by one heart.
• Scribblenauts: In the original game, Maxwell, enemy characters, and objects all lack any indicators of health, making it unclear just how much damage any of them can take before they're killed/destroyed. This is changed in later games, where everything has a four-dot health bar that appears when they're hurt, allowing the player to know their status and how quickly certain items can destroy other objects.
• Shantae: Risky's Revenge: Due to the lack of Shows Damage numbers like in later games, it's unclear if different attacks deal the same amount of damage or not.

Roguelike

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup gives a rough indication of how wounded an enemy is, but you aren't told how much damage you're doing to them. Possibly because the designers didn't want the player to be distracted by math.
• NetHack doesn't show hit points of enemies at all, nor how much damage you deal to them. (You can probe enemy HP with wands, spells, or a stethoscope, but that's the only way to find out).

Role-Playing Games

• Dungeons Of Daggorath has hit points represented by a beating heart, which beats faster if the player is fatigued or damaged. The heart rate also plays into the rate of Regenerating Health.
• Final Fantasy: Most bosses in the series are immune to the Scan ability, meaning you can only determine their HP by looking up a guide.
• Horizon Zero Dawn and the sequel Horizon Forbidden West normally show enemy life bars and the exact amount of damage inflicted by Aloy's attacks. However, if you play the games on Ultra Hard difficulty, enemy life bars are hidden, as are how much damage attacks deal to them. The only way to gauge their health is by paying attention to Subsystem Damage (as destroying components injures machines, so the more components you destroy the more heavily injured the machine is) and noting that once they fall to about 20% or so of health, a machine's animation becomes "injured", with slower movement, a noticeable limp, and random sparks being emitted from their joints.
• In Jade Cocoon, you and your minions' HP are designated by both a number and a bar, while enemy minions' HP are only marked by a bar.
• In Kingdom Hearts, both the player party's HP and the enemy's HP are represented by unmarked bars. There are no damage numbers anywhere for the most part (except in Kingdom Hearts χ), so unless you have an external resource you're pretty much just going on how much each individual hit lowers the gauge by. In the first few games where Enemy Scan was an ability that needed to be earned and equipped, you didn't even get that luxury for enemies at the start of the game and had to just hit them until they explode into darkness.
• Madou Monogatari: The only way to track your HP is to read the text that is printed out stating Arle's condition and magic levels during battle, or her Character Portrait when exploring. Later games upgrade it into an Idle Animation when in battle, which become labored when low on HP.
• Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift: The fight in the forest is unlike the dungeon fights, where Mylne's Hit Points are clearly stated. Instead, she only communicates damage as responses to attacks, recommending healing or not as required. Such as "No problem! I still got plenty to spare!" vs. "HP's getting low... Is it HP recovery time yet?"
• Mario & Luigi: Health isn’t displayed for enemies at all, so the only way to know the number of hit points they have is by looking up a guide. Meanwhile, Giant Battles only use health bars to display the approximate amount of HP the player and boss has.
• Mega Man X: Command Mission has an overkill mechanic, where dealing more than 75% of an enemy's current health allows you to finish it off right there, represented by a bar that resets with every attack. Because enemies lack a normal health bar, you have to use the overkill gauge to judge how strong they are, with repeated attacks causing the gauge to empty out further and further.
• Paper Mario:
  • In both Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, enemies only have a bar for their HP until you use the signature ability of a party member, Goombario in the first and Goombella in the second, to scan them.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash has a paint theme, and enemies lose paint as they take damage. You can get a general sense of an enemy's HP by looking at how much color they have left, but no exact damage values are given.
• Pokémon:
  • Starting from the first games, Pokémon Red and Blue, only the player's Pokemon are provided with numerical amounts of Hit Points in the battle screen. But, there's supposed to be Scratch Damage, unless broken by programming errors, so if an attacker is weak enough to deal a single Hit Point, then it's shown that at sufficiently low maximum Hit Points, the Life Meter has exact gradations for each point.
  • In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, your player character can take damage, from environmental hazards (mostly fall damage or sinking into deep water) and attacks from Pokemon outside of regular battles. To determine how much health you have left, the screen's borders will flash black and eventually red when you're reaching critical.

Shoot 'Em Up

• In Einhänder the only thing whose HP you know is yourself, and it's one. Your gunpods can take damage, but aside from their HUD icon turning from green to yellow to red it's not clear how many enemy bullets they can absorb.
• Genetos: Regular enemies die in a few hits so a Hit Points measurement isn't necessary, unlike bosses and their Life Meters.
• Meritous: As said in "Your PSI Circuit and You", since the relevant enemies don't look different when damaged:
  some enemies can take more than one hit from the PSI circuit before they are destroyed.
• In Touhou Project games, stage enemies lack visible health bars. Most of them die quickly anyway, but it's noticeable for a few particularly powerful stage fairies.
• The Void Rains Upon Her Heart: The main boss has a visible health bar. Breakable boss parts don't, but they usually Show Damage if they're expected to last long. Moreover, the gift "Fear Sense" not only adds health bars to boss parts, but shows the exact damage your shots deal.

Stealth-Based Game

• In the Tomb Raider reboot games (Tomb Raider (2013) and onward), there's no HP gauge, just a red haze around the screen when Lara is injured. The best indication that she's near death is an enemy declaring that she's critically injured, though this is only applicable when fighting enemies that talk.

Strategy Game

• Final Fantasy Tactics usually gives you exact HP counts for enemies with less than 1000, but anything bigger than that (such as the Lucavi) shows as "???," instead. Fortunately, most Percent Damage Attacks still work on them, so you can get a rough estimate of how much HP they have while taking off a good chunk of it.

Survival Horror

• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has the screen turn grey (along with reduced movement) if the player takes damage, having color restored as they gradually regenerate health. The health screen shows which wounds are untreated, along with a heartbeat electrocardiograph. Additionally, the game's sanity meter is also left vague showing distorted view as it lowers.
• Dead Rising: While in-game, Frank just has 12 Life Blocks, but internally, those Blocks are 1000 Hit Points each. The same applies to Survivors and Psychopaths, although their HP is represented by a health bar rather than Life Blocks.
• A recurring element in the Resident Evil franchise is that health is displayed by a cardiogram which is colour coded and labelled with a vague level like "fine", "danger", etc or a specific status effect (like poison), as well as changes in character animation (like limping, groaning and reduce moving speed). It adds to the tension since the player can never be quite sure how many hits they can take, and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis used this to great effect during the first mandatory Nemesis boss battle: Jill is infected with The Virus and her health meter is thus completely obscured (reading only "Virus" and having a weak ECG no matter what), forcing you to rely entirely on Jill's body language to try and figure out how much health she has left. The fourth through sixth games introduce a health bar, though the player’s exact HP is unknown.
• SIGNALIS: Elster's health varies between Nominal, Caution, Danger and Critical, with a blue/yellow/orange/red background on her character portrait. She holds her stomach on lower health statuses, and if you're playing on console, your controller will pulse on Critical. Healing items are described as providing a small, medium or large amount of healing. There is no indication of how much damage enemies have taken, but most of them go down in one or two hits.
• The first three Silent Hill games, which are spiritually related to the Resident Evil games, don't give you any exact quantification of your health.
  • The pause menu. It shows either a coloured background over Harry's mugshot in Silent Hill, or a coloured filter over the paused gameplay in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, and also follows the RE example of changing character animation based on remaining health.
  • Silent Hill 2 only shows a large cross at the bottom-right corner when at low health. Otherwise health is shown as an in-game snapshot on the inventory screen with a color shade in the top-left corner (it gradually turns red and pulses as you take damage), and no indication if using a health item could cause excess hit-points to be lost— the only clear metric is that the screenshot is tinted green at full health.
• In SOMA, if the protagonist takes a hit, he will start limping and seeing distortions such as lights split into primary colours, which means taking another hit will kill him.

Third-Person Shooter

• The Gears of War games represent player health with the usual red vignette and darkening screen but also a red gear logo in the middle of the screen that becomes more opaque as you take damage and kills you once it's full and a skull appears in it. The problem is that it's vague at best and distracting at worse. Later games incorporate it into the UI better, with Gears 5 mixing it with the damage-direction indicator.
• When you hit an enemy in MDK and its sequel, their Life Meter is displayed but you never get an exact numeric value of how much HP the enemy has, nor how much damage has been dealt.
• The Saboteur does not have any concrete way of measuring Sean Devlin's health; instead, blood gathers around the edges of the screen as he takes damage, and when his health is critical all the screen is tinted red.
• In Splatoon when you take damage (but are not splatted yet) the borders of your screen get splashed with ink. While there are definitely Hit Points being tracked, your exact hit points are not shown to you. Likewise, in most non-practice modes, your only indication as to how much damage the enemy has taken is how much ink is covering it. The only times a traditional Life Meter appears is for defense missions in the second game's expansion and for King Salmonids in the third game.
• Warframe lets you see the damage you're dealing to enemies as numbers popping up on the screen, but their remaining hitpoints are visible only as bars displayed above their heads. The codex shows the enemies' hitpoint capacity, but it doesn't take Level Scaling into account.

Unsorted and Other Video Games

• In 60 Seconds! and its sequel 60 Parsecs!, aside from the more variable status effects, a member's health is measured via hunger, thirst (in the first game only) or sanity. They aren't given a definite measurable value, and you have to go by descriptions in the Journal to see how they're doing. Two members could be both described as "hungry", but you won't know who needs food more than the other. Someone can also be described as perfectly sane one day, but the next day they'll completely lose it.
• Age of Empires: Mythologies: The upgrade "Mother of Deceit", obtained from worshipping Nyx, has the HP of your units be hidden from enemy units unless there is an enemy unit directly adjacent to them, with it appearing as "???/???". The enemy units in the Greek campaign automatically have this upgrade in addition to Nyx's other upgrades whether or not they have Hades as their Major God.
• DiRT Rally has vehicle damage only presented by physical damage to the car, or by some events such as the radiator beginning to heat up. Once outside the race, damage is presented in exact percentages.
• Eldritch Lands: The Witch Queen's Eternal War: Both enemy units and your homunculi can take a set amount of damage, but both the amount of damage they can take and how much damage attacks deal is never revealed to the player outright.
• The Epic Battle Fantasy series:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1: How much damage an enemy can take can only be determined through manually recording damage numbers and comparing that to the ungradated, temporarily on-screen Life Meter for the enemy.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The uses of Interface Screw in the game:
    • The Shroud status effect hides literally all information on-screen on the character it's been applied to. Health, buffs, status, everything.
    • The glitched field effect in certain areas does an Interface Screw to everyone on the field. Only HP is visible, and even that is an uncertainty. One area is so bad that it corrupts even the graphics for equipment and skills.
  • Adventure Story: A platformer, which as typical for the genre, has enemies that usually die in few enough hits that listing Hit Points isn't useful.
  • The Bullet Heaven sub-series of Bullet Heaven and Bullet Heaven 2, as typical for a Shoot 'Em Up series, has enemies that die quick enough to not need Life Meters or Hit Points info displayed.
• Hitman 2: There's no visible number for hit point value, but if you're hurt enough (shooting, electrocution or poison, for example) then 47 dies.
• In Kid Icarus: Uprising, Pit has a health bar, but his exact HP is unknown, but it can be changed with modifiers from weapons. Enemies and bosses have hit points but they don't have health bars as it can be tested that different weapons damage them differently.
• Monster Hunter:
  • A staple feature is that the monsters you fight lack visible health bars by which to tell how much damage you're doing to them and how much longer you have to go in a fight. The only indicators of a monster's health is when it reaches around 20% HP or below and begins to do a noticeable limping animation. This is couched in the idea of there being a dash of realism to the hunt since there are no health bars in the real world so you have to use your intuition and observation to figure it out. However this can become an issue when some quests require you to capture the monster alive and therefore you have to whittle down their health to the limping threshold: Deal too little damage and the traps and tranquilizers will fail; too much and you run the risk of killing the monster and failing the quest.
  • Later games in the series have started to add visible damage numbers as indicators by which you can roughly figure out the monsters' total hit points to gauge the fight's progress. There are still no health bars though and a random element to the game remains where monsters are programmed to start with an amount of HP between two thresholds, which you cannot tell on sight meaning you could encounter two individuals of the same species who take different times to defeat.
• The Plants vs. Zombies series clearly uses hitpoints with plants dealing different amounts of damage to zombies of different health amounts. But besides visual wounds for Shows Damage, it is not clear how much health zombies have.
  • Averted by the China-exclusive installment Plants Vs. Zombies Online, which shows Life Meters for the zombies.
• Titan Quest: Setting the game to have no combat text means this trope occurs since the enemy Life Meters are ungradated and don't carry info on the number of Hit Points.
• Transistor: Red has a Life Meter, but the number of Hit Points it holds is unstated.

Other media:

Tabletop Games

• Beyblade Burst: Zig-zagged. While you can see how close a Beyblade is to bursting by looking at how far the tabs on the disc have turned, they can't be seen when the bey is spinning fast.
• Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Characters gain the "bloodied" status condition when at or below half health, so having the condition gives some information on how much more they need to be damaged to fall but doesn't relate how many Hit Points, numerically, that is.
• Unknown Armies instructs the GM not to tell the players how much damage they have taken, instead keeping track of the numbers in secret and only giving verbal descriptions of injuries. This can make getting hurt a lot more stressful for the players - especially for Epideromancers, who have to intentionally hurt themselves to gain magical charge.

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