Injury and Death

The most common way that your character gets hurt is to take damage and lose Stamina Points or Hit Points.

If your Hit Points reach 0, you are dying. You immediately fall unconscious and can take no actions.

While dying, you lose 1 Resolve Point each round at the end of your turn. (If your Hit Points reached 0 during your turn, such as from an attack of opportunity you provoked, you do not lose a Resolve Point until the end of your next turn.) This continues until either you die or stabilize (see Stabilizing below).

When your Hit Point total is 0, if you are not stable and you have no Resolve Points remaining but would lose Resolve Points for any reason, you’re dead. If you have 0 RP when you are first reduced to 0 HP, you have 1 round to be healed or stabilized. If you have not been healed or stabilized by the end of your turn on the next round, you’re dead (see page 275 for more details on the dead condition).

You can also die from taking Constitution ability damage or ability drain equal to your Constitution score or from having a number of negative levels equal to your character level (see Ability Damage, Ability Drain, and Negative Levels on page 252).

Nonetheless, certain types of powerful magic and technology can restore life to a dead character, such as a 4th-level mystic cure spell or a raise dead spell.

There are several ways to stabilize a dying creature, including first aid, healing, and spending Resolve Points. Once stable, you are no longer dying and no longer lose Resolve Points, but you still have 0 Hit Points and are unconscious.

While you are dying, if you have any Stamina Points, any damage you take still reduces those first. The first time each round you take Hit Point damage (whether from an attack or from continuous damage, such as from a bleed effect), you lose 1 Resolve Point. At any point after that in the round, if a single source (such as one attack) deals Hit Point damage greater than half your maximum Hit Points but less than your maximum Hit Points, you lose 1 additional RP. As mentioned earlier, if you would lose Resolve Points but have no Resolve Points remaining, you die instantly. If you take damage equal to or greater than your maximum Hit Points from a single attack, you also die instantly.

If you take damage while unconscious but stable, you are once again dying and no longer stable.

After taking damage, you can recover Hit Points through natural healing or through magical or technological healing. You can’t regain more Hit Points than your maximum Hit Point total.

Certain effects, such as force fields, give you temporary Hit Points. These Hit Points are in addition to your current Hit Points and Stamina Points, and any damage you take is subtracted from your temporary Hit Points first. Any damage in excess of these temporary HP reduces your Stamina Points (and then your actual Hit Points) as normal. If the effect that grants the temporary HP ends or is counteracted, any remaining temporary HP go away.

When temporary Hit Points are lost, they can’t be regained or restored like a character’s normal Hit Points or Stamina Points can be, though some sources of temporary Hit Points have their own rules on how to restore lost temporary Hit Points.

Nonlethal damage represents harm that can knock you out instead of killing you. Some weapons deal only nonlethal damage, while others can be set to deal nonlethal damage when desired. You can deal lethal damage with a nonlethal weapon and vice versa.

Some monster attacks or harmful effects might directly damage or drain one or more of a character’s ability scores, or they might impose negative levels. If you take ability drain or negative levels, you might no longer meet the prerequisites for certain feats or abilities, and thus be unable to use them.