Many things can cause harm to adventurers. The most obvious of these is combat damage. However, poisons, diseases, starvation, environmental effects, and many other things can reduce an adventurer's ability to continue breathing.

Your character's health is represented by two values in Unbound Tales: Stamina and hit points.

Stamina represents your character's ability to avoid damage. This might be through dodging, or through absorbing damage through non-lethal means. So long as your character has stamina remaining, your character is not actually taking injury yet. Every character has a maximum stamina, ranging anywhere from fifteen to ninety, but averaging about forty. As you take damage from any source, your stamina will go down.

If your stamina is reduced to zero, any excess damage will be transferred to hit points. Unlike stamina, hit points start at zero, and increase as you take damage.

You might receive temporary stamina from many sources, ranging from class features to elixirs to magic. Temporary stamina works identically to normal stamina, save that you can receive any amount, above and beyond your normal stamina. It never converts to normal stamina; if you have taken stamina damage, and receive temporary stamina, this does not repair your normal stamina damage.

Temporary stamina never stacks. If you receive an allotment of temporary stamina, and you already have some, you must decide whether to lose your existing temporary stamina and take the new allotment, or keep your existing and not gain the new allotment.

Hit points represent actual physical injury. So long as you have any hit points of damage, you suffer a penalty to all skill checks equal to the hit points of damage you have taken, and the TN of any saving throws you have to make are increased by your hit points of damage.

Some creatures and objects are exceedingly difficult or unusually easy to hurt with certain types of damage.

If a creature or an object has resistance to a damage type, damage of that type is reduced by a given value applied to each die of damage.

If a creature or an object has vulnerability to a damage type, damage of that type is increased by a given value applied to each die of damage.

Resistance and then vulnerability are applied after all other modifiers to damage.

Unlike Resistance, Damage Reduction is applied to the final amount of damage before that damage is applied to stamina or hit points. Though less effective than Resistance, Damage Reduction is also generally easier to come by.

At the start of your turn, if you have zero stamina remaining, you must make a Body saving throw against a TN of 10. Remember that if you are missing hit points, this TN will be increased.

• Success: You avoid collapsing, but are still suffering penalties due to hit points.
• Failure: You collapse from your wounds, and become Incapacitated.

At the end of a battle, if you have taken hit points of damage, make a Body saving throw against a TN equal to the number of hit points of damage you currently have.

• Success: Your character lives. However, your hit points remain until you can be healed, so you are still suffering all the penalties typical of that state.
• Failure: Your character dies.

Whenever a character receives healing, it must be applied to missing stamina first. Only when a character's stamina is fully recovered will healing apply to their hit points.