alexandraerin

First, A Wilder World uses what I call a "forgiving short scale" of HP. This is not the same as old school D&D where nobody had many HPs to begin with... that was the low end of a large scale. PCs in A Wilder World will have more HP than most of the opponents they face, more HP than they're likely to lose in a single blow (or even two), and being reduced to zero is not favorable in the long run but it doesn't mean you're dead, or even dying.

Your HP are calculated by how many points you put into the more physical-oriented areas during stat allocation, though the maximum benefit you can get there if you are an absolute meat shield/human battering ram stat-wiseis +11 HP and everybody starts with a packet of 9. This is part of the "forgiving" aspect... the game assumes that heroic figures of legend and destiny who aren't particularly tough still won't necessarily have an easy time dying.

Second, Hit Points in AWW aren't "health points" and they do not correlate to gross bodily integrity. They're a measure of your ability to stay in a fight despite what's thrown your way. So, HP doesn't just cover physical damage but also mental damage.

(This doesn't just mean telepathic brain blasts, it means fear spells and sleeping drugs and dispiriting jeers... any or all of these things might have side effects that better convey their precise nature, but they all damage your resolve/ability to keep fighting in a similar way.)

As mentioned above: getting reduced to 0 HP doesn't mean dead, it means out of the fight. What that means in story terms depends on the attacker's intentions and circumstances. If one member of the party is trying to talk an enemy out of fighting and leaves them with 2 HP, and another member of the party hits them with a mace for 2 damage, they could still be dead even if those 2 points of damage were all the physical damage they took. Low HP = low ability to keep fighting, so what might have been a minor hit to a well-protected area could be a crushing blow to the head.

Or a crushing blow to the knee, leaving them alive but incapable of fighting. Or a calculated tap to the head leaving them unconscious by basically fine in the way of fictional characters who are knocked unconscious.

The flip example also works... they lose most of their HP to the mace and then the party's diplomat steps up and says "You don't really want to keep testing my friend's patience, do you?" and they give up then and there, having taken 2 points of mental damage and gone down to zero as a result.

Mental damage and physical damage are tracked separately for PCs and major NPCs who are going to be present throughout the adventure, because physical damage has more of a lasting implication. For minor NPCs, damage is damage. It doesn't really matter.

How much damage does an attack do? Well, your attack roll is also your damage roll. An attack roll is made by rolling (usually) a single six sided die and adding your Prowess (for physical attacks), plus any attack bonuses from your Special Abilities (fightery-type characters will generally have some decent static bonuses for attacks with a particular type of weapon or fitting into a particular style)

The number you roll plus modifiers is compared to the target's defense (which for players, is a stat plus the possibility of things like armor.) Generally this will be somewhere between 2 and 5. Amounts of 6 or higher are possible, and yes, it is possible for someone without a high hit bonus to hit them, but generally the game will represent really tough to bring down enemies by giving them a not unreasonably high defense and then a load of HP, so that you can see progress instead of having to roll eight or nine times to make one hit.

If you roll higher than defense, you do the difference in damage. If you roll exactly as high as defense, you make contact (which could be important for other reasons) but not in a way that does damage.

If your target is on their guard (has allocated actions for defense), they can make a defense roll, which replaces their defense with a die roll plus their Reflexes, if it's higher. (Or some other stat, if it's an esoteric defense like a mystic shield). Normal defense rolls represent attempts to block (with a shield or similar), parry, or dodge. Just as weapons are assumed to be all basically good but you can have an unusual skill with one or another, these defensive maneuvers are also assumed to be the same in effectiveness, but defensive abilities and tricks will frequently be tied to specific ones. So you might have a better bonus to dodge, or be able to counter attack after a successful parry, or whatever.

Even if the defense roll doesn't beat your attack roll, it can still lessen the damage if it's higher than their original defense. If they tie, that "goes to the defender"... instead of a 0 damage hit, it's considered the same as if they'd beaten you.

Now, all these stats I'm mentioning... Prowess, Defense, Reflexes... will fall more or less into the same ranges. Players are free to make characters who are pretty un-rounded and optimized in a single direction, but typical NPCs usually start out with average in everything and then have points tweaked a bit up or down. If everyone has average on everything, then a character making a die roll + their Prowess vs. the target's Defense, the result is the same as their die roll. So 1 to 6. Average 3.5. If the target's got a point or two of armor added to their defense (not unusual), then average damage is 2.5 or 1.5.

If the target with average Reflexes is trying to dodge or parry an attack made with average Prowess, then it's basically high roll wins.

So the average numbers-in-a-vacuum attack is going to hit for a few points of damage if the target doesn't defend, and is likely to be negated if the target does defend.

(It would be a very exceptional PC who had average abilities, though. A lot of characters will either be great at physical combat or terrible at it. But that's fine! The math is very straightforward. One character who is set up for fighting can do enough damage to make up for the character who spends the entire fight scene doing something other than attacking.)

Now, I talked about long-term implications of physical damage before. This is where we get into the difference between HPs and wounds. Wounds are represented as Wound Points. When a fight is over, you look at the physical damage you suffered. You subtract your Toughness from it... that's a combat stat that's part of the initial HP calculation, and that's used when making some resistance rolls (cf. Fortitude save). It also measures your resilience to injury, as seen here. For every three points of physical damage you took beyond your Toughness, you accumulate one wound point. If you were knocked down to zero by a physical attack, you take another wound point.

Your wound points subtract from your maximum HP until you get a chance for serious rest and recovery or miraculous healing, which in most cases means "the end of the adventure". Wound points aside, you come into each new fight with full HP.

Healing abilities that are player-controlled are usually in the form of "treat x wound points per scene" or "treat x people of 1 wound point per scene." This refers to the scene in which the wound would have been inflicted... if someone takes 4 points of wounds and you can treat one point, you can't have them back to full in four scenes. You turn the 4 points of wounds into 3 points and then they make do.

Harsh? A little, but the system overall is forgiving. Getting knocked to zero HP doesn't mean you're dead, it means you've lost ~33% of your HP for the rest of the adventure, which might you will have to take fewer risks and spend more actions defending or moving away in future fights but isn't something that can't be overcome.

This all ties back into the idea of the challenge level being something determined over time rather than for each individual encounter. If how well you win (i.e., how much damage you don't take in the process) matters, then even encounters that are designed to showcase how much butt the PCs kick can still count for something over the course of an adventure.

Wounds are also the usual medium of exchange for out-of-combat damage for things like dangerous falls or traps, where it's not a matter of taking you out of a fight but impacting your ability to fight future battles.

A character who has taken enough wounds to have no HP left is too badly injured to fight, or to do anything too strenuous. Depending on the circumstances, they may be out of the adventure completely (likely if there's spelunking or mountaineering involved), or able to limp/be carried along while offering purely mental aid.

You'll note in here that there's no rule mentioned for player character death. That's because there is no rule for player character death. While some options will be included for people who want a little more bloody "realism", it's not a mechanical outcome of the core game rules at all.

Opportunities for character death normally have to be written into an adventure -- determining what happens if players win or lose (or circumvent) a battle is part of encounter design, and only pivotal battles are meant to result in player character death upon their individual or collective defeat. For non-combat hazards, it should always be "balance beam over a boiling lake full of lava" level of apparent that a player is taking their character's life into their hands. In most cases, the check to perform a not impossible but fatal-on-failure stunt can be read as the character sizing it up.

"Fail" to jump the canyon = you lost your nerve or realized your limits.

Note that this doesn't mean that the "lethal peril" sensing abilities of the Death-Touched mentioned in my previous post will rarely come up. A trap that makes use of spring-loaded blades at neck height is clearly a deadly danger, after all.

The fact that it's not going to kill the PCs doesn't change the fact that it's deadly, any more than its failure to kill any one person who stumbles into it makes it a non-lethal deterrent.

Note that this also doesn't mean that player characters are a special class of nigh-immortal beings who are aware that they're impervious to serious harm. Again, the hypothetical blade trap is not incapable of killing the player characters. It's also possible it won't kill them... and it transpires that it doesn't.

On the other hand, if a player announces that they're sticking their neck under the lunette of a guillotine and are releasing the blade to impress the villagers with how this costs them 1 HP off their total, it should be explained to them that they've announced they're committing suicide and they should be given a chance to reconsider.

"The adventure will not kill you off in the opening scenes" is just part of the dramatic compact that guides the story, in the same way that it's understood that you will not randomly contract the plague die of an infected bedsore between adventures. It means you're special and destined for greater things, possibly including a greater death. That's all.

(See also: not a simulation.)

Also note that just as a dearth of death doesn't mean you're playing on god mode, it also doesn't mean you're playing on easy mode. One of my reasons for banishing the grim specter of death is to make it so that a typical adventure or campaign can have a lot of back and forth to it, a lot of ups and downs... if death is a natural outcome of failure-by-the-rules, then an adventuring career is a string of mostly unbridled successes that lasts until death.