Multiple Life Bars

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Multiple types of damage are tracked separately. A character exhibiting this trope typically has multiple Life Meters, each tracking a different kind of damage. Comes in multiple flavors:

1. Layered Hit Points: The Life Meter has several layers by default, and defeating the character requires depleting every one in order. Each Life Meter so depleted gives you access to the next.
  • A common setup is Regenerating Shield, Static Health. See that trope for details.
  • Temporary Hit points—using a special skill or ability to create an extra layer of hit points that absorb damage. The character may be able to perform this repeatedly.
2. Subsystem Damage: Several Life Meters representing various areas or portions of the character, which are more or less exposed to attack in any desired order. Depleting a given Life Meter disables whatever area it is associated with, which trigger the outright defeat if it is associated with a "vital" area, otherwise can impair their ability to continue fighting.
  • May be combined with Layered Hit Points by splitting shields and/or armor into sectors, which requires to bring one to zero before any damage is done to more juicy parts inside.
3. Alternate Knockout Conditions: All of the different Life Meters are exposed to attack, and depleting just one is enough to knock out the character.

Variants that have their own trope page:

Examples of Multiple Life Bars include:

Layered Hit Points

Anime and Manga

  • Many if not most of the boss monsters encountered by the players in Sword Art Online had multiple life bars which had to be whittled down one after the other. Worse, depleting a life bar would frequently change the boss's tactics, activate its Limit Break, or turn it red, if not all three at once.

Tabletop Games

  • 1E Gamma World
    • Mutants with the Force Field Generation ability could create a force field that absorbed up to 5 dice of damage. Once the force field went down any further damage reduced the mutant's hit points, and the force field could not be generated again for 24 hours.
    • Some types of powered armor had force fields that worked similarly, except that they returned to full strength at the start of the next melee turn even if they took more damage than their limit.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • Temporary Hit Points is a common enough effect.
    • Module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Police robots had a 20 hit point force shield that acted like the Gamma World Force Field Generation ability, except that it regenerated at 1 hit point per melee round.
  • Villains and Vigilantes: The Armor power was for all practical purposes a separate pool of "hit points" which had to be exhausted before damage was applied to your "real" hit points.

Video Games

  • Iji has both "Armor" and "HP" stats. Small arms fire only damages your armor, with each HP equating one full armor bar. However, powerful attacks (melee attacks, explosives) directly damage your HP, bypassing the armor entirely.
  • Final Fantasy V gives us the debut of Golem, who once summoned absorbs damage for your party.
  • Theoretically, this is what Pokémon's Substitute does.
  • Some videogame bosses have multi-layered life bars, with each bar's depletion triggering a change in the boss' behavior. (cf. Sequential Boss, Turns Red)
    • Bosses in Touhou games have multiple life bars. Whenever one is depleted they switch to the next attack pattern.
    • Several bosses in Distorted Travesty have multiple life bars, and usually change their behaviour after one of them is depleted.
  • In the Gundam Battle Assault games, instead of duels utilizing a best-two-out-of-three format, each fighter had three life meters. When one is depleted, the mech is "overheated" and flinches for a moment, but the fight otherwise continues without interruption.
  • In Thexder, using the shields activated a secondary (temporary) meter that could absorb 100 HP of damage, while your main Life Meter was impervious to damage in the meantime.
  • Many Harvest Moon games have both Stamina (your primary bar) and Fatigue (your secondary bar). Fatigue is harder to recover, and if you expend too much of it, it won't fully recover even by going to sleep. You'll need items.
  • EVE Online ships have shield, armor, and hull HP bars. Layered, but once one bar is sufficiently lowered, damage can start bleeding through to the layer underneath.
    • If shield and armor are gone, the ship's weapons and modules are exposed to attacks. Any damage to hull may bleed through modules, damaging or disabling them. Even if the ship survives the ordeal, it has to dock up and get repairs to be spaceworthy again.
  • The X Wing series and Dark Forces series feature shields and health. In X Wing, shields regenerate. In Dark Forces, they take energy damage, but not punches. 0% on your health points kills you.
  • Crackdown has an armor meter that regenerates fairly quickly, which gives way to a health meter that regens more slowly.
  • Mega Man Zero introduced layered life bars to the series, and Mega Man ZX continued this tradition. In fact, you can even get your own layered life bar.
  • Most bosses in Scurge: Hive have layered life bars.
  • Kingdom Hearts bosses use layered health bars - if you have the Scan ability, that is.
  • Viewtiful Joe has layered health bars.
  • Mischief Makers has three layered health bars.
  • Alpha Protocol uses the layered hit points system for both the protagonist and most powerful enemies, including bosses. The "regenerating shield" part is called "endurance," and it represents a combination of body armor and willpower, and notably does not block everything (explosions tend to "bleed" through, for example). It also featured a semi-layered health bar underneath. Health was split into sub bars which determined how much you could heal. During missions, health items could restore one's health up to the last bar that was full. For example, if you depleted a bar to half, it could be refilled. But if you depleted a bar fully, that bar would remain empty until the next mission.
  • X-men Origins: Wolverine had layered hit points for Wolverine: he had a standard life meter, and a "Vitals" life meter underneath that, representing his internal organs. The main difference is that his internal organs regenerated health more slowly.
  • In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia you can use your hearts count as this if you equip a certain item.
  • In Galactic Civilizations II, starship defenses (shields, armor and point defenses) essentially work as temporary extra layers of hit points which vary with the random number generator's whim during every combat round and absorb fire before the actual hit points take damage.
  • In Legend of Mana, both you and the enemies you fight can have layered health bars.
  • The Streets of Rage tend to give the bosses these... and threw on a couple more layers for the English releases.
  • The final boss of Clock Tower 3. This is quite jarring because no other boss had these, so seeing his death count translate to three full-sized health bars may have caused quite an Oh Crap.
  • Bosses in the first Breath of Fire had 2 life bars. A normal life bar, and a hidden one that activated once the normal life bar was depleted. The boss typically changed tactics once the hidden life bar activated.
  • The Syphon Filter series has a health bar that's intentionally obscured by an armor bar. When armor is depleted, your health is damaged directly. Notably, armor was much tougher than health, as the same amount of damage to completely reduce your health to zero will only take off about half of your armor. Headshots bypass armor directly and are always instantly fatal.
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, you have crystals representing every 1000 hit points (up to 9 crystals). The sequel, on the other hand, has a straight-forward bar reflecting your percentage of remaining HP.
  • Metroid games have Samus with multiple energy tanks. Super Metroid also adds the Reserve Tank system, a secondary health storage method that could be triggered manually or when Samus runs out of energy in her main tanks.
  • Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure uses the method of layered life bars to indicate that much more health while conserving screen space. Even though there's health power-ups that give you more layers on your life bar, the first fights against General Tao and King Piccolo start you with one layer when the opponent has several, the telltale sign that the plot's calling for Goku to get clobbered.
  • The Mass Effect series uses kinetic barriers (referred to as "shields" by you and your squadmates) followed by your actual health. Enemies can have up to three layers of HP, the first being their Barrier or Shield, the second being their Armor and the last one being their Health.
  • Guild Wars 2 has the Death Shroud and Barriers that add a temporary shield over regular health and are displayed as an extra layer of health. The Death Shroud is a large decaying shield exclusive to the Necromancer class that also significantly alters active skills during its effect and prevents healing except for a few self-healing effects that bypass this restriction. Barriers can be applied by some skills and specializations for a few classes or triggered by runes and persist for a few seconds before vanishing.

Web Original

Subsystem Damage

Video Games

  • Naval Ops: Commander divided the player's main ship into four different sections (Bow, Port, Starboard and Stern), each with its own set of hit points. If any one of those life fall reached zero, the ship sinks and the level is lost.
  • In the original Deus Ex, JC Denton can take damage to the various parts of his body. Losing all his HP in one of his arms increases his aim waver, while both arms significantly increases it. Losing all HP to a leg reduces his speed and jump height, while both legs being knocked out of commission means he can only crawl very slowly. Losing all HP to the torso or head results in death.
  • In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, although damage is applied to your hit points in full, your limbs, head and chest all have separate hit points. If their condition is reduced to 0, they become damaged, similar to the Deus Ex example above (with the exception that losing HP to the head results in a concussion).

Alternate Knockout Conditions

Tabletop Games

  • Alternity had four different types of damage, each of which had to be tracked separately: stun, wound, mortal and fatigue.
  • Some Tabletop RPG systems (Shadowrun and Hero System being prominent examples) differentiate stun damage and physical injury and keep track of them separately. Running out of either will knock you out, but recovering from injury is long and hard, while stun damage clears after a short rest.
  • In the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, some powers can deal damage to a target's ability scores. At high levels, a lot of monsters have hundreds or even thousands of HP, but only 10 points of their lowest ability score, and most creatures don't have anything to heal ability damage. This makes it a Game Breaker that was removed from 4E.
  • Games of Magic: The Gathering are usually lost when a player runs out of life, but you can also lose by accumulating 10 poison counters or running out of cards. All of these have decks behind them, though the poison counter deck used to be weak.

Video Games

  • Characters in Star Ocean 3 get knocked out if they run out of mana, and many attacks exploit it by targeting magic points instead of or in addition to Hit Points, resulting in this trope.
  • Metal Gear Solid has separate stamina and health bars. The former is only drained by non-lethal weapons (and in some games, slowly empties to represent starvation), but knocking enemies out has advantages (the most obvious one being that most bosses in the series give you some sort of bonus for knocking them out instead of killing them).
  • Champions has at least 3: Stun (go to 0 and you fall unconscious), body (go to 0 and you may die) and endurance (go to 0 and you are too exhausted to take most actions).
  • Billy vs. SNAKEMAN: Delivery Missions have Drivetrain (the HP of your car), Durability (the HP of the box you're delivering), and Deliciousness (the HP of the contents of the box).
  • The fighting game Primal Rage uses both a traditional health meter, as well as a "brain meter." When it was depleted, the character would become temporarily stunned, allowing the opponent to get in some free hits.
  • Petey Piranha in Super Smash Bros. Brawl holds 2 cages, each one with a life bar, to defeat him you have to destroy either of the cages while attacking him directly lowers both cages bars equally.

Combined variants

Tabletop Games

  • The World of Darkness tabletop RPGs (and video games based on them, such as Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines) all use a mix of Subsystem Damage and Alternate Knockout Conditions: Stun and Bashing damage merely gets converted to Lethal when it exceeds a threshold, but too much Lethal or Aggravated kills you dead.
  • Iridium System has 10 areas (vital and non-vital) for a humanoid character, each with its own fortitude points; damage can be either normal or Concussion (non-lethal).
  • Alternity uses compartment system for starships, with systems assigned to compartments. Durability points equal volume.
    • Alternity Warships rules overhaul has 4 damage tracks: Stun (unlikely to cause a major system failure, hull breach, or structural damage) - Wound - Mortal - Critical (can destroy one or more of the ship’s compartments with a single hit). Like in RPG rules, damage level depends on how good a hit is, but also upgraded or downgraded by the difference between weapon and hull scale (Firepower and Toughness), with Critical damage upgraded by doubling; hits also inflict some secondary damage in all lower tracks. It also has locations based System Damage.

A ship is shaken when all the boxes in its stun track are marked off, disabled when all the boxes in its wound track are checked off, crippled when all boxes in its mortal track are checked off, and destroyed when all boxes in its critical track are checked off.
Damage Check: […] made to determine whether or not a system exposed to damage continues to function or not.

Video Games

  • Earthsiege utilize multiple life bars to distinguish between energy shields (which may regenerate) and armor/HP for various components, usually resulting in Subsystem Damage as your armor/HP reaches low levels.
  • In The Reconstruction, every character has Body, Mind and Soul points, all of which serve as Hit Points and Mana at the same time. Any of these reaching zero KO's the character.
  • Master of Orion 2 has damage applied to sectored regenerating shields, then armor, then hull structure and systems—drive, computer and shield generator has separate points, other systems are either broken or not. A ship is killed only when its structure or drive is reduced to 0 HP. Drives are low on HP, but rarely get hit and stations haven't any. Some weapons can penetrate normal shields or armor, emission-guided missile variant always hits drives and one gun ignores armor and structure, dealing only shield and system damage, which can immobilize or kill ships really quick. All bypassing measures can be countered, though.
  • Wing Commander has shields and then various part of the ship damaged and repaired separately.
  • Vega Strike has sectored regenerating shields, then sectored ablative armor, then hull. Each hit to the hull has a chance of becoming Critical Hit for some or other Subsystem Damage. "Non-lethal" EMP weapons don't kill the hull and can disable a ship so it can be captured.
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