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Body Armor as Hit Points
In the context of some video games, sometimes body armor just provides a bonus to the owner's maximum Hit Points. Rather than add any kind of specific protection to certain attacks, a character wearing body armor will just gradually have it chipped away whenever they are hit, in the same manner as their usual Hit Points. If enough damage is sustained, the extra body armor may simply vanish.

It is not usually visible on a character, and acquiring it puts the object to use instantaneously, so the player character is never seen discarding it. This trope is, obviously, not particularly realistic. Ironically, it became popular with many "realistic" shooters because putting on body armor seemed a more plausible way of improving a character's Hit Points than having them grab a first aid kit in the middle of a firefight. Generally necessary for the sake of game mechanics, although this is less true today than it was ten years ago.

A variation of this which generally is considered to make more sense is Full-body Deflector Shields As Hit Points. After all, energy which specifically covers your entire person and uses energy to protect should be able to help protect you from anything as long as its energy supply is sufficient, right?


Compare Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp". Contrast Destructible Armor, where the amount of armor is a direct indication of the user's remaining HP. Using this system rather than making armour a separate stat Armor Piercing Attacks can circumvent may help avert Armor Is Useless.

Video Game examples:

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     Arcade Games  

     First Person Shooter  

  • Doom was the Trope Codifier for first-person shooters. Body armor came in 2 varieties, with blue armor having higher durability and absorbing a higher percentage of damage, compared to green armor. There were also "armor bonus" items that could repair your current armor (and bring it above 100% in the case of green armor), while picking up a some armor bonuses while unarmored gave you a few points worth of green armor.
  • Alpha Protocol has armor that grants endurance, which is like health that regenerates.
  • Many James Bond FPS games, however Nightfire plays with this to a degree: Your armor only protects you from bullets. When you fall from a great height, your bio stats decrease.
  • Perfect Dark uses "realistic" personal shields.
    • In Perfect Dark Zero, body armor will mitigate the effect of being shot, although it will still undergo Critical Existence Failure and stop working, and is useless against melee. This actually makes sense, as kevlar vests in real life are designed to absorb bullet impact, and do nothing against a knife or club.
  • The second FEAR game.
  • Played with in the early Rainbow Six video games. Without heavy armor, the player character can go down in as little as one bullet.
  • The shields from Halo.
  • Played straight in Unreal Tournament 2003, which completely abstracts armour as a floaty yellow shield icon when not equipped, and otherwise as a number that will go down instead of your health when you're hit.
  • Borderlands has the "Deflector Shields As Hit Points" variation (plus some of them actively restore health).
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein does this with armored enemies, with pieces of their armor falling off as you shoot at them, including the final boss.

     Platform Games  

  • This is how armors work in Legend of Kay. You even get an extra Life Meter (for the armor) next to your normal one.
  • In Jak 3: Wastelander and The Lost Frontier, you start with eight hit points, or "half a circle". Each armor upgrade gives you two extra points, filling up the "circle".
  • In ESWAT (arcade version), you lose pieces of Powered Armor when you take a hit.

     Real Time Strategy  

  • In Starcraft, the Protoss have the "Deflector Shields" version.
  • Armor upgrades in Dawn of War increase hit points rather than damage resistance. This is because the game engine relies on armor type to determine damage taken.
  • In StarCraft II, the Vanidium Plating upgrade adds +5% HP per armor upgrade. This also affects vehicles and spaceships, as well as soldiers. Marines also get a Combat Shield upgrade that grants +10 HP.

     Role Playing Games  

  • In Parasite Eve 2, armor modifies your maximum HP and allows you to carry more usable items into battle.
  • In the computer game Autoduel, your vehicle's driver has 3 Hit Points at full health. Body armor can also be bought (or replaced, if damaged) at truck stops, which grants another 3 hit points. Driver health isn't affected until all 3 hit points from body armor are gone. (If 6 HP sounds puny, keep in mind that the damage scale is designed around armed, (usually) heavily armored vehicles shooting the crap out of each other.)
    • This is carried over from the original Tabletop RPG Car Wars. Body armour would give 3 extra damage points (improved versions, 6). As a side note on damage scale, what seems to be an ordinary M60-size machine gun does a base 1d6 damage.
      • As a humorous side-note, in the Tabletop RPG, you fall unconscious after taking 2 damage points and die after 3. A .44 magnum revolver inflicts 2 damage points. Therefore, if you take the rules literally, as long as you're not wearing armor, you cannot commit suicide with a .44 magnum, even if you put the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger.
  • Mass Effect plays the trope straight, with a third layer devoted to biotic barriers or shields. Most boss-type units in Mass Effect 2 have at least armor or shields. On Insanity difficulty, all enemies have armor or shields, and boss-type units have shields/biotic barriers, armor and finally health. Especially tough boss-type units have biotic barriers, shields, armor and health. However, huge or purely mechanical enemies only have armor, not health. Once their armor is depleted, it's assumed the last shot hit something vital and killed/destroyed them.
  • The Mobile Phone game Battleloot Adventure has armor increase your max HP instead of your defense stat.

     Stealth Based Game  

  • Batman: Arkham Asylum also does this. Each armor upgrade adds another segment to your health bar, but does absolutely nothing to improve your resistance to damage.

     Third Person Shooter  

     Turn Based Strategy  

  • In the Disgaea series, some armors and accessories will give you extra hit points in addition to boosting your other stat ratings.

     Wide Open Sandbox  

  • Grand Theft Auto: All of the Playstation 2-era games use this trope the same way; body armor hit points are indistinguishable from regular hit points insomuch as game mechanics are concerned, but in Grand Theft Auto IV, only being shot or caught in an explosion will take off armor; damage taken from falling, getting run over, getting punched in the face and so on bypasses it. San Andreas and Liberty City Stories also bypassed armor damage from drowning and falling.
  • In Spore, adding armor to the animal increases the hitpoints, though the increases don't stack.
  • In EVE Online, this is played straight and averted. Spaceships have hitpoints split into three types: Shields, Armor and Structure which take damage in that order. Ships can equip modules to extend the hitpoints of all three, playing this straight (relying on just this is called "buffer tank"). The aversion lies in the four Damage Resistance stats, which reduce damage taken by a straight percentage ("resistance tank"). This latter part is more an example of Damage Reduction but it adds to the ship's effective HP all the same.
  • In the classic computer game Auto Duel, your character has 3 hit points and can buy body armor at any truck stop, which provides another 3 hit points. Unlike your body, though, the armor can't be fixed once it's shot up, so once it's sustained the full 3 points of damage, you'll need to buy new armor. (Oh, and if you're thinking that 3 hit points is a puny number, keep in mind that the game is designed around the concept of vehicles blowing the crap out of each other.)

Other examples:


    Tabletop Games 
  • Ablative armor in GURPS acts almost exactly like normal hitpoints (the exceptions being against attacks with armor penetration modifiers).
  • Rifts's Mega-Damage system basically replaces your normal SDC/Hit Points with the armor's MDC, given that even light Mega-Damage to a normal human will usually kill them outright.



Bling of WarTropes in Shining ArmorBroken Faceplate
Air Aided AcrobaticsVideo Game PhysicsBoom, Headshot

alternative title(s): Body Armour As Hit Points
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