A character’s hitpoints can involve toughness, luck, timing, endurance, or the obvious physical wellbeing. Hitpoint loss is rarely indicative of physical injury due to the game’s publications describing hitpoints as a combination of many things. Resistance, Immunity, and Vulnerability to Damage Skip ahead to an area of interest by clicking the link below. I’ll go over what hitpoints represent, followed by some basic rules. I want to inspire your roleplay opportunities and descriptions so you can narrate damage in new and interesting ways. My goal is to use my 5e experience and knowledge with a bit of research to expound on damage types. We can learn more about the damage types by playing the game and exploring the abilities and spells that use them.

The basic rules contain brief descriptions of damage types, but that’s about it. Damage types can be so interesting if we afford them adequate consideration.ĭamage categories receive little explanation in the rules of D&D 5e.

Since we need to describe damage so much, I figured I’d take a crack at diving deeper into what damage is, what the different damage types are, and how we, as DMs and players can become better storytellers by understanding these concepts. As a roleplaying game, the game eventually encourages players to describe what it’s like to suffer or inflict damage. D&D 5e damage types and hit points explained featured image credit WotC Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.ĭisclaimer: This article contains affiliate links that add gold to our coffers.Ĭombat is a massive part of D&D 5e.

Dmg system shock d&d 5e