Health and combat numbers

Your characters hit points are a measure of your ability to sustain physical injuries to your body. If your hit points ever drop to 0, you become incapacitated and begin to slowly bleed to death. If your hp drops below -10, your character will die. (see help DEATH) As your level increases, so too will your hit points. How much your hit points increase is a function of your character's constitution and class.

Mana

Your character's mana is an attempt to quantify mental concentration and the ability to focus their will to execute a maneuver, produce an effect, cast a spell, enter a psionic focus, or any other significant action. Nearly every active, activated ability in the game costs some amount of mana, though this amount may go down with skill in the ability in question.

Movement

Your movement, or moves, represents your character's stamina in travelling long distances. If your movement ever drops to zero, you will be unable to move. (Rest or sleep to restore lost movement). Differing terrain requires different amount of movement to move a single square.

Hitroll

Hitroll represents your chance to hit a given target. This chance is reduced by the target's armor class, parrying, and dodging abilities. Factors that increase your hitroll include: dexterity, various skills and spells, weapon quality, and enchantments on items or weapons.

Damroll

Damroll represents various factors that increase the damage you do with every physical blow. Things that increase your damroll include: strength, various skills and spells, weapon quality, and enchantments on items and weapons.

Damage

Damage done varies depending on many factors, including the quality of your weapon, additional modifiers to your ability to do damage from equipment or spells, and skills such as enhanced or brutal damage.

The damage messages are broken up into two categories. Your absolute damage, and percentage damage. The absolute damages are as follows:

pathetic      inadequate     strong         vicious        formidable
pitiful       mediocre       potent         brutal         tremendous
feeble        (none)         forceful       mighty         heroic
weak          average        powerful       fearsome       titanic
paltry        telling        fierce         ferocious      godlike

The percentage damages are:

barely scratches   wounds              savages               ravages
scratches          damages             mutilates             sunders
grazes             harms               maims                 kills
hurts              tears into          mangles
hits               rends               devastates
injures            mauls               dismembers

There are also various percentage damage messages beyond kills for particularly damaging final blows.

Saving Throws and Resistances

See also

saves2

Two of your primary defenses against magical attacks and effects lay in two areas: saving throws, and resists.

Saving throws (or 'saves') represent your generic resistance to all types of magic. In general, whenever you are the target of a spell or other magical malediction, your saves are factored in when determining whether you resist the effects. Much like armor class, negative saves are better.

Resists (and vulnerabilities, which are essentially negative resists) are more focused in nature, and only help against a specified type of magic or damage. When determining whether you resist a spirit scholar's 'manabarbs' spell, for example, both your saves and your 'mental' resistance are taken into account. Resists also subtract, as a percentage, from the amount of damage you take from attacks of that type.

All About Saves, Resistance, and Damage Reduction

Example A: a fireball is cast on you, doing 100 fire damage.
  Example B: a flaming sword hits you, doing 100 fire damage.
  Example C: a magic missile spell is cast at you, doing 100 "other" damage

Saves Saves represent magical resistance in general, and are shown in SCORE. They apply to all damage types. However, they also only apply to spells. In the case of (most) damage spells, they halve the damage (there are notable exceptions, like disintegration). To use the examples from above:

Example A: if you save against the fireball, you take 50 fire damage instead
           of 100
Example B: this is a magic damtype, but not actually a spell. You get no save
           chance, and take the full 100 damage
Example C: if you save against the magic missile, you take 50 other damage
           instead of 100

Damage Reduction Damage reduction isn't a specific stat, but rather a concept not explicitly shown in score. Generally speaking, it represents a percentage by which damage is reduced (a few things, like durability and fugue, reduce instead by subtraction, making them more useful against lower damages and less against higher damages). It can apply to all or almost all damage (like with sanctuary), or just to certain types. So in the examples below, assume you have 20% fire damage reduction from firekin:

Example A: the 20% reduction means you take 80 fire damage instead of 100.
           If you also saved, you'd take 40 damage. However, the damage
           reduction does not help you save.
Example B: as with (A), you'd take 80 fire damage. Since damage reduction
           doesn't care whether the source is a spell or not, it applies
           here, while saves still do not.
Example C: your damage reduction is against fire, so you still take the full
           100 damage.

Resistance Resistance is the cream of the crop, acting as a sort of combination of saves AND damage reduction. However, unlike normal saves, the saves implied by resistance ONLY affect the specified damtype. The number of saves equals the amount of resistance, so for example if you cast ward of frost and gain 25 resistance to fire, you've just given yourself an additional 25 saves when saving against fire type spells, as well as 25% damage reduction. 25 saves is a lot, so you will save very often against fire. Note that this doesn't mean fire-sphere spells necessarily, it means fire-type spells. To be sure, most fire-sphere spells are also fire-type, but to draw an example from another sphere: searing light is spirit-sphere, but of type light, while spiritwrack is also of spirit-sphere, but of type holy.

Anyway, let's go back to our example, assuming you've put up that ward of frost and gotten 25 resistance to fire as a result:

Example A: the bonus 25 saves from the resistance means you will probably
           save, bringing the 100 damage to 50. But the 25 damage
           reduction from the spell drops it further to 37.5.
Example B: the saves aspect does not help you since you cannot save melee
           strikes. The 25 damage reduction still helps, bringing the 100
           damage down to 75.
Example C: the damtypes don't match up (fire vs other), so the spell doesn't
           help you at all. The 100 damage stands at 100, unless your normal
           saves manage to halve it.