1 Mike: Elle, can you use your powers again to lift us back up the wall to the passage?
2 Eleven: This nosebleed says no. I need time to recover.
3 Lucas: It drained her hit points!
3 Dustin: Not necessarily.
4 Dustin: It could have drained her Strength or Constitution.
4 Lucas: You know pedantry drains Charisma?

One of the standard ways of tracking damage to roleplaying game characters is through hit points. This is a number of points that characters have, which may vary from person to person. When wounded, you subtract some number of them. Typically when the number reaches zero the character either falls unconscious or dies, depending on the rules of the game in question.

But there are many other forms of damage. Characters could lose points in ability scores instead, like those mentioned in the last panel here. Some games have more abstract systems where characters take "wounds" and a few will cause problems (though this could be considered a more coarse hit point type of system also).

Another method is narrative damage, where characters who are hurt in combat gain things like scars, or missing fingers. The point here is not to make the wounds dangerous, but stylish - to add to the character's complex life story.