Provisional Damage

The red bar in health is the provisional damage of a a character in Street Fighter X Tekken while the yellow is their actual health left.

Provisional damage, also known as "white damage", refers to any and all damage in the Street Fighter games that can be automatically recovered.

Description

This section of "temporary damage" is represented by a faded yellow section in some games (e.g. Street Fighter IV ); other games (e.g. Marvel vs. Capcom series) represent it with a red section in the Health Meter.

In terms of correlating Provisional Damage with realistic details, this may come to represent the idea of the body recovering after being attacked and the nervous system displaying immediate sensations of pain, before such sensations recover to signal wellness, as opposed to sustained injuries and significantly harmed areas of the body. In the case of Street Fighter IV and Focus Attacks, Provisional Damage comes to represent this phenomena and the body under endurance and adrenaline of withstanding attacks in a defensive stance; in turn, Armor Breaking attacks likely represent attacks with a lot of ki behind them, purposely target weak points of the body, or are dynamically powerful in terms of physiology and physics.

Methods

In most of the games, some counter attacks (e.g. Gouken's Kongoshin) negate damage in this way by converting it to provisional damage.

Crossover games

When characters take damage in some crossover games, some of the health they lost remains in the Health Bar. Provisional damage in these games can be recovered by switching out the character you are currently controlling. While not active, the character will slowly recover any provisional damage they have.

In certain games such as Street Fighter X Tekken, characters slowly regenerate Provisional damage when they are not the character currently in the fight (tagged out).

Street Fighter IV series

In the Street Fighter IV series, there are two additional methods of dealing provisional damage:

1. Being hit while executing armored attacks, including Abel's Breathless, or a Focus Attack. These attacks have Super Armor that protects against certain numbers of hits (i.e. Breathless takes two, while Focus Attacks and most other armored attacks take one). Some moves have the Armor Break property, which means they ignore armor completely, and deal damage normally.
2. Being struck by Gen's Shitenketsu.

In this series of games, any provisional damage is automatically recovered as the match goes on. However, if a character with provisional damage is hit by an attack, the health they have yet to recover is lost in addition to the damage that attack inflicts. Finally, if a character takes more provisional damage than they have health, they will be knocked out.

Also, in Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition, any damage done to an auto-block when using the Lite controls is received as white damage. This can be prevented if incoming damage is blocked by a normal block even though auto-block is active.

Street Fighter V series

In Street Fighter V, provisional damage is caused by being hit while in an armored state, blocking a medium or heavy normal or unique attack, or being hit by a V-Reversal. Unlike previous games, provisional damage cannot result in a knockout.

Gallery

Ibuki absorbing provisional damage and Chun-Li proceeds to recover it