Glyphscape/Vitality

Skill Overview
Vitality is the most simple skill in RS3. It determines the amount of life you have - each level up increases your hit points by 3%. You start off with 0 exp, effectively at level 0. At level 0, you maximum hit points is 100.

Vitality is a very important skill to have a high level in. High vitality protects you from random "injury" events and makes you a less juicy target for pk-ers. You'll also be more secure. Unlike in RS2, in RS3 gaining the later levels in vitality is far more effective than they used to be, because instead of having your hit point max equal to your vitality, your hit point max grows exponentially with your vitality level.

Vitality is one of the stats that figures into determining your combat level.

Gaining Experience
You can improve vitality merely by being logged in - at the rate of 0.333 exp per second. This is true no matter the specific situation you're in. Within five minutes of starting the game you'll reach level 1 vitality. Although RS3 logs you out after a minute of inactivity, for each full day you're logged in you receive 86400 / 3 = 28,800 vitality experience. At first this will feel like gaining levels incredibly quickly, but later on it will seem inordinately slow.

You can also speed up the rate at which you gain vitality experience. For each hit point you lose (such as through combat), you gain 0.5 vitality experience, as long as you don't die. So at level 0, you can gain up to 99 vitality experience in this way before having to restore your hit points in some way. If, however, you get killed, you lose vitality experience equal to 50 times your vitality level. So if you die while you're level 30, you may lose up to 1500 vitality experience, limited only by the fact that you can't lose so many experience points so as to fall in level. This means that the best time to undertake something risky is when you have just recently gained a vitality level.

Because you generally gain a lot of vitality experience when you get injured a lot often, fighting much more difficult enemies is a good way to train this skill. But of course, this also adds the danger of getting killed, and dangerous regions are often far out of the way.

Another standard way of accelerating vitality experience gain is by eating food. Some foods give you lump sum experience in vitality when you consume them; some temporarily increase your rate of vitality gain; others allow you to gain more vitality when you're injured by a particular mode of attack; and still others heal you so that you can continue to take damage (and thus gain vitality experience). You can only eat so much food at a time (no more than 5 items in the past minute), so choose wisely which types of food to eat, and bring with you an optimal assortment of foods whenever possible. You should also stock up a supply of food when you're traveling across settlements so that you can maximize your experience gain during this "lull" in activity.