If there is no Rule entitled “Vital Signs”, this proposal does nothing.  Otherwise, reword the Rule as follows.

Each dragon has five stats, to be tracked on the GNDT. The stats are called Heartbeat, Muscle, Scales, Flame and Wings. Muscle represents how strong a dragon’s attack is, Scales represents how well a dragon defends from an attack, Flame represents the power of the dragon’s breath attack and Wings represents its airborne speed and maneuverability. Heartbeat represents how much damage a dragon can take.  Muscle, Flame and Scales can never fall below 1, if they would then set them to 1 instead.  Wings may drop to exactly 0, but can never be less than 0.  Heartbeat can be any integer, positive or negative.

A dragon with a Wings stat of 0 is considered Crippled.  A dragon with a Heartbeat of 0 or less is considered Dead and its Breeder must start raising a new dragon. 

A new Dragon has a value of 5 for all stats except for Heartbeat and a Heartbeat of 100.