As a DM I've done this both ways throughout our current campaign and I find it to heavily depend on the scenario but I'm with Yurei on this one. Yelling out mid game whatever HP total you have might be bad for immersion for some but for us anyway it works well enough. We also have had the flip side of this make things a lot easier during an encounter where the party was severely outnumbered some 10 to 1 on a battlefield, where friendly allies were either dead or on the way there. Immediately giving them the AC and HP totals of everything on the field would have been a massive logistics nightmare. So in this sense things were described broadly.
In more with keeping to our philosophy they recently fought a parasite crippled dragon and its rider for all intents and purposes in which the HP total and AC were just stated up front because if I hadn't the fight would have been so much worse at the time. In the end i'll do whatever I can think of to speed up combat, while it's important to have good solid combat, anything, just about anything that speeds up the 2-3 hour combat session I'll try at least once.
For those curious Dragon AC 14 / HP 330, Rider AC 22, 212 (also before anyone crucifies me, that dragon lasted exactly 4 turns)
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"I once knew this fella, Aasimar raised in the Underdark. Was like a brother to me. When he escaped we couldn't take much with us. Poor, emaciated husks of the living we were. 'ts okay though. We survived and made our ways. I'll never forget the way the people from my home looked at us when we walked in the archway. Though, I'm frighteningly certain the feelings they would have, had they but the opportunity ta see us leave." --Manolovo the Traitor, Memoirs of a Scoundrel
Heh. I mean, funny you should ask the one-armed artificer when she starts losing limbs. Her answer would be "At eight years old, the first and worst time. A couple of times after that, because it turns out having an artificial limb you can sacrifice to the ancient death-tomb of Whoever-Hates-Us-Now has saved civilization a few times. Or at least local townships."
In a more reasonable answer? Nobody's lost limbs yet (outside backstory) other than the one NPC who lost the limb offscreen in a fight we didn't get to quite in time, but people have been impaled, taken heavy weapon wounds, suffered burns and frostbite. My gal in particular seems to attract arrow wounds to a degree she is not at all happy with. We simply accept that all characters in D&D 5e have Wolverine-like super regeneration, because that's the only explanation for long rests. And we only do that because DDB won't let us use any of the Gritty Realism or Slow Natural Healing rules. If the DM'd had his way we would've used the Slow Natural Healing rules from the start and dispensed with magical Wolverine regeneration, but DDB doesn't let us do that without a ton of fuss. Which sucks. We really wanted to use that rule.
I will say having played in many games where there are long healing rules all it ends up doing is either just extending the time between in game stuff, or meaning that you never get to fight the high level monsters because your DM is concerned about a TPK, or you never get to work thorough a long hard set of encounters.
Or it turns DnD into a game where you accept you will lose a character every 30-45 sessions. A bit like cyberpunk, or legend of the five rings, or the myriad other games where more realistic healing rules are in play don’t get attached to a character because they will die.
If a fighting group is fighting monsters often enough they might have formulated a system for how worn out they are. I personally in real life am no stranger to say to a friend that I'm at 30% capacity for whichever reason etc.
The other thing I will say to those who talk about calling out hitpoints breaking immersion is that this is what the DM calls out all the time, I have known tables where the rule on not telling each other a hit point total in game leads simply to the cleric trying to keep a running total of how much damage every player has taken simply so he can know what the potential ceiling is to healing on a character. In addition as has been stated there are abilities and spells that require the caster to know exactly what the hit point total is for a player, or how many hit pints they have taken.
How I see it, you know the numbers you are doing damage to a monster, you know the numbers you are receiving when taking damage. You know how much health a healing spell will do to an ally, so when in combat if it helps strategizes I do not see harm in knowing where the other player's health if they wish to share. After all you are all suppose to be on a team trying to overcome this obstacle as the more information you have and willing to share with your fellow players is a good thing yes?
As for out of combat, yeah the use of numbers to describe how you're doing could see a bit tacky.
How I see it, you know the numbers you are doing damage to a monster, you know the numbers you are receiving when taking damage. You know how much health a healing spell will do to an ally, so when in combat if it helps strategizes I do not see harm in knowing where the other player's health if they wish to share. After all you are all suppose to be on a team trying to overcome this obstacle as the more information you have and willing to share with your fellow players is a good thing yes?
As for out of combat, yeah the use of numbers to describe how you're doing could see a bit tacky.
Can you define out of combat? generally clerics do patch work healing during combat trying to get attacks in first and heal only when characters are down or nearly down, but then after they might then do a more focussed bout of healing as the players recover, search bodies and have that post combat moment. This is generally the time that I hear players go round the table stating how many hit points they have.
While investigating a dungeon the rogue might set off a few traps, again now the cleric asks how many hit points they have left, yes they should have a rough idea because they just heard the dice results bering called but still in game they should ask.
I take the using of hit points in this instance to be a matter of translation, I don't speak dwarvish and neither does the player playing my dwarf but we have a conversation, which everyone else hears, in dwarfish, and they can't understand it. I doubt there is such a thing as a mocha or a flat white in a fantasy world, but, my players ask for it in an inn because we don;t want to come up with a whole language that we have to convert. Hit points are the same, the Fighter says, I have 25 hit points left of my 55 total. in the "game world" that translates to, I am pretty hurt, could do with some healing here, my arm feels broken and I have a dodgy deep cut in my leg and am losing some blood. The cleric understands that to mean, I need to cast a healing touch at a the 3rd level because that will allow the magic to knit his bone and close that wound.
The end of the day immersion and role play only gets you so far when you have rules, stats, numbers and dice to dictate things. I would much rather not have my party TPK because the cleric misunderstood how hurt the fighter was, burned a 5th level healing spell and did 45 points worth of healing on a fighter who only had 8 points of damage.
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As a DM I've done this both ways throughout our current campaign and I find it to heavily depend on the scenario but I'm with Yurei on this one. Yelling out mid game whatever HP total you have might be bad for immersion for some but for us anyway it works well enough. We also have had the flip side of this make things a lot easier during an encounter where the party was severely outnumbered some 10 to 1 on a battlefield, where friendly allies were either dead or on the way there. Immediately giving them the AC and HP totals of everything on the field would have been a massive logistics nightmare. So in this sense things were described broadly.
In more with keeping to our philosophy they recently fought a parasite crippled dragon and its rider for all intents and purposes in which the HP total and AC were just stated up front because if I hadn't the fight would have been so much worse at the time. In the end i'll do whatever I can think of to speed up combat, while it's important to have good solid combat, anything, just about anything that speeds up the 2-3 hour combat session I'll try at least once.
For those curious Dragon AC 14 / HP 330, Rider AC 22, 212 (also before anyone crucifies me, that dragon lasted exactly 4 turns)
"I once knew this fella, Aasimar raised in the Underdark. Was like a brother to me. When he escaped we couldn't take much with us. Poor, emaciated husks of the living we were. 'ts okay though. We survived and made our ways. I'll never forget the way the people from my home looked at us when we walked in the archway. Though, I'm frighteningly certain the feelings they would have, had they but the opportunity ta see us leave." --Manolovo the Traitor, Memoirs of a Scoundrel
I will say having played in many games where there are long healing rules all it ends up doing is either just extending the time between in game stuff, or meaning that you never get to fight the high level monsters because your DM is concerned about a TPK, or you never get to work thorough a long hard set of encounters.
Or it turns DnD into a game where you accept you will lose a character every 30-45 sessions. A bit like cyberpunk, or legend of the five rings, or the myriad other games where more realistic healing rules are in play don’t get attached to a character because they will die.
If a fighting group is fighting monsters often enough they might have formulated a system for how worn out they are. I personally in real life am no stranger to say to a friend that I'm at 30% capacity for whichever reason etc.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
The other thing I will say to those who talk about calling out hitpoints breaking immersion is that this is what the DM calls out all the time, I have known tables where the rule on not telling each other a hit point total in game leads simply to the cleric trying to keep a running total of how much damage every player has taken simply so he can know what the potential ceiling is to healing on a character. In addition as has been stated there are abilities and spells that require the caster to know exactly what the hit point total is for a player, or how many hit pints they have taken.
How I see it, you know the numbers you are doing damage to a monster, you know the numbers you are receiving when taking damage. You know how much health a healing spell will do to an ally, so when in combat if it helps strategizes I do not see harm in knowing where the other player's health if they wish to share. After all you are all suppose to be on a team trying to overcome this obstacle as the more information you have and willing to share with your fellow players is a good thing yes?
As for out of combat, yeah the use of numbers to describe how you're doing could see a bit tacky.
There are definitely a lot of ideas being shared in this thread about how to deal with that problem.
I'll throw my hat into the ring. My advice is for everyone to just freely share whatever information that they need to.
In the end, you can just do whatever you want to do.
Can you define out of combat? generally clerics do patch work healing during combat trying to get attacks in first and heal only when characters are down or nearly down, but then after they might then do a more focussed bout of healing as the players recover, search bodies and have that post combat moment. This is generally the time that I hear players go round the table stating how many hit points they have.
While investigating a dungeon the rogue might set off a few traps, again now the cleric asks how many hit points they have left, yes they should have a rough idea because they just heard the dice results bering called but still in game they should ask.
I take the using of hit points in this instance to be a matter of translation, I don't speak dwarvish and neither does the player playing my dwarf but we have a conversation, which everyone else hears, in dwarfish, and they can't understand it. I doubt there is such a thing as a mocha or a flat white in a fantasy world, but, my players ask for it in an inn because we don;t want to come up with a whole language that we have to convert. Hit points are the same, the Fighter says, I have 25 hit points left of my 55 total. in the "game world" that translates to, I am pretty hurt, could do with some healing here, my arm feels broken and I have a dodgy deep cut in my leg and am losing some blood. The cleric understands that to mean, I need to cast a healing touch at a the 3rd level because that will allow the magic to knit his bone and close that wound.
The end of the day immersion and role play only gets you so far when you have rules, stats, numbers and dice to dictate things. I would much rather not have my party TPK because the cleric misunderstood how hurt the fighter was, burned a 5th level healing spell and did 45 points worth of healing on a fighter who only had 8 points of damage.