Anyone who has conversed with me for more than a quarter of an hour will tell you that I’m awful about ruining twists/endings for people. It’s so bad that my sister will rush over and physically clamp her hand over my mouth if I’m ruining something for her (We really are adults, I swear! We just live in a very strange household…) And at the gaming table, it’s not unusual for me to say something like “Well, it started with 31, and then [player 2] hit it for 7…” It just pops out, and I don’t know why!
And math has always been hard for me. So part of the problem is that when I do math, I talk it out along with the computations I’m doing on paper — yesterday in the middle of combat, I absentmindedly said “…so 58 minus 16 is…” And then of course everybody at the table knew that werewolf #2 had 42 HP left. The obvious solution is to use the calculator on my phone, I just hate using it. This one is really on me; I could fix it if I wanted to. I just really, really hate messing with my phone!
Does anyone else deal with this?
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I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
One option would be to use a combat tracker like Kobold Fight Club/Improved Initiative, where you simply put in the damage/healing amount, and it does the math for you.
Rather than keeping track of hp, keep track of damage taken; the monster goes down when its damage taken equals or exceeds its hit points. This means (a) you're doing addition, not subtraction, which most people find easier, and (b) knowing how much a monster has taken, while not completely useless, is information the players mostly have anyway.
Rather than keeping track of hp, keep track of damage taken; the monster goes down when its damage taken equals or exceeds its hit points. This means (a) you're doing addition, not subtraction, which most people find easier, and (b) knowing how much a monster has taken, while not completely useless, is information the players mostly have anyway.
Not only that, I have often found it helpful to remember that the amount of damage a monster takes before it dies, and the number of HP it had when the fight started don’t necessarily have to be the same.
A monster’s starting HP is just the DM’s guesstimate as to how epic they think the heroes will be during that fight.
The amount of Dagestan the party deals is a testament to how epic the heroes were during that fight.
The first number really only matters to the DM to refine their guesstimation skills. The second one is what makes the players look at each other and think, “[expletive] yeah we did!” or “holy 💩 that was close!” 😉
+1 for addition instead of subtraction, I tend to just tally it up using a tally chart, so I don't even need to do the maths until it looks like it's getting close to its starting HP. If the players aren't sweating (but are enjoying the fight), I make it go on a bit longer. If they're either really struggling (with what shouldn't be a struggle) or bored, I might make them fall early.
Plus, that makes it a lot less likely that you'll give away their HP, as you will be saying "it had taken 20 damage and took 6 more...", which the players could have tracked for themselves!
What's wrong with people knowing how many hit points a monster has left? When the players do damage at least you have to know how many points they did. It is fair to hide something from them that they have to tell you?
Intelligent tactics requires that you have some way of knowing how bad off your enemy is. Technically, in D&D at this point, nobody is wounded physically at all until they drop down to zero. If you have a habit of letting the information slip out, just go ahead and let everyone know all hit point totals, including the other characters in the party. The healers will know who needs help the most, the warrior types will know which monsters to concentrate on, there's nothing wrong with that style of play as long as everyone is having fun.
What's wrong with people knowing how many hit points a monster has left? When the players do damage at least you have to know how many points they did. It is fair to hide something from them that they have to tell you?
Intelligent tactics requires that you have some way of knowing how bad off your enemy is. Technically, in D&D at this point, nobody is wounded physically at all until they drop down to zero. If you have a habit of letting the information slip out, just go ahead and let everyone know all hit point totals, including the other characters in the party. The healers will know who needs help the most, the warrior types will know which monsters to concentrate on, there's nothing wrong with that style of play as long as everyone is having fun.
Knowing how much HP a creature has is metagaming. Creatures have a potential range of HP based on their hit dice, so knowing that Dragon [X] started with 291 HP and that Dragon [Y] started with 307 should not be a given. Even if (and I would say especially if) you use the fixed HP number, players shouldn't be making tactics based on a creature having a certain number of hitpoints remaining, at least not directly.
What's wrong with people knowing how many hit points a monster has left? When the players do damage at least you have to know how many points they did. It is fair to hide something from them that they have to tell you?
There’s a difference between knowing roughly how injured a monster is and knowing an exact number.
Yes, the players have to tell the DM how much damage their character does in an attack or with a spell. The DM is under no obligation to tell them what the total is. If the players keep track for themselves then they can use that information. If they don’t, that’s on them. Most DMs I know would have no problem letting the players know how much damage a creature has taken if asked, but they are not obliged to.
You asked if it is fair to hide info from the players that they have to tell the DM. The point it, the players tell the DM how much damage has been done. They don’t tell the DM how much damage they have to do to kill the creature. • For the DM to reveal how much damage has been dealt just reaffirms information about the past that the players already know, and could have tracked for themselves anyway. • Telling the players how many HP a monster has left is giving them information new information about the future that their characters would have no way of knowing yet.
Part of the reason for a DM to want not to reveal how many HP a monster has left is because once one does, that number cannot change. So suppose I give a monster 100 HP when I’m planning the encounter, and the party does 20 damage to that monster. If I tell my players that a monster has 80 damage left, then they know exactly how many points of damage they will have to do before it dies. If I instead tell them that their characters have done 20 damage to the monster, they don’t know how many HP are left. It might be 80, or 60, or 100, or something else. If it turns out that 80 HP would be too much to chew through and the monster will likely win, then I can ignore that 80 and say they kill the monster whenever the fight gets dire and it would be epic for them to pull of the win, even if they have only done another 40 damage to it. If instead it looks like 80 HP will be way too easy of a fight for them and they’re gonna mop what I expected to be a bigger challenge, then I can scratch out that 80 and make it 100, or 120, or higher. The most extreme example I have is this:
One time I started a monster off with 110 HP expecting that to be a really tough fight for a party that low level and the plan was for the monster to beat the snot out of them but get super injured and run away before they killed it. The point of that was to scare the bejebers out of them as to how deadly things were in the campaign. I knew they were going to have an impressive dungeon coming up and wanted to make sure they would be cautious. I also knew that they would gain at least a level if not two by the time they re-emerged from the dungeon. The plan was for them to go through that dungeon and then have another encounter with “the one that got away.” Between having leveled up and gotten some new gear in the dungeon, they would smoke it’s punk ass like a stogie this time and get to feel like super-badasses for it. Good plan, right? So, they are walking down the road not paying any attention to anything and I dropped the monster on them. (Literally. It dropped out of the sky and landed directly on one of them.) Time for beneeber scaring. Right? They did 80 damage to the monster in the first round and a half, and the creature had surprised them so that first round they hadn’t really done much. So I took that 110 and secretly upped it to 170. By the end of that second round I had upped it again to 220. By the time the fight was over and the thing was escaping with its life they had done 336 damage to it. I had literally more than tripled the monster’s HP between rolling initiative and narrating its frantic escape. When they had done the first 80 damage, if I had told them it only had 30 HP left then that’s all it could have ever had left. They would have been cocky from their easy win and probably charged gleefully into a TPK down in the dungeon and never gotten to feel like super-badasses at all.
Remember, players do not do any damage whatsoever, their characters do damage. I know, you’re thinking “who cares, what’s the difference.” Well, everyone should care, DMs and players alike. And here’s the difference:
Players look at the game, see a “Monster,” count how much damage their characters have done, and wonder how many HP are left.
Player characters look at the world, see a monster, assess how injured it looks, and wonder how much more it can take.
As a final solution I might add, if you accidentally blurt out numbers, with most monsters, who cares? They're supposed to die fairly easily anyway, so it won't hurt anything. If it is a boss encounter that is tough enough that you want it to be a challenge, say "oops, please ignore that" and the players ought to have enough respect for the other players and the DM to be willing to do that.
I'm also of the mindset that it's okay if your players just know your creatures' HP. You can tell them the AC, you can tell them what the DC of any check is before they roll for it... You can say, "He's got two more legendary resistances"... just keep in mind that your players are going to be more tactically savvy in that case. They're never gonna waste a high level spell when they know exactly how much HP the enemy has, etc.
Most players figure it out eventually anyway. I think it's often more engaging to be more coy with this information, but the game doesn't fall apart if the players know this metagame information.
I never tell players the exact number. I do however use the health bar in Roll20. My thinking is, the characters can see how wounded the creature is. If it is near death, it would be bleeding profusely and the characters would be able to see that.
I think my brother has an old calculator from school that I could borrow, so maybe I’ll try that. And I like the idea of adding the damage up and comparing it to a total. I’ll probably try that, too.
My players are probably experienced enough that they can avoid meta gaming if I ask them to. The problem (as many of you have mentioned) is that I frequently change monsters’ HP in the middle of combat. Most of my players are glass cannons. Their damage output is really high, but their AC and HP are mostly (aside from the paladin, who’s almost impossible to hit!) pretty low. I’ve been using lower-level monsters and increasing their HP, so they don’t kill anyone in one blow, but also survive for more than one round.
Sposta’s story pretty well sums up how I approach combats. I’d prefer that I retain the ability to change things whenever I need to.
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I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
I'm also of the mindset that it's okay if your players just know your creatures' HP. You can tell them the AC, you can tell them what the DC of any check is before they roll for it... You can say, "He's got two more legendary resistances"... just keep in mind that your players are going to be more tactically savvy in that case. They're never gonna waste a high level spell when they know exactly how much HP the enemy has, etc.
Most players figure it out eventually anyway. I think it's often more engaging to be more coy with this information, but the game doesn't fall apart if the players know this metagame information.
Oh I agree that it’s absolutely okay to reveal everything if the DM wants to. There’s nothing “wrong” with it by any means, it’s a personal preference either way. The game will absolutely not fall apart as long as everyone is happy playing that way.
When I’m on the other side of the screen in one of the floor seats though, I personally prefer for the DM to not reveal that stuff to me. As you said, it’s more engaging for me that way. It helps me see through the game into the world.
So that’s another reason for some DMs to want to obfuscate those details, to facilitate their players’ enjoyment. Flip side is that is also a valid reason to reveal such information too.
Another vote for counting up. Addition is easier than subtraction.
My piece of paper for tracking the monster looks something like this: Thornwhip (325): 244458647989 112
As for the health metadata, my table uses triage terms. Anyone can look at a combatant (PC or non PC) and tell its health is GREEN (over half health left), YELLOW (below half) or RED (probably going down in the next hit). Players are not allowed to tell each other the HP numbers at the table - just the colour.
The very simple answer to the OP's solution is to stop talking out loud ^_^ . Just do it on a bit of paper if you can't do it in your head.
There is no right or wrong way to play D&D, but for my personal preference, monsters should be allocated a particular number of hit points before the fight begins, and the DM should try not to change them as much as they can. I have changed monster hit points in relation to unexpected damage output - but that happens mostly because I try to stick to the character creation process. A fearsome level 12 NPC with 18 constitution winding up with only 120 hit points often ends up taking 80 damage in the first turn of combat, even before his turn has been taken, and I think "crap, this fight is basically over and this is hardly epic."
The hit points in the MM and other source books are generally vastly undertuned and assume that PCs are very average (high ability scores of 14-15), don't use flanking rules, and have no magic items. So 'resistance to non-magical damage' is supposed to double their hp, but every character in my game has a +1 magic weapon by level 6, so it's just irrelevant (a poorly thought through mechanic in general). So I usually just have to double all NPC and monster hit points.
The point, however, is that if your monster hit points are totally fluid and you basically end a fight when you feel the characters have done enough damage then really that's cheating the players. Part of the point of using dice is that outcomes are not certain. Character death is a possibility. The characters can lose. If you entirely move to counting upwards on monster hp to an unknown number, then the character decisions really don't matter. It doesn't matter if that player rolls a critical hit or not because hit points are almost meaningless. As a player I would feel cheated if instead of fighting towards an actual, objective goal (reduce the monster hit points from 400 to 0, for example) the fight, decision making and dice rolling was just going to continue until the DM felt that it was time to stop. I would feel like the DM was telling me a story and actually, I was kind of irrelevant.
I strongly recommend that you set the creature hp before the fight begins, adjust it at the end of the first turn only if you feel that as a DM you have made a mistake and made the fight vastly too easy, never because it's too hard.
Anyone who has conversed with me for more than a quarter of an hour will tell you that I’m awful about ruining twists/endings for people. It’s so bad that my sister will rush over and physically clamp her hand over my mouth if I’m ruining something for her (We really are adults, I swear! We just live in a very strange household…) And at the gaming table, it’s not unusual for me to say something like “Well, it started with 31, and then [player 2] hit it for 7…” It just pops out, and I don’t know why!
And math has always been hard for me. So part of the problem is that when I do math, I talk it out along with the computations I’m doing on paper — yesterday in the middle of combat, I absentmindedly said “…so 58 minus 16 is…” And then of course everybody at the table knew that werewolf #2 had 42 HP left. The obvious solution is to use the calculator on my phone, I just hate using it. This one is really on me; I could fix it if I wanted to. I just really, really hate messing with my phone!
Does anyone else deal with this?
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
One option would be to use a combat tracker like Kobold Fight Club/Improved Initiative, where you simply put in the damage/healing amount, and it does the math for you.
Rather than keeping track of hp, keep track of damage taken; the monster goes down when its damage taken equals or exceeds its hit points. This means (a) you're doing addition, not subtraction, which most people find easier, and (b) knowing how much a monster has taken, while not completely useless, is information the players mostly have anyway.
Not only that, I have often found it helpful to remember that the amount of damage a monster takes before it dies, and the number of HP it had when the fight started don’t necessarily have to be the same.
The first number really only matters to the DM to refine their guesstimation skills. The second one is what makes the players look at each other and think, “[expletive] yeah we did!” or “holy 💩 that was close!” 😉
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+1 for addition instead of subtraction, I tend to just tally it up using a tally chart, so I don't even need to do the maths until it looks like it's getting close to its starting HP. If the players aren't sweating (but are enjoying the fight), I make it go on a bit longer. If they're either really struggling (with what shouldn't be a struggle) or bored, I might make them fall early.
Plus, that makes it a lot less likely that you'll give away their HP, as you will be saying "it had taken 20 damage and took 6 more...", which the players could have tracked for themselves!
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What's wrong with people knowing how many hit points a monster has left? When the players do damage at least you have to know how many points they did. It is fair to hide something from them that they have to tell you?
Intelligent tactics requires that you have some way of knowing how bad off your enemy is. Technically, in D&D at this point, nobody is wounded physically at all until they drop down to zero. If you have a habit of letting the information slip out, just go ahead and let everyone know all hit point totals, including the other characters in the party. The healers will know who needs help the most, the warrior types will know which monsters to concentrate on, there's nothing wrong with that style of play as long as everyone is having fun.
<Insert clever signature here>
You can also just lean into it.
Obfuscate!
Drop seemingly absent-minded remarks like "321 minus 7 is... oh half for resistance..."
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Knowing how much HP a creature has is metagaming. Creatures have a potential range of HP based on their hit dice, so knowing that Dragon [X] started with 291 HP and that Dragon [Y] started with 307 should not be a given. Even if (and I would say especially if) you use the fixed HP number, players shouldn't be making tactics based on a creature having a certain number of hitpoints remaining, at least not directly.
There’s a difference between knowing roughly how injured a monster is and knowing an exact number.
Yes, the players have to tell the DM how much damage their character does in an attack or with a spell. The DM is under no obligation to tell them what the total is. If the players keep track for themselves then they can use that information. If they don’t, that’s on them. Most DMs I know would have no problem letting the players know how much damage a creature has taken if asked, but they are not obliged to.
You asked if it is fair to hide info from the players that they have to tell the DM. The point it, the players tell the DM how much damage has been done. They don’t tell the DM how much damage they have to do to kill the creature.
• For the DM to reveal how much damage has been dealt just reaffirms information about the past that the players already know, and could have tracked for themselves anyway.
• Telling the players how many HP a monster has left is giving them information new information about the future that their characters would have no way of knowing yet.
Part of the reason for a DM to want not to reveal how many HP a monster has left is because once one does, that number cannot change. So suppose I give a monster 100 HP when I’m planning the encounter, and the party does 20 damage to that monster. If I tell my players that a monster has 80 damage left, then they know exactly how many points of damage they will have to do before it dies. If I instead tell them that their characters have done 20 damage to the monster, they don’t know how many HP are left. It might be 80, or 60, or 100, or something else.
If it turns out that 80 HP would be too much to chew through and the monster will likely win, then I can ignore that 80 and say they kill the monster whenever the fight gets dire and it would be epic for them to pull of the win, even if they have only done another 40 damage to it.
If instead it looks like 80 HP will be way too easy of a fight for them and they’re gonna mop what I expected to be a bigger challenge, then I can scratch out that 80 and make it 100, or 120, or higher. The most extreme example I have is this:
One time I started a monster off with 110 HP expecting that to be a really tough fight for a party that low level and the plan was for the monster to beat the snot out of them but get super injured and run away before they killed it. The point of that was to scare the bejebers out of them as to how deadly things were in the campaign. I knew they were going to have an impressive dungeon coming up and wanted to make sure they would be cautious. I also knew that they would gain at least a level if not two by the time they re-emerged from the dungeon.
The plan was for them to go through that dungeon and then have another encounter with “the one that got away.” Between having leveled up and gotten some new gear in the dungeon, they would smoke it’s punk ass like a stogie this time and get to feel like super-badasses for it. Good plan, right? So, they are walking down the road not paying any attention to anything and I dropped the monster on them. (Literally. It dropped out of the sky and landed directly on one of them.) Time for beneeber scaring. Right?
They did 80 damage to the monster in the first round and a half, and the creature had surprised them so that first round they hadn’t really done much. So I took that 110 and secretly upped it to 170. By the end of that second round I had upped it again to 220. By the time the fight was over and the thing was escaping with its life they had done 336 damage to it. I had literally more than tripled the monster’s HP between rolling initiative and narrating its frantic escape. When they had done the first 80 damage, if I had told them it only had 30 HP left then that’s all it could have ever had left. They would have been cocky from their easy win and probably charged gleefully into a TPK down in the dungeon and never gotten to feel like super-badasses at all.
Remember, players do not do any damage whatsoever, their characters do damage. I know, you’re thinking “who cares, what’s the difference.” Well, everyone should care, DMs and players alike. And here’s the difference:
One is a numbers game, the other is a story.
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This is the answer right here hahahaha. Or, vice versa, every shot *almost* kills the monster… 6 rounds later and 245 HP later… lol
As a final solution I might add, if you accidentally blurt out numbers, with most monsters, who cares? They're supposed to die fairly easily anyway, so it won't hurt anything. If it is a boss encounter that is tough enough that you want it to be a challenge, say "oops, please ignore that" and the players ought to have enough respect for the other players and the DM to be willing to do that.
<Insert clever signature here>
I'm also of the mindset that it's okay if your players just know your creatures' HP. You can tell them the AC, you can tell them what the DC of any check is before they roll for it... You can say, "He's got two more legendary resistances"... just keep in mind that your players are going to be more tactically savvy in that case. They're never gonna waste a high level spell when they know exactly how much HP the enemy has, etc.
Most players figure it out eventually anyway. I think it's often more engaging to be more coy with this information, but the game doesn't fall apart if the players know this metagame information.
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Buy an actual calculator instead of the one on your phone. Problem solved.
I never tell players the exact number. I do however use the health bar in Roll20. My thinking is, the characters can see how wounded the creature is. If it is near death, it would be bleeding profusely and the characters would be able to see that.
I think my brother has an old calculator from school that I could borrow, so maybe I’ll try that. And I like the idea of adding the damage up and comparing it to a total. I’ll probably try that, too.
My players are probably experienced enough that they can avoid meta gaming if I ask them to. The problem (as many of you have mentioned) is that I frequently change monsters’ HP in the middle of combat. Most of my players are glass cannons. Their damage output is really high, but their AC and HP are mostly (aside from the paladin, who’s almost impossible to hit!) pretty low. I’ve been using lower-level monsters and increasing their HP, so they don’t kill anyone in one blow, but also survive for more than one round.
Sposta’s story pretty well sums up how I approach combats. I’d prefer that I retain the ability to change things whenever I need to.
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
Oh I agree that it’s absolutely okay to reveal everything if the DM wants to. There’s nothing “wrong” with it by any means, it’s a personal preference either way. The game will absolutely not fall apart as long as everyone is happy playing that way.
When I’m on the other side of the screen in one of the floor seats though, I personally prefer for the DM to not reveal that stuff to me. As you said, it’s more engaging for me that way. It helps me see through the game into the world.
So that’s another reason for some DMs to want to obfuscate those details, to facilitate their players’ enjoyment. Flip side is that is also a valid reason to reveal such information too.
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I use 'bloodied' (below half hp) from 4th edition.
I use the term “bloodied” too. I find that it gives my players a nice sense of progress.
I live with several severe autoimmune conditions. If I don’t get back to you right away, it’s probably because I’m not feeling well.
Another vote for counting up. Addition is easier than subtraction.
My piece of paper for tracking the monster looks something like this:
Thornwhip (325):
244458647989112As for the health metadata, my table uses triage terms. Anyone can look at a combatant (PC or non PC) and tell its health is GREEN (over half health left), YELLOW (below half) or RED (probably going down in the next hit). Players are not allowed to tell each other the HP numbers at the table - just the colour.
The very simple answer to the OP's solution is to stop talking out loud ^_^ . Just do it on a bit of paper if you can't do it in your head.
There is no right or wrong way to play D&D, but for my personal preference, monsters should be allocated a particular number of hit points before the fight begins, and the DM should try not to change them as much as they can. I have changed monster hit points in relation to unexpected damage output - but that happens mostly because I try to stick to the character creation process. A fearsome level 12 NPC with 18 constitution winding up with only 120 hit points often ends up taking 80 damage in the first turn of combat, even before his turn has been taken, and I think "crap, this fight is basically over and this is hardly epic."
The hit points in the MM and other source books are generally vastly undertuned and assume that PCs are very average (high ability scores of 14-15), don't use flanking rules, and have no magic items. So 'resistance to non-magical damage' is supposed to double their hp, but every character in my game has a +1 magic weapon by level 6, so it's just irrelevant (a poorly thought through mechanic in general). So I usually just have to double all NPC and monster hit points.
The point, however, is that if your monster hit points are totally fluid and you basically end a fight when you feel the characters have done enough damage then really that's cheating the players. Part of the point of using dice is that outcomes are not certain. Character death is a possibility. The characters can lose. If you entirely move to counting upwards on monster hp to an unknown number, then the character decisions really don't matter. It doesn't matter if that player rolls a critical hit or not because hit points are almost meaningless. As a player I would feel cheated if instead of fighting towards an actual, objective goal (reduce the monster hit points from 400 to 0, for example) the fight, decision making and dice rolling was just going to continue until the DM felt that it was time to stop. I would feel like the DM was telling me a story and actually, I was kind of irrelevant.
I strongly recommend that you set the creature hp before the fight begins, adjust it at the end of the first turn only if you feel that as a DM you have made a mistake and made the fight vastly too easy, never because it's too hard.