Players knowing Monster HP

[gatewatcher]

How much information do you give to players on a monster's health?

Feeling the players should know

• If it's been dealt damage at all - I would actually indicate this on the token so they stop asking
• if below 50% - never played 4E but I like the vague positive reinforcement.
• If it's near death - normally done by a flavorful "you see it's eye losing focus due to blood loss" type description

My players are the type to start adding up a monsters hp; which if they are going to do that why not just have maptools do it and get the players back to playing. Thinking I might just make the "damage dealt" a visible field; possibly without adjusting for healing so it's still misleading.

Basically they are showing interest in having maptools display npc HP bars; which we tried. I'm on the fence but leaning towards no...


What do you do?

[Geddy2112]

I tend to give general descriptions of injuries and overall condition. If players want to know more, I will let them do a heal check(or medicine or insert relevant game mechanic) to get a rough estimate of HP. Likewise, I will describe if an attack seemed to have no effect, or a particularly nasty hit.

[DJ Yung Crunk]

A general idea of where the monster is is preferable. Otherwise you're significantly altering the IC strategies of the characters based on OOC knowledge. Players might want to conserve that high level spell if they know the monster is at death's door, but how would their characters know?

[Jormengand]

I use the following system:

Hit points	Description
HP=100%	Uninjured
75%<=HP<100%	Barely injured
50%<=HP<75%	Injured
25%<=HP<50%	Badly Wounded
0%<=HP<25%	Near Death

Though, I don't actually calculate exactly, so someone might get a near death when the creature's only badly wounded. I also tend to give more detail: "The troll looks injured, with deep wounds cutting into it" or "The kraken looks near death, about to collapse with exhaustion and slick with blood."

[Honest Tiefling]

If you have a system with skills, why not just tell/show them if they have the appropriate skills? Then the characters are rewarded for their investment, and there's an IC reason it's happening.

[LibraryOgre]

I'm a big fan of 4e's "Bloodied" as a concept... simply telling the characters "It's been hit, but it's not bloodied" or "It's bloodied" gives them an idea of how badly injured something is. They can track how much damage they've done, so know about where they stand.

[Quertus]

Kudos to everyone who brought up using the heal skill! Spot, and pure combat experience (BAB) could also make sense to use.

I tend to tell players whenever they land a blow that is somehow less effective than they were expecting (DR, immune to crit / sneak attack, etc).

I usually respond with vague ideas of how damaged creatures are (undamaged, barely scratched, "bloodied", on death's door, how is it still standing, seriously, your holding its heart in you hand, and it's still charging at you full force).

But I will also let players know which one is the most injured (the most common question I get).

With regard to character injuries, they usually tell each other exactly how many HP they have / are down... and it seems like too much effort for too little gain to bother changing that.

[Asmodean_]

I use the following system:

Hit points	Description
HP=100%	Uninjured
75%<=HP<100%	Barely injured
50%<=HP<75%	Injured
25%<=HP<50%	Badly Wounded
0%<=HP<25%	Near Death

Though, I don't actually calculate exactly, so someone might get a near death when the creature's only badly wounded. I also tend to give more detail: "The troll looks injured, with deep wounds cutting into it" or "The kraken looks near death, about to collapse with exhaustion and slick with blood."

I remember you used a "slightly miffed" when Amnestria managed to do an entire 1 damage with her bow.
Generally, I just note down as "this-thing-has-lost: (number) HP" so when I say a troll has "-44" HP I mean it's lost 44HP, not it's somehow at negative-44* HP and still alive.

*this is negative dash 44, not negative minus 44

[Knaight]

I generally indicate wounds. How this happens depends on the HP system in question - if there is a defined category for wounded (4e has bloodied, GURPS starts giving penalties, L5R has several wound categories with increasing penalties), that gets an indicator. If it doesn't, I generally describe things that still has low remaining HP be described as sporting some serious injuries. Description will also usually indicate whether there's been any damage, unless there's a particular reason that an injury wouldn't show.

[Quertus]

Description will also usually indicate whether there's been any damage, unless there's a particular reason that an injury wouldn't show.

I personally love having a permanent image of myself on myself, so that I always appear unwounded. Bring me my red shirt, indeed!

[SirBellias]

I tend to tell players whenever they land a blow that is somehow less effective than they were expecting (DR, immune to crit / sneak attack, etc).

I usually respond with vague ideas of how damaged creatures are (undamaged, barely scratched, "bloodied", on death's door, how is it still standing, seriously, your holding its heart in you hand, and it's still charging at you full force).

But I will also let players know which one is the most injured (the most common question I get).

Basically this. Usually I don't make them roll a check though. That's a good idea, I might use that for my serious campaign.

[Knaight]

I personally love having a permanent image of myself on myself, so that I always appear unwounded. Bring me my red shirt, indeed!

That would be one example. Another that has cropped up has been characters on PCP like drugs (chemical or alchemical), who while obviously bleeding have a tendency to not really show that it hurt them meaningfully.

[Deepbluediver]

In my favorite kind of system we use a bloodied/crippled mechanic (2/3rds & 1/3rd HP, respectively) with fairly significant penalties, so it's sometimes beneficial to know ABOUT where the monster stands. Usually a skill-check will serve that purpose (Know(dungeoneering) or Survival are the favored ones).

Otherwise it's not important to really know exactly know much HP a monster has, unless the DM thinks it will be really funny. Like the time one player in our party had a sword enchanted six-ways-to-sunday to deal lots of different damage types, and after he spent a whole minute calculating the damage of each different type the GM announced that he had dealt exactly "1" damage to the monster. That was a good clue to get out of dodge.

[gatewatcher]

Thanks everyone

So keeping with the basic injured, bloodied, near death/crippled line of thinking I think I have my macros setup to update the monster's HP bar accordingly. What is sneaky is that the percent of the HP bar it shows is not exactly the same as the percentage of the brackets - i.e. when it's below 55% the HP bar changes to 60%; below 15% lowers the bar to 10%. But maybe I'm just trying to troll the players.

I decided on 15% for near death/crippled because, if I estimated the math correctly, it's roughly 1 normal attack. But a bad damage roll on a 14% could result in the monster not dying; so you can't just trust that an offhand attack to do the trick. Even certain aoe's wont do enough. I might raise it a tiny bit if I don't find this occurring in practice.