D&D 5E Would you change a monster's hit points mid-fight?

Y

Jester Canuck said:

As the title asks: it's the middle of an encounter, would you change a monster's hit points?

Click to expand...

Yep!

Managing the tempo of an adventure sometimes requires cutting things short. What the DM thought of as a cool encounter can become just another grind session in the eyes of the players, which kills the fun.

Rarely it's necessary to up the hit points, such as when a player is readying a cool attack to finish off the big bad evil guy but would be thwarted by something mundane like ongoing damage doing the deed instead.

emdw45 said:

This seems like a false analogy to me. Railroading is the illusion of choice. Books and movies don't offer that illusion.

I'll give you video games though: they tend to be railroadey, and yet there exist people who enjoy them (and people who hate them). The same seems to be true of RPGs.

I do however submit that people who dislike railroads will gravitate to RPGs over video games, since live RPGs are the only way to get a true off-the-rails experience. Even then it's not guaranteed, it depends on your DM's style.

Click to expand...

Books and movies give the illusion that characters within the story have to make choices that are vital to the movement of the story As a reader you're reading to see what they do and what happens from what they do. If you knew all of that in advance, you wouldn't keep reading even though the writer/director is pushing his characters in a known direction on tracks that he creates. You're riding on the author's train where he is the conductor/engineer on tracks he made. Good writers will take a reader on an enjoyable journey even if it is a carefully crafted journey with no ability for the reader to take an alternate route other than getting off the train.

All of RPG adventuring is a railroad. The only difference is whether your railroad has one track (a very focused module) or eight tracks (a sandbox). The fact is the DM has encounters set up in advance or he pulls them from the monster manual. This idea that you can pull a random encounter out from nowhere and make it challenging or interesting on a constant basis is ridiculous. I've never seen any DM pull that off consistently. If a DM tried, I guarantee I could run their players in a much more interesting campaign I crafted. Much more satisfying and interesting than goofing off with your buddies pulling out random encounters from the Monster Manual.

If you're simply talking about exploration adventures with no real end game scenario or a variety of possible options like defeating a cult, the local dragon terrorizing the town, or the robber baron as possible options amongst many for a party to participate in, those are still examples of railroads with multiple tracks. A DM has to work from prepared encounters or he risks making an overly easy or difficult game that isn't sustainable.

People assume railroading is a bad thing. It isn't. The problem is most DMs don't know how to use a railroad. I've played with those DMs. I know what a "bad" railroad looks like. You guys are talking about the DM that reads the module or designs the adventure and doesn't know what to do when the players do something different other than say "This is the only option. If you don't do this, then there's nothing else to do." I get that. I don't enjoy that either. Same as I don't enjoy the DM that runs the encounter exactly as it is written in the book even if it makes no sense. It's not how I handle things.

That is why I wait for the players to complete something before I design what is next. I need to know the consequences of the current encounter before I plan the next part because I have to adapt the next part to the actions of the characters. If the characters think they are done with something or the next piece of the puzzle isn't obvious, I design an encounter to get them on track in a fashion that seems organic to story progression.

One recent example in the Carrion Crown AP was the insertion of the main villain into the first module as an employer/adviser that manipulated the PCs into destroying his enemies. I spent time having him engage the PCs in conversations that built up their investment in stopping whatever plot was occurring within the story. He even gifted them coin, magic items, and intelligence over the course of the adventure until they were staying at his house while in the city. They had become friends with this individual and trusted him. When he turned on them, it was a bit of a surprise. It was a railroad, but one that was done in a fashion that players didn't even notice it. They felt like they were engaged in a mystery that required their attention. They took it as seriously as a real person might if they found themselves engaged in strange happenings that might endanger the well being of many innocents and they had the power to do something about it. That is the essence of railroading. If you do it right, it is amazingly fun and barely noticeable by the players.

I get it, not many can pull it off. I've been in more of those campaigns than I have been in the enjoyable ones. The campaigns where the DM is telling you where you're going and why. He's reading the module rote. He's not bringing any characters to life including the one you're playing. It feels like the usual "defeat the BBEG from doing bad things" single track railroad adventure. If that is mostly what I was dealing with, maybe I would find a railroad with multiple tracks more interesting. That being said a railroad is only a bad thing if the DM doesn't know how to make the ride interesting.

sanishiver said:

Y
Yep!

Managing the tempo of an adventure sometimes requires cutting things short. What the DM thought of as a cool encounter can become just another grind session in the eyes of the players, which kills the fun.

Rarely it's necessary to up the hit points, such as when a player is readying a cool attack to finish off the big bad evil guy but would be thwarted by something mundane like ongoing damage doing the deed instead.

Click to expand...

The thing is that you have sooo many other ways of cutting an encounter short that doesn't rely on fudging. You can for instance have the monster flee or surrender, or have a dragon allied with the monsters appear and then the PC's might fly. You can also just sum up the encounter like you do with travel or other uninteresting activities.

Take one encounter I ran that was just a bit too hard. The PC's did really well and had killed the main bad guy and his right hand man, but there was still some more henchmen left. Two long time allies of the henchman and one mercenary. I could just have started fudging a bit earlier in the combat and the encounter would probably just have ended with the PC's killing everyone. I didn't go that route though.

The players know my style and know I am playing "hardball" and that just keeping on doing their ordinary stuff would probably lead to 1-2 PC's dying and all the NPC's dead. One of the henchmen was badly wounded and decided to make a run for it. One of my players then tried to make a deal with the remaining mercenary and gang up on the last henchmen. He had earlier role-played his character in such a way that it really made sense and he rolled well on his intimidate/diplomacy check. The mercenary turned on the last henchmen and they killed him pretty quickly. Then we had an interesting encounter role-playing what the deal would be between the turn-coat mercenary and the PC's.

The players also know that monsters might flee if their leader has been killed or to shift allegiance. This adds another dimension to the game, much more interesting than fudged hp or rolls which lets the players just rely on the combat mechanics.

I am fine with fudging if you cleared the fudging with your players in advance. It's more of a play style thing, even if I think less fudging is better.

Blackbrrd said:

The thing is that you have sooo many other ways of cutting an encounter short that doesn't rely on fudging. You can for instance have the monster flee or surrender, or have a dragon allied with the monsters appear and then the PC's might fly. You can also just sum up the encounter like you do with travel or other uninteresting activities.

Take one encounter I ran that was just a bit too hard. The PC's did really well and had killed the main bad guy and his right hand man, but there was still some more henchmen left. Two long time allies of the henchman and one mercenary. I could just have started fudging a bit earlier in the combat and the encounter would probably just have ended with the PC's killing everyone. I didn't go that route though.

The players know my style and know I am playing "hardball" and that just keeping on doing their ordinary stuff would probably lead to 1-2 PC's dying and all the NPC's dead. One of the henchmen was badly wounded and decided to make a run for it. One of my players then tried to make a deal with the remaining mercenary and gang up on the last henchmen. He had earlier role-played his character in such a way that it really made sense and he rolled well on his intimidate/diplomacy check. The mercenary turned on the last henchmen and they killed him pretty quickly. Then we had an interesting encounter role-playing what the deal would be between the turn-coat mercenary and the PC's.

The players also know that monsters might flee if their leader has been killed or to shift allegiance. This adds another dimension to the game, much more interesting than fudged hp or rolls which lets the players just rely on the combat mechanics.

I am fine with fudging if you cleared the fudging with your players in advance. It's more of a play style thing, even if I think less fudging is better.

Click to expand...

Sure. All of these things are valid things to do, and they all are in support of the same goal-- making the game as fun for the players as possible. If a bad guy receives a critical hit for like 52 damage and drops down to 2 remaining HP... cutting that long fight short by having having him throw his hands up in surrender versus just having him fall over dead/unconscious from that critical hit both accomplish the same thing. And which way you do it all depends on your particular style. But one is not defacto "better" than another because no one is judging how you DM and scoring you points. No one else cares how you do it.

Unless of course you genuinely believe your own style of play is the "right" one and everyone else is playing wrong and you think you're going to get a trophy at the end of the year for playing the "right way". In which case, best of luck to you!

Celtavian said:

All of RPG adventuring is a railroad.

Click to expand...

I don't really think this is true. I do think you have some good points, but look at your example. The PC's just assumed the guy was the good guy and did his bidding. Let's say the PC's are of a suspicious nature and did some investigation to find if the NPC was trustworthy. If you generated content based on this and actually let the actions of the PC's decide if they discovered the truth and if they did, let the PC's completely change the story - you are not running a railroad any longer. You are now running a story based on the PC's actions and the motivations/actions of the NPC's you have created. If you were running a railroad the PC's investigation would just put them back on the track you planned from the start.

I ran "Reavers of Harkenworld" and mostly, the PC's did as the adventure was written, more or less a railroad, but towards the end the PC's actions had diverged so far from the adventure that I was improvising one session at a time, and at a certain point I had no idea what the PC's would do so I just prepared their opponents, but not anything about the circumstances around meeting them. It was smart, I kinda assumed the PC's would hole up in a partially taken keep, but instead they stormed the rest of the keep and then did a commando raid into the enemy camp two days ride away, assassinating the main NPC. Completely different than my assumption that it would be a long siege and a slog of a combat.

To sum it up, starting up a campaign that has a plot doesn't make it a railroad. Only allowing planned outcomes of the plot to succeed is rail-roading. The minute the train is running rampant through the city/forrest/dungeon, it's off the railroad. You might have a train-wreck of a campaign, but at least the PC's decisions actually mattered.

(Btw, if you like rail-roads I think that's fine, but I don't think it's the only way to play. Adventure paths and mega adventures are very prone to rail-roading so I try to avoid those, but some are just really good, for instance Red Hand of Doom. What makes RHoD good is that the assumptions it makes don't really make it hard to adept the adventure to the PC's actions. It's more of a "this is the what we think is the scope of the adventure, if the PC's act outside it, you need to wing it, building on what they did".

DEFCON 1 said:

Unless of course you genuinely believe your own style of play is the "right" one and everyone else is playing wrong and you think you're going to get a trophy at the end of the year for playing the "right way". In which case, best of luck to you!

Click to expand...

Well, I did a comment at the end saying: " I am fine with fudging if you cleared the fudging with your players in advance. It's more of a play style thing, even if I think less fudging is better."

Celtavian said:

We think exactly the opposite. The only reason I do play these games is to participate in adventures similar to what I enjoy in a movie or a book. I would despise RPGs if they provided the same experience as a video game where all I was doing was building up numbers on a character sheet. That is all you're doing if you're not participating in a story.

Click to expand...

Well as I said a kind of story arise from the act of players playing the game via their PC, but we are not playing to try and tell any particular story. If you read the party journal there is a rough story in there, but its just what results from roughly recording the various actions we take that night, which we do so we remember things next time we play and have notes to refer to if something arises down the line and we need to remember something. Our goal in D&D is to complete some objective, be it raiding an Orc tribe, looting a tomb, saving the farmers daughter, or just getting rich and famous from the PC POV. Unless your a re playing as a pure wargame, which I would have no problem with, some kind of story gets told. But tropes of books and movies are not always part of it, like plot immunity for a bad guy or PC. To quote Ivan Drago, if they die, they die and the DM must adapt.

Celtavian said:

Books and movies give the illusion that characters within the story have to make choices that are vital to the movement of the story As a reader you're reading to see what they do and what happens from what they do. If you knew all of that in advance, you wouldn't keep reading even though the writer/director is pushing his characters in a known direction on tracks that he creates. You're riding on the author's train where he is the conductor/engineer on tracks he made. Good writers will take a reader on an enjoyable journey even if it is a carefully crafted journey with no ability for the reader to take an alternate route other than getting off the train.

Click to expand...

That's an interesting theory of literature. It's not really congruent with my experience (your theory would predict that rereads are no fun at all, because you're no longer in the dark as to what they'll do or what will happen), and it's not at all clear that the analogy you're drawing between illusion of choice in an railroaded RPG and "the illusion that characters within the story have to make choices that are vital to the movement of the story" is a good one. The illusion of choice means that you appear to have power to influence the outcome, but in fact all outcomes are the same. (If you refuse to join the expedition you'll be shanghai'ed anyway.) You're apparently claiming that characters in a book have no choice, that if they chose differently the story would be rewritten to be the same anyway... to me it seems more likely that if Luke Skywalker, for example, had chosen to join Darth Vader in the Dark Side, the story would not have been rewritten to come out the same. It would have not been written at all, because George Lucas would have said, "That's a terrible movie. No one would watch it," and thrown away that draft. And yet in an RPG, the choice can be made, and the party deals with the consequences. A railroad will force it to come out the same as if Luke hadn't made the choice ("oops, just kidding, I guess the Dark Side isn't compatible with your midichlorians--guess we'll have to have a lightsaber fight now"). A non-railroad will accept Luke's choice and go from there ("you killed the Emperor and took over the Empire; Leia doesn't trust you any more but Han is fine with it; Han doesn't know that you murdered Chewie in a fit of rage").

You're claiming that a static medium like a book can present the same illusion of choice as a dynamic medium like an RPG. I don't buy it. "That's not true! That's impossible!" ;-)

Suppose Vader rolled terribly and Luke kept critting in Empire? My players would go nuts if they thought I was keeping Vader alive since I had big plans for him in Jedi, they would demand their rightful victory. I would too in the off night game we play. If we wanted collaborative storytelling there is no need for dice, we are playing a game that happens to tell a bit of story as you play through it.

Blackbrrd said:

Well, I did a comment at the end saying: " I am fine with fudging if you cleared the fudging with your players in advance. It's more of a play style thing, even if I think less fudging is better."

Click to expand...

I started rolling openly as DM so I could avoid the desire to fudge rolls and to allow me to point to 20's and cackle while the players watch.