Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 5774716" data-attributes="member: 2804">To understand why 4e HPs are higher, you have to understand that the design goal of 4e is that a standard PC can survive at least 5 hits from a standard monster of their level before going down.This is a design goal I agree with. Also having more HP makes it easier to add damage variability and granularity among weapons, spells, and attacks, instead of everything being the same.Where 4e made a misstep was giving monsters (but not PCs) a bit too many HP which sometimes, but not always, contributed to grind. The reason that a common 4e house rule is to halve monster HP but double damage is because with half HP a monster who normally lives 6 rounds will now die in 3. So to keep them a viable threat, you double damage so that overall the amount of damage they can deal to the PCs in those 3 rounds is the same as the amount they would have done in 6.But you can't just cut HPs for PCs too, because now PCs are dying in one or two rounds again or getting one shotted with a crit which is the original problem that 4e solved. If you drop HPs AND damage, you then you lose that granularity. You can't differentiate weapons or let PCs do more damage via some kind of stunt, power, maneuver, feat, or whatever without throwing the game out of whack. And besides, rolling lots of damage is fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />So you really have to have 4e style HPs to make the game work. Having more HP gives you more room to breathe in the design space regarding damage without breaking the game.</blockquote>

Verification