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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6754135" data-attributes="member: 29398">Characters know about themselves.  Their players know their current h.p. as a hard number, the character knows its own fairly specific "this is the physical condition I'm in right now", without necessarily having a number attached...but only when they stop and think about it.  In the middle of a battle a character really doesn't know the difference between being hit for 6 or 16 unless those are getting down to being the last 6 or 16 it has; the player knows the actual numbers but still shouldn't be able to predict what comes next.  That said, if I roll 5 points of damage on 3d10 I'll tell the character/player it was obviously just a glancing blow; but if I roll 26 on the same 3d10 I might just say "you get clobbered" and leave it up in the air whether that's normal or low or high, particularly if it's a creature they haven't met (or haven't met often) before.  (I roll behind a screen)They also know how much damage they can give out - players know from the dice, characters come to learn what it usually takes to bring down monsters of varying degrees of sturdiness - again without hard numbers - once they've met a few the same.  Example: my current crew have recently beaten up so many Hill Giants they could give lessons in it and though the Giants don't always have the same starting h.p. totals the characters have pretty much learned what it takes to drop one; but they've never seen an elephant thus if one of those attacked them they'd probably have no idea what it could do and - depending how the battle goes - may or may not learn all that much accurate information from just fighting one.Where for me that's just realistic.  If you think a foe is easier or harder than it really is after only fighting one or two that's probably going to change how you approach it next time: "Aw, this thing's a pushover - we killed three last week and didn't take a scratch!" can be music to my ears. <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=":)" />  Conversely, having them think twice about taking on what in reality is an easy opponent because the three they fought last week bent some noses before dropping is also good.Lan-"players also never know exactly what h.p. an opponent is at, but they get a general idea along the lines of 'untouched', 'fatigued', 'hurting', 'wobbling', 'bleeding', etc."-efan</blockquote>

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