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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 7183764" data-attributes="member: 2011">In the "Describing the Effects of Damage" sidebar of the Players Handbook, there is verbiage that PCs should know when the creature is half damaged. I find this reasonable. There should be obvious clues that the players are making progress.The concept that hints should be given for resistance or vulnerability would also seem to imply that 25% damage is something that should be known, or 10% damaged, or 2%, etc. In other words, where does the concept of "less damage than expected" come in? Is 10 points of damage on a 30 HP creature any more or less the expectation than on a 400 HP creature?A creature has 500 hit points. After a long battle, it finally gets below 250 hit points. The PCs know that they are making progress. On the other hand, it has Fire Resistance and from his vantage point 120 feet away, the Wizard is able to immediately discern that his 25 points of damage Fireball (which could be 12 or 6) was more or less effective against this foe than the plethora of other foes that the Wizard has cast Fireball on in the past. It almost sounds nonsensical. Sure, when you Fireball Ogres, they are nearly half damaged, so it might be obvious. On the 500 hit point Dragon, it's white noise, no matter if the final result is 6, 12, or 25. The difference between 1% or 2% damage should rarely be noticeable.Actually, I consider it a very good example. AC is one of the game mechanics that does not just reflect being missed. It also reflects glancing blows that do no damage (e.g. Plate armor). The mechanic does not just suggest one thing. Even with Leather Armor, not all of the AC is the creature avoiding the blow. Some of it is the armor protecting. DR can also suggest many different things: regeneration or just plain lack of damage or a thick hide or some other type of protection. So to say that DR cannot indicate a strong exoskeleton and that AC does, or vice versa, indicates that there is a narrow way in which a given mechanic can and should be viewed.I get it. As people at a table playing a game, resistance is often described in one set of ways and it's the way it has been viewed at that table for decades. That doesn't mean that the game mechanic cannot mean something else. Like a strong exoskeleton.I suspect that after the fourth or sixth resistance hint by a DM over the course of a campaign or over the course of years of multiple campaigns, the hints tend to become super obvious and they are not truly hints anymore. Just like there are only so many different ways that many DMs can narratively think to describe hits. Sooner or later, many DMs reuse the same flavor and it eventually becomes repetitive and known.</blockquote>

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