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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 1601250" data-attributes="member: 633">I never roll. However, I don't always take the average, either. When I have lots of similar enemies, I sometimes use different HPs to make them slightly stronger or weaker, rather than changing their stats (which is a lot more complex and forces you to have different stat blocks). This has more to do with differentiation than encounter difficulty. Very, very rarely, I'll give an important NPC some above-average hit points to reflect some (possibly supernatural) background bit. I've done this in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=68383" target="_blank">the Abyssal Campaign</a> with [spoiler]the tiefling Lianne, who is not just any tiefling, but the granddaughter of a Tanar'ri Lord; this exceptional heritage makes her simply harder to kill than her body and skill would suggest[/spoiler].  As a general rule, though, I don't like random hit points. They were needed in past editions, where all monsters of the same type were otherwise identical, but today we have varying HD, class levels, and varying Constitution (not to mention Toughness and similar feats).    If I want to really make an enemy tougher or weaker, I change his Constitution instead, or give him extra HD or levels.Nothing wrong with the idea, but the average of each 1d8 is still 4.5. That "not in the books" also refers to statistics textbooks I suppose. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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