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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 5098229" data-attributes="member: 15470">I think discounting the surges sent her way by her companions does a disservice to the game designers.To quote the assumptions in your post -"It is assumed that both will have teammates assisting them and factoring what help they may or not be is beyond the scope of this theory.""Assuming their are 5 PCs, it is even odds numerically. Again, Myria is likely to be facing one of these Berserker's dead-on."Both of those assumptions fly in the face of my personal experience at the gaming table - and I play a fighter! - which has been that no matter what else is going on, the party's leader almost always deals out hit points. She has standard actions which do an attack, and heal one person for surge-value, and another for bonus points. She also has minor actions which deal out a healing surge to an ally.Monsters' allies, on the other hand, rarely get beyond helping gift Combat Advantage or a similar +2 (aid another, etc), and almost never grant their allies a quantity of hit points equivalent to a healing surge at that level.Even granting the assumption "Myria is entirely on her own, facing a creature 1-on-1 as a level-appropriate encounter for a Lvl 4 PC" ..Myria should still have several other possibilities to increase her effective hit point total. The Invigorating keyword, for example: Crushing Surge as an At-Will should be giving her about +3 HP per hit. The L4 magic item "Cloak of the Walking Wounded", giving her two surges in combat instead of one. The Level 2 utility powers "Unstoppable" (say, +2d6+3) or "Boundless Endurance" (regen +5). If she's going it alone, by Level 4 she's probably used feats to strengthen her ability to go it alone, such as "Improved Vigor" for +1 temp HP on Invigorating, "Student of Battle" for access to the Warlord's Inspiring Word.She's also likely to have picked up a Healing Potion or two on her way to fourth level.(My fighter, at L4, had the Cloak, Crushing Surge, and Student of Battle, mentioned above, even though he was part of a larger party.) Rather. As noted by one of your other respondents, PC's net hit points is much larger when you take into account the hit points granted through all of their healing surges - the designers just needed to start the PC's with a lower short-term hit point value so that they would feel an actual danger of dying during combat. Here I disagree with you. One Elite equals two PCs of the same level, and one Solo equals four PCs of the same level. This is explicitly clear from the Encounter creation guidelines in the DMG and the experience guidelines for same.If Myria is expected to take on an Elite of her level as a solo encounter, the DM has selected an encounter of Level + 4 for her - which may be do-able for an optimized party, but is well outside of the DMG's recommendations for encounters (Level - 1 to Level + 2).In practice, I find its been, "Hey fighter, go tie up the elite as best as you can while we deal with the rest of this rabble .." with the result that the fighter battles until bloodied, second winds himself, and then starts getting support from leaders and other characters as they come back from their sub-missions on the battlefield.(In fact, in actual play, I think Elites get the short end of the stick: they are two creatures' worth of hit points but only one creatures' worth of actions; a party of four PC's should run circles around the level-appropriate encounter of two Elite monsters of their level.)From all of that, I conclude that the assumption "humanoid player characters should have equivalent hit points to humanoid monsters" to be incorrect.My conclusion seems to be borne out by the DMG's section on NPCs (p182), as NPCs with classes are created by adding templates which include massive amounts of hit points to existing creatures, basically turning a normal creature into an Elite .. so that a Level 8 gnome fighter constructed as an NPC would have vastly different hit points from a level 8 gnome fighter constructed as a PC.</blockquote>

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