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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rachel" data-source="post: 5101782" data-attributes="member: 88033">So many great responses! Thank you to everyone for that! But please allow me to "reset" the topic a bit.  This whole idea that humanoids in the MM have too many hit points came to me as I thought about how fragile humanoids are in relation to other things. I don't want to get too simulationist, but IRL people can die from a prick to the wrong place, or drown in a spoonful of water. Humans are weak! So I guess it doesn't make sense to me to see humanoids with hundreds and hundreds of hit points. That's a lot of hits they can take! Then I noticed that PCs had substantially less HPs than even humanoid monsters. That only confounded the problem, in my eyes. Okay so if an orc or other *squishy* bodied humanoid like an illithid had so many HP, at least the PCs should have similar. True monsters, such as demons and magical beasts, in my mind make perfect sense having gobs of HP; they don't trigger the same WTH? kind of response.   So I set out to sort of envision what it would be like to pit a fighter vs. an orc (particularly the Chieftain) one-one-one as a study to see how she would fare. The point was never to say her allied PCs might not help out, or that the orc's henchman might not either. The point was to say *what if neither the fighter nor the orc's allies chose to or we able to help*. A true one-on-one. This is relevenat b/c that could happen...it could be a one-on-one (which looked to me like it would drastically favor the orc). In a follow-up response, I listed 2 cases (a duel being one of them) where no allied help comes into play.  Ultimately, a humanoid can only be so tough. A humanoid with 300+ hit points can takes dozens of hits potentially. A demon, a large magical beast, I can see it, but not a humanoid. Most humanoids are *squishy*. Some humanoids (those intended to be extra-tough) may also make sense with gobs of HP (like elemental-themed ones). But an orc? There is no orc that's going to be *that* tough. Period. As another point, I added at the end of my original post that the way to make orcs tougher is not to stack on insane amounts of HP, but to do other things such as giving them tactics, better gear, more of a damage punch, overwhelming odds, etc.. Hopefully this clarifies some things and brings us back to square one. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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