D&D General Hit Points. Did 3.0 Or 3.5 Get it Right?

[Dausuul]

The answer to your issue is having the PCs do less damage and reduce hit points across the board. You know, like they did in the old days.

Jgsugden's issue was that monsters died before doing anything.

I don't see how this is addressed by scaling down all numbers except monster damage. It does increase the chance that the party dies before doing anything, but I don't think that's an improvement.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is also easy to turn them into templates for 3.5

Elite creature.

Boss creature.

Fairly similar to the Pathfinder 1e core bestiary template for just making things tougher.

So long as there's an in-universe explanation for the enhanced stats.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What? Minions now are too blatantly narrative for dnd?

For me they are.

Edit: actually, @Celebrim explained it better than I could.

 

[Micah Sweet]

3.X's idea is that monsters should be built like PCs because we cannot know exactly what role or purpose an NPC will end up having - encounters aren't foreordained to be combat or set pieces. The goal is to have a single stat block that represents how the NPC can interact with the world regardless of what that interaction may turn out to be or what sort of encounter the DM is designing.

A perfectly reasonable idea, and motivation for it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

D&D is based on narrative mechanics even if you lampshade it. It is not and never has been (despite some efforts of 3.X) remotely a physics sim. Once you have an outright video game mechanic in there (and yes I'm aware that hit points came from D&D) you're complaining about trifles.

If you can find an in-universe explanation for classes you can for minions, elites, and solos. Especially when solos are generally things like dragons. And minions are people who are heavily outclassed, hence one hit kills. You can even see minions at work literally in the Princess Bride when Inigo actually fights guards and goes through them in seconds.

Minions/standards/elites/solos are much much easier to justify than classes and levels.

We are not going to agree on the hit points issue and whether or not any other narrative mechanics concerns matter if they're involved. We're just not.

And the issue with categories of monster is when people stop caring about the explanations and look at it from a purely gamist POV. Don't do that, look at it from the setting perspective first, and we're golden as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Neonchameleon]

We are not going to agree on the hit points issue and whether or not any other narrative mechanics concerns matter if they're involved. We're just not.

We aren't talking about Fate Points here. Merely classifications a DM can use in world building.

And the issue with categories of monster is when people stop caring about the explanations and look at it from a purely gamist POV. Don't do that, look at it from the setting perspective first, and we're golden as far as I'm concerned.

Once again I say "class" and "level". They are less narrative than either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Jgsugden's issue was that monsters died before doing anything.

I don't see how this is addressed by scaling down all numbers except monster damage. It does increase the chance that the party dies before doing anything, but I don't think that's an improvement.

Scale down monster damage too, in most cases (ogres should still IMO hit pretty darn hard). All I can tell you is that the "monsters die too fast" issue didn't happen in my 1e and 2e games, and it definitely has since.

 

[Micah Sweet]

We aren't talking about Fate Points here. Merely classifications a DM can use in world building.

Once again I say "class" and "level". They are less narrative than either.

Who's talking about Fate Points?

Class is your adventuring profession. Level is an abstract indicator of general proficiency at your adventuring profession. Makes in-universe sense to me.

 

[Celebrim]

1e was really designed around low level play. It got weird if you leveled too high.

I've actually written about that elsewhere. For example: https://www.enworld.org/threads/a-g...enge-a-party-of-13th-level-and-higher.535699/

The truth though is all game systems are designed around situations where the 'bonus' to a roll is significantly smaller than span of fortune available from the fortune mechanic. In D20 this means the design is built around situations where your bonus on the D20 check is rather smaller than 19, and probably not larger than 10 or so. Any game system starts breaking down when the fortune is a rather small input to adjudication or where the range between bonuses of participants becomes large. It's not just a D&D thing. It has to do with the mechanics of playing well together and having reasonable expectations of failure or success.

3E also got weird if you leveled too high.

3E with it's more favorable HP calculator never adjusted nor reconfigured to go higher level nor to its greater HP threshold.

I wouldn't put that down as a major problem with 3E high level play. The biggest problems IMO have to do with saving throw progression and the fall out effects of that for example that "save or suck" gets progressively and exponentially more and more powerful the higher level you get. The other problems have to do with increasing numbers of things that do not have stats but are stated as absolutes rather than quantities - things like "immunities" for example.

 

[Celebrim]

Class is your adventuring profession. Level is an abstract indicator of general proficiency at your adventuring profession. Makes in-universe sense to me.

I would go even further than that. As I implement "class" now, it's not even your profession but rather in most cases an abstract marker of a group of problem-solving skills commonly learned or taught together. If you look at my homebrew classes, they are all intended to cover a wide variety of professions and backgrounds from the mundane to the extraordinary. What they are intended to indicate is that most people have a fairly wide variety of experiences but perhaps not unlimited resources for learning how to deal with challenges, as well as having professional training to reinforce what they do regular or are good at. But they do little to force you to have any particular background. In fact, my homebrew classes scrub background specifics out of the class - Fanatic replacing Barbarian, Hunter replacing Ranger, Shaman replacing Druid, Champion replacing Paladin, etc. That 1e AD&Dism where class equals profession and so you need Merchant, Smith, Sentinel, Duelist, Mariner, and so forth as classes to cover professional skills not covered by another class goes away, as does the assumption that your berserker grew up in a rural background or that your hunter is a good-aligned nature loving spellcaster.