Hit Points... Up or Down?

[hagor]

When I'm GM, I add up damage to monsters.

When I play, I subtract damage from my hit points.

Why? Because when I'm GM, I generally am not so worried about exactly how many hit points each critter has remaining - what I'm most concerned about is if they are still standing. When I'm playing, what I'm most concerned about is how much longer I'll still be standing, so knowing how many hit points I have left is more important.

I recently changed to this.

 

[Argyle King]

I usually add mine up. I don't find negative HP to be an issue at all; depending on what system I'm playing, I track negative HP differently.

If I'm playing D&D 4E, I keep track of negative HP with a new tally because I need to know when I reach my bloodied value again, and healing immediately takes me back to 0 before applying. In other systems, I just keep adding.

 

[The Human Target]

Always subtract.

When I see people who add I always feel like they're cheating.

I'm addition prejudiced.

 

[Obryn]

When I'm not using Masterplan to do all that pesky math for me, I add up for my monsters. I usually just write on the battlemat, and this way my players don't know how many HPs the creature has left. (Though they get a big hint when it's Bloodied.)

-O

 

[Al'Kelhar]

As DM, I add for two reasons, both explored by prior posters:
- I personally find it easier to add than subtract;
- as my players are often able to see my scratch pad of monster hit points, they don't know how many hit points a monster has left.

One of my players seems oddly critical of my practice of adding hp rather than subtracting, whereas the others don't really care. I suspect that because he is fractionally faster than me at subtraction, some inferiority complex underlies his criticism ;-)

Mind you, when I played RPGA games, I was mortified by the general lack of mathematical competence of the players. Seriously, counting on your fingers? (Note that this is not intended as a jibe at people with genuine learning difficulties. My observation was that at least one person on every table couldn't do basic addition. Says more about our education system than the individuals concerned...)

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[danzig138]

I subtract, as both player and GM. Adding is just. . . wrong. In fact, subtracting is so ingrained in my hit point thinking, I retrained one of my players who added, because I could never tell how many hit points he actually had left at any given time.

Why? Because it's how I learned to do it and it's just quicker for me. Now we use maptool, so I just throw the numbers in as necessary.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Add me to the list of those that go up when I'm DM'ing and down when I'm playing.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Joshua Randall]

- make a chain of changes (-7 -3 +5 -1 - 4 ...) and calculate the resulting number at irregular intervals

I suppose if the monster is getting healing or temp hp regularly, this is okay, but in general I think it's a terrible idea. Here's why.

I've seen several DMs track monster hit points by writing down the damage the monster took (express as either a negative or a positive number), intending to add up / subtract down the damage en mass at some point. It never works, and it takes longer than just adding / subtracting as you go

The DM will be staring at a list of numbers like this and trying to determine if the monster is bloodied or dead:

23
17
8
-5
35
6

I honestly don't understand why anyone would ever track hit points that way.

- keep tally with poker chips

That's what I do for my PCs. In 4e D&D, I started using red chips to indicate the bloodied half of my hit points, and white chips to indicate the unbloodied half. (Instead of the typical convention that red = 5 points.)

With low level PCs, I create one big stack of poker chips. Say, 12 red and 12 white for a 1st level PC with 24 hp. As the PC takes damage, I remove white chips from the stack. When I get down to the red part of the stack, the PC is, obviously, bloodied. It's a nice visual representation.

I use blue chips for temporary hit points.

With high level PCs, the stack gets too tall, so I have the white chip stack in front of (towards the rest of the players) the red chip stack. For example, a PC with 90 hp would have a white stack of 45 in front of a red stack of 45.

 

[Celebrim]

When I'm a DM, I tend to subtract hitpoints. This is because I'm not terribly worried about keeping track of anything except when the NPC dies. Even so, lately I've taken to making sheets of paper with boxes on them where I can track hitpoints quickly, so that's really more like adding damage.

As a PC, I always add damage because I want to leave my 'max hit points' box intact. It's been a while since I played, but in the future I'd likely do my reutine tracking with something like MtG life wheel or other counter mechanism just to avoid unnecessary pencil marks.

You make me wonder though if I should rewrite my homebrew rules to 'invert hit points' the way 3rd edition inverted AC. Negative hit points have always been sort of problimatic to describe and some of the language describing my somewhat more complex than normal rules for 'damage tracking' has become rather tortured.