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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DND_Reborn" data-source="post: 8180869" data-attributes="member: 6987520">Not being as familiar with 3E and 4E, you could well be correct and I freely acknowledge that. But I have to judge from what I know and am familiar with--I have nothing else to compare it to. <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=":)" />I agree with you, but the bold part is key. Changing HP without changing AC would result in a different feel for the game (than what I am trying to achieve, anyway). I could also just double damage for everything (but the result is the same as halving HP...). If I reduce both HP and damage, it wouldn't help any since the ratio would be the same (if I reduced them evenly, of course...).Anyway, if WotC wants to have more hitting (thinking this is more "exciting"--it isn't, IMO) but stop the treadmill effect (implementing BA), something had to happen to make tougher creatures harder to defeat. Their response: increased HP, which turns combat into slugfests. They didn't want to change damage, because it would represent changing what had been a fairly consistent standard through editions. A longsword, for instance, has been 1d8 nearly from the beginning. A fireball does d6s worth of damage, and magic missiles are d4s, etc.How much of an increase was the HP "bloat"? As you say, by comparison to 3E and 4E, maybe not that much (you would know better than I as I've explained), but by comparison to 1E and even most of 2E, it is a LOT! Consider an ancient red dragon in 2E (AC 31, HP 103.5) versus 5E (AC 22, 546 HP). The AC is nearly 10 points less (so even goblins can hit it with a decent chance...) but it has over 5 times the HP!FWIW, my design intent was: Make hitting special so it means something.It is too common , too easy, and too boring. "Oh, look, I hit again. And again, oh, and one more time..." yawn Every time a PC hits, the player has to roll damage and I, as DM, have to track the HP decrease. Monsters that used to go down in a single hit now take two or three. Larger combats, especially, end up taking up too much game time. We used average damage for a lot of things, and it helped speed the game up, but didn't help making hitting more exciting.I can do this by decreasing bonuses, or by increasing AC to make it more difficult. I chose to increase AC as a uniform bump is easiest to implement. Alternatively, to preserve some aspect of Bounded Accuracy, I could impose disadvantage on all attack rolls--mathematically it works out to nearly the same thing and was something I considered for a long time.But, if hitting is more difficult, creatures deal less damage per round, and combat takes longer. To compensate, I decrease HP, also uniformly, by halving it across the board for monsters. PCs no longer get CON bonuses each level and stop getting HD at 10th level, gaining only a small increase per level afterwards based on their HD.A cascading effect resulted in necessary changes to save proficiencies (all creatures are proficient in all saves, saves already proficient gain advantage).A nice bug was magic became more powerful in some ways, more like it was in AD&D. <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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