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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 5995685" data-attributes="member: 1465">I don't particularly like your suggestion but I think you are right in raising the problem.We don't want high level monsters and BBEG being insta-killed with a 1st-level spell, but I think it's also lame if some spells become useless at higher levels. This is currently the case with a couple of spells (Bane and probably another one...), because IIRC all other spells using a HP threshold work in such a way that targets above the threshold only get lesser effects, but still get some so the spell never becomes useless. -> goodThen there are still some spells which do become useless, e.g. Sleep -> badI kind of liked the idea of a "current HP" threshold because it opened up interesting tactics and scenarios (both for the PCs and the monsters, of course) but it is understandable that others don't like the idea at all.However, since Hit Dice are still used (and pretty easy to check) in the monsters' write-ups, I don't see any reason why "maximum HP" should be used instead of a HD threshold.Both ways work but achieve slightly different results:- maximum HP means that in a game where the DM rolls monsters' HP, you never know if spell X is going to affect that Troll or not... because you don't know its HP since they are not always the same! You may cast spell X against a group of Trolls and affect only some of them [good if you like variety]- in a game where DM uses default HP per monster, all Trolls are affected by spell X the same way [good if you lie consistency]Then a HD threshold works pretty much the same as having default HP (the second case above), unless the DM changes the number of HD of some of the Trolls. The point here is that the DM doesn't actually have to really lower/increase the HD and reroll HP (in 3ed, changing HD of a monster means to recalculate everything, ack!! increasing is a pain, lowering is a true nightmare!), she can just decide to override the current HD value and say "Troll <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=1" target="_blank">#1</a>  has +1HD, Troll <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=2" target="_blank">#2</a>  has -HD" without actually changing any other number, only for the purpose of bringing in variety in spell effects and such.So perhaps it depends on how each DM prefers, especially given how you are going to keep track of HP during a battle...</blockquote>

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