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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 2942187" data-attributes="member: 12460">I've noticed my players often expect to know things that their characters would have no way of knowing in combat. Here are some of the most common ones.-Did it look like I bypassed his damage reduction?-Did it look like I bypassed his energy resistance?-Is he regenerating or simply fast healing?-How many hit points are you down?-Are you stunned or just dazed?-Did he just use a spell-like ability?-Did you stabilize or are you still dying?My question to you, En World, is what do you do in situations like this? Do you just allow the players to have omniscient information about the PCs and NPCs of the world at any time, or do you have restrictions on it?Personally, I never tell my PCs anything other than what their characters would observe. To me, it is fair and realistic that the PCs know how much damage is being dealt, so I always call out damage aloud. If they ever started writing everyone else's current hp total down in plain view I would put a stop to that, but to me it should be sufficient for you to know that your ally has taken about 5 hits which averaged around 15 points of damage over the last two rounds to decide whether or not to heal him. One of my biggest pet peeves however is the dreaded "Are you stable?" question. There is simply no way to tell that kind of thing without taking a pulse or listening for breathing. A person on death's door is going to have very shallow breath and will not be moving much unless they are dying of a seizure. Noticing something like that as a "free action" in the middle of a pitched battle is simply ridiculous in my opinion and I'm sure I'm not alone. My other pet peeve is when a player hits for 30 odd points of damage, and metagaming that the monster probably has some kind of DR asks if the full damage went through. Again, this is not something that I think would be necessarily obvious. I follow the rules to a T on this one and only inform PCs that there is a damage reduction effect when the entire amount of damage is negated, otherwise, in answer to the "did my damage all go through" is simply "you don't know, but the attack did injure him." I feel that is fair enough. I have a hard time believing any PC could be so keen as to be able to determine the difference between 25 points of damage and 30 points of damage when they are swinging their sword 3 times a round and dodging enemy attacks at the same time.</blockquote>

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