GMMichael
Guide of Modos
Wise words. Would you say, that after you found your bruises, that you were 50% closer to dying? What about after those jumping jacks? Not a scratch on you, but you felt like you were in mortal danger, no?
D&D 5E Keepiing Current HP from players...
- Thread starter FrogReaver
- Start date
Wise words. Would you say, that after you found your bruises, that you were 50% closer to dying? What about after those jumping jacks? Not a scratch on you, but you felt like you were in mortal danger, no?
jasper
Rotten DM
In mortal danger of dying from embarrassment while my friends laugh at me and I tired not to curl up in a ball on the college lunch room floor. I was at least stunned for 1 round. But made my will save and didn't go prone. On the bruises I was at least 10% closer to dying.
I get the idea to try to enhance immersion, or build up tension and etc., but I see a problem for me as a DM to implement this idea, be fair to my players and don't feel dumb myself. The game already has a lot of asymmetry on availability of information between players and the DM. The proposed variant goes one step further, as now the players don't have information on their own HPs, but I as a DM have information on the monsters HPs. Every time the players use healing it will be an extra gamble (rolling dice + blurred info on current status). For me to use resources healing the monsters it will never be so blurred. So, to be fair, what should I do? Make deliberate suboptimal choices for the monsters to balance the ground? Just play the monsters in the normal way I would but balance down encounters a little bit if I want to preserve the original challenge level? None of these seem good enough for me. So, something different?
If somebody knows how to handle this, please share your methods and techniques.
I am not good at pretending not to have information that I have. This is even the reason I decided, when DMing, to start rolling dice in the open, so to let the players make decisions better informed. I feel this enhances their tactical approach to battles, with their reactions and such. I also make some effort in-game to let the PCs access information on monster weaknesses, specially the ones I know the players have from their long experience in the hobby. I encourage them to evaluate monsters capabilities by describing their equipment, emphasizing physical and behavioral characteristics, so they can judge monster defenses and try to play their offences accordingly, etc. I also feel this way I am free to build up the challenges in interesting ways for my players to interact with, as the less information there is, the more the game feels like just gambling to me.
If somebody knows how to handle this, please share your methods and techniques.
I am not good at pretending not to have information that I have. This is even the reason I decided, when DMing, to start rolling dice in the open, so to let the players make decisions better informed. I feel this enhances their tactical approach to battles, with their reactions and such. I also make some effort in-game to let the PCs access information on monster weaknesses, specially the ones I know the players have from their long experience in the hobby. I encourage them to evaluate monsters capabilities by describing their equipment, emphasizing physical and behavioral characteristics, so they can judge monster defenses and try to play their offences accordingly, etc. I also feel this way I am free to build up the challenges in interesting ways for my players to interact with, as the less information there is, the more the game feels like just gambling to me.
mflayermonk
First Post
The DM makes optimal decisions whenever possible with all knowledge available.
I liked the gambling analogy you made, because that similarity is there. The turn of a friendly card.
Mercule
Adventurer
This isn't really a good argument on anything. FROgs are inherently asymmetric. That is kinda the point of having a GM. It isn't a problem because they aren't competitive -- unless your GM really sucks.
There are plenty of good reasons not to hide hut points from the players. Asymmetry just isn't one.
I was not arguing that the game asymmetry is a problem in itself, but I think the degree of asymmetry matters. The DM has access to all information available. The players play with the information from their PC sheets and the game rules. This seems to me a reasonable minimum. Going further than that might make player decision-making more like gambling, which I would not desire.
But the greater difficulty I would have, and that is what I was trying to argue about, is as a DM. I am not sure if the proposed HP hiding would be much different than the players playing without numbers in the sheet at all, just relying on some descriptive qualities to represent attributes and allow the DM to handle all the numbers. This can be fun for the players, they just let themselves be transported to some awesome fantastic universe without even needing to care for number-crunching, but what kind of behavior the DM should engage in order to keep the game fair for all and fun for DM self? I know both concepts of fairness and fun will vary a lot from table to table, but my gut feeling, for what it is worth, tells me that a DM would need to either highly abstract the situations in their own head in order to follow whatever narrative calls despite what the numbers point at, or they would need to deliberately "play dumb". I don't know how to do the former, it seems really hard to ignore the whole bunch of extra information only I can access, hence my question, and I am not interested in the latter.
Fair enough.
robus
Lowcountry Low Roller
I would say though that having the players HP hidden (or at least no obvious) from the DM dissuades the DM from fudging.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
I'm not sure it does. It would just happen with fewer cases of DM's thinking, Hmmm... the PC has 23 hit points left? "You take 22 hit points of damage."
The fudging would just be less precise and, potentially, even greater in magnitude since DM doesn't know how much damage to shave off an attack to keep the PC from being taken out.
