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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7035798" data-attributes="member: 6796661">This is how many started playing the game in the early days. Rolling dice and tracking damage was the purview of the referee. Quickly, however, this was given up in most RPGs. Having your stats in front of you and making your own roles makes you more invested in your character. Despite this style of play being part of the game in the early days, it now wouldn't feel like D&D to me. If I want the kind of game you are describing, I would use another system. If suspense is really what you want to build in your game, get rid of HP altogether and use a simple system like Dread or Grin. I prefer Grin because Dread makes success based on the real-life physical dexterity and steadiness of hand of the player. Grin is based on a card draw. I find that in all these suspense games, players are rewarded for being awfully careful. Most D&D adventures just wouldn't work well with this system. You would have to be very adept at adapting on the fly or would need to rewrite the adventures to fit that play style, or write your own. Better to just use another system than to try to shoehorn this into D&D.To echo almost everyone above, I wouldn't want to play this way as a DM or player. I'm happy letting my players track all there stats and initiative. I'm looking for more things I can let my players take over, so that I can focus on the story and running the monsters and NPCs. As a player, I would be either frustrated or bored with this approach and would not stay in a campaign run this way. All that said, I am all for using a wacky mechanic for a specific encounter or even a session to create a very different feel. But it needs to be temporary and sparingly and works best in a long-term campaign of standard play. Even then it can be hard to pull off and I would make sure that I'm prepared to switch to standard play if the players do not seem into it.</blockquote>

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