D&D 5E Max HP?

[Xeviat]

Hiya ENWorlders!

After 15 years, I finally finished "Red Hand of Doom", converted to 5th Edition! The PCs ended up at 12th level for the final fight, and hit 13th afterwards.

One thing I observed after running a game from 5th level all the way to 12th level was that fights are, truly, quick and decisive. It takes real effort to make an impactful, setpiece climactic encounter. My final fight ended up lasting only 7 rounds and it had some positioning issues and was against a high level mythic.

Mythics go a long way to help this, but I wanted to discuss the ramifications of max HP for PCs and Monsters. How do you think this would affect the game? What do you think might become problematic issues?

I think full-casters might be weakened. With fights taking a little longer, they'll have to fall back on cantrips more, while Fighters and Rogues can mostly keep putting out at the same strength. Status spells may feel better than damage spells. Healing spells may feel weakened. Hit Dice healing may feel weakened (though this can be compensated by having all HD recover on a long rest).

What do you think would happen? How would you act differently?

 

[overgeeked]

I think monsters are undertuned in 5E. By quite a lot. Max PC hit points would only make the problems of the edition worse.

Monsters should have more hit points, more actions, and do more damage. Across the board. Legendary and Mythic monsters help, but only a little. But even they are undertuned. And the problem only gets worse as you level.

I’m not sure about max hit points for monsters, but they should have at least 25% more than the listed average. And even that is likely lowballing.

The game is balanced on the idea that you’ll have 6-8 medium encounters per day with a short rest after every two encounters and a long rest after the 6-8. That’s what class abilities assume. So if you have fewer fights per day, daily resource characters get more powerful while short rest resource characters get less powerful.

One thing I’m doing is letting characters take a short rest as an action, though I’m thinking it might even need to be a bonus or free action, and using the daily XP chart to determine encounters.

I tried a CR2 creature with buffed attacks, damage, and hit points against a non-optimized 1st-level party. What should have been a more than deadly encounter was a 3 and 1/3 round slaughter...of the monster. The PCs barely broke a sweat and one character went down twice. There was nothing wild or extraordinary about the spells used, dice rolled, or damage caused. It was just a cakewalk.

Max hp for both sides would have made it take longer. That’s all. And the one character who went down probably wouldn’t have. So even less of a challenge than it already wasn’t.

 

[Ogre Mage]

The first thing which jumps to mind is that blaster-focused casters would be weakened considerably. Eldritch blast-focused warlocks might be the exception since their blasting is an unlimited resource. But this change would turn them into even more of an eldritch blast turret. I would imagine nova-focused characters would suffer in general but I am less familiar with running martials.

Characters and abilities built to win a war of attrition will perform better. Spirit guardians with its 10 minute duration would retain its strength in this situation. While fireball is obviously worse. Damage spells which require an attack roll, expend a spell slot and are of instant duration like scorching ray and guiding bolt are in this scenario. I would never prepare them.

I might play a circle of the shepherd druid summoner and start flooding the battlefield with max HP conjure animals! If wildshape is also at max HP then moon druids are insane. At level 2 they will turn into a brown bear and have 52 HP!!!

 

[Horwath]

Monsters and PCs, if anything need LESS HPs, not more.

 

[Lyxen]

What do you think would happen? How would you act differently?

A question for you: How is it a problem that a fight only lasts 7 rounds ? Quick and decisive fights are good, right ? Who likes fights that drag over hours and hours, just for dragging out the issue ?

That being said, yes, mythic monsters are the option of choice for me too for bosses, they make sense, they have implications story-wide and they reflect exactly the kind of drama expected from big battle scenes of movies and books.

View attachment This_Isn%27t_Even_My_Final_Form_Image.webp

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

Balancing fights is an art and a party of high level PCs can deal a lot of damage, so sometimes you can consider to give the monsters more HP if they need to survive more than 1 round and there is no opportunity to add a shield of minions.

If you also want to give the PCs more HP, so the overall fight lasts longer, you can allow them to take healing potions as a bonus action (RAW it's an action), and make the healing potions more abundant in the world.

But you need to realize that this game is designed to have fights that last only a few rounds. A fight of 7 rounds sounds long, imho. The usual method is to add some minions or a special monster in the rooms prior to the BBEG. Although it is not a single fight, this does add many more rounds of combat, and allows the PCs to use all their abilities and grind it down a bit. They can then heal up (healing potions / spells), which increases the total HP of the party by a lot.

 

[Shiroiken]

I have given 75% and 100% HP to elite monsters that are supposed to be leaders. With a small boost to AC or attack/damage, this helps differentiate them without needing a new monster stat block.

 

[Stoutstien]

I think HP in general is an overused defensive factor for both PCs and NPCs. It leads to number bloat which is just going to slow the game down. Bigger HP pools leads to seeking more damage which will eventually lead to the need to inflate them again.
I'd much rather have more active mitigation, recovery, and avoidance features than just treadmills of bigger values.

 

[Quartz]

Mythics go a long way to help this,

There's nothing stopping you having multiple mythic levels.

 

[DEFCON 1]

When I have run tables with 7 or 8 PCs having reached 7th or 8th level... I quite often would run monsters with Max HP. And it didn't really change much about the game, it just varied the types of encounters the party would have.

Rather than fighting 8 monsters with normal HP numbers from the MM... they instead might fight 5 monsters with Max XP. The total amount of HP the monsters would have would be the same... but it would just be the number of targets and the number of monster actions would be lessened. But if I used more powerful monsters (and occasionally had them do Max Damage on attacks), then the amount of return fire would be more powerful which would just change how the party would react.

Nothing wrong with changing things up in my opinion, and also nothing wrong with not changing things the same way every single time. Variety is the spice of life and makes for more compelling drama when the party has to always react differently to different things.