Maximum Hit Points

[Wulf Ratbane]

That was techincally the idea behind Fighter being worth more CR than Warrior.
Feats can matter.
The problem is not all feats are strong enough to do so.
Then again, some are stronger.

So I can add a Feat to a monster, which is worth +1 CR by your estimation.

Or I can add a level of Fighter to a monster, and it gets +1 BAB, d10 HD, saving throw increases, skill points, and a Feat, and this is also worth +1 CR.

Unless the monster in question is a spellcaster, in which case fighter is a non-associated class, so it only increases by +1/2 CR.

You're tenacious, I'll give you that.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

So I can add a Feat to a monster, which is worth +1 CR by your estimation.

Or I can add a level of Fighter to a monster, and it gets +1 BAB, d10 HD, saving throw increases, skill points, and a Feat, and this is also worth +1 CR.

Unless the monster in question is a spellcaster, in which case fighter is a non-associated class, so it only increases by +1/2 CR.

You're tenacious, I'll give you that.

I like you. Have +1 xp.

 

[Protagonist]

I duno about CR, but maxing hitpoints definetly encourages the use of save or die/suck/fail/whatever effects, thus crippling direct damage even more in 3.x

 

[pawsplay]

I've routintely handed out max HP and immunity to mind-affecting and polymorph to some of my campaign baddies, and I didn't adjust the CR.

I think for a "standard" encounter if you did this, an ad hoc +25% xp might be justified.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Maximizing hp is not worth +1 CR per se, but it can be... even more sometimes.

It strongly depends which kind of attacks your players use. If you are fighting a wizard with a single fireball memorized, it doesn´t matter if you bring 1 or 8 orks (raising CR by 6), but if the ork has double hp it may survive the fireball and can put a good chunk into the wizards hp before going down in round 2.

CR really is no real measure for difficulty, has never been and will never be, but its a good starting point to make a balanced challenge.

If you give monsters max hp to allow monsters do level appropriate damage to the party, no CR increase.

If you think it is a more difficult challenge because of the increased hp, increase CR.

The best thing: you don´t have to decide before the fight happens. Just make up the encounter, le the players face it and estimate how many resources of your players were drained and how well their tactics have been. (20% resources, no real threat of death with averarge tactics and luck, but still very dangerous (deadly) for a single PC, means a CR = level encounter)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What would people identify as guiding marks that more hit points affects CR notably?

I would start with the following:
- The monsters has a lot of "assymmetric" abilities it has little chance to bring all to bear. Bodaks or Meduas come to mind. If they can squeeze out an extra round, that's one extra "save or suck" effect for the entire party. A creature with an area effect that it can use repeatedly (Breath Weapons, Fireballs). But not a creature that has one Flesh to Stone spell prepared and the rest is just a claw-claw-bite routine.

- The Monster has really little hit points usually. Undeads that don't get any bonuses from Constitution. On the other hand, a Monster with a d10 hit die and a +6 Constition modifier will not see such a significant increase in hp by maximizing the dice.

Any other pointers?

Generally I think it will rarely be more than one point of CR.

 

[pawsplay]

The best thing: you don´t have to decide before the fight happens. Just make up the encounter, le the players face it and estimate how many resources of your players were drained and how well their tactics have been. (20% resources, no real threat of death with averarge tactics and luck, but still very dangerous (deadly) for a single PC, means a CR = level encounter)

And so the worse your players do, the faster they level.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

And so the worse your players do, the faster they level.

Heh. That's a feature, not a bug. You learn more from when everything goes wrong than when everything goes according to plan.

 

[pawsplay]

Heh. That's a feature, not a bug. You learn more from when everything goes wrong than when everything goes according to plan.

Maybe. But in any case, I think the gaming experience is generally more immersive when player goals and characters goals are somewhat in alignment.

 

[S'mon]

Personally I'd rather be giving max hp to the PCs than the monsters. It doesn't make much difference to the Wizard, especially one with high CON (like all smart players do), but it goes a fair distance to making Fighters and Barbarians less sucky, and reducing the overwhelming importance of Clerical healing.

As for monsters and CR, for low CON and high-dice (eg d12) monsters max hp might be worth +1 CR. If they get most of their hp from CON then it's not a big difference, but doubling hp is certainly worth +50% XP as the monster will be around nearly twice as long, doing nearly twice as much damage.

Adding an extra monster by contrast, they start off doing twice as much damage (because two of them), then one goes down, damage drops 50% for the remainder of the fight. In a typical fight, 2 monsters do around 3 times as much damage as 1 monster before dropping. This can be mitigated by area-effect attacks and narrow frontages, so x2 XP works out OK.