PC hit points vs Monster hit points

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

My personal belief is that PC hit points are approximately twice as valuable as monster hit points. i.e. if your rogue is standing in the middle of a group of creatures doing 25-30 damage per round but taking 15-20 in return you're probably getting a negative net return in terms of projected victory in that encounter. I would be interested in hearing other peoples perspective on this.

I mostly focus on "hard" encounters for analysis both because these are the most critical points in the campaign for seeing how effective pc's are and if something doesn't "work" in an easy encounter it's unlikely to adversely affect the pc survivability. PC's are sort of on a constant pass fail system with regard to encounters. It only takes one "failure" for the pc's to wind up dead so they're basically required to pass them all.

Minions make this comparison more difficult because you start having to account for them as more than 1HP. If a wizard hits a minion with magic missile for 11 dmg 10 is wasted. The minion effectively soaked up 11 damage even though it only had 1 hp. All monsters will usually soak up some extra damage on the killing blow because of the nature of the game but so do pc's this only becomes a significant problem because of the design of minions and their 1HP. I usually use 6-7 HP's when talking about minions because they'll usually take 4-10 dmg minimum when they get hit.

5 orc raiders led by an orc berserker is a 875 exp encounter. This is N+3 for a level 1 group of 5 pc's. 296 hp

8 goblin warriors and 3 goblin cutters is also 875 exp and 250 hp's if you accept minions as 6 for this kind of comparison.

5 pc's have roughly 125-130HP's at level 1

In simplistic terms, in order for the pc's to "pass" they must put out 250+ damage before they take 125

This is the basis for my question/assumption/point.

PC hit points are about 2x value of monster hit points and thus healing is about twice as powerful as damage.

 

[Mad Hamish]

I don't think it's as simple as you're making out.

I don't think there's a magic number you can apply to say this is better than that.

In general you'll be facing things that have more hit points than the pcs do, but I don't think that makes (for example) healing more important than damage because if you take out enemies faster they have less chances to heal you.

If you kill a monster in 2 rounds compared to 4 then you take half the damage from it (generally).


In terms of minions don't forget that area affects tend to wipe them out.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

Actually, the PCs have more HP than that.

They have at least 25% plus HP than you calculated due to second wind. Add leaders, special powers that allow you to spend healing surge, reduce damage or gain temp hp, and you will find that the PCs are about on par with the monsters.

In simplistic terms, in order for the pc's to "pass" they must put out 250+ damage before they take 125

I know you have acknowledged the possibility of getting healed in your OP but you can't then pretend that the PCs will have lost by the time they take 125 HP worth of damage. I don't think you will ever see a fight get to that point without the PCs using heal well before that. So in effect, they can take more than 125.

Of course, it is still a good idea to do your best to have double the damage output over your opposition... It pretty much guarantees victory.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

Actually, the PCs have more HP than that.

They have at least 25% plus HP than you calculated due to second wind. Add leaders, special powers that allow you to spend healing surge, reduce damage or gain temp hp, and you will find that the PCs are about on par with the monsters.

I'm not sure I agree with on par though clearly they have the potential to have much more than I've suggested. First many a pc has hit the deck without taking a second wind. Additionally there's a the possibility the healer will be stunned, downed, killed, dazed etc. Additionally some of the healing comes from dailies or daily use items so the party won't always have that in every encounter.

There's also the possibility that a party will not have a leader. Though I feel it's a terrible choice and unless your DM designs encounters specifically to your strengths you'll eventually get killed. I participated in a thread on another site where some people projected that an optimum build for a party would be something along the lines of all elves, 3 rangers, 2 wizards, high stealth, high perception, get lots of surprise, kill before things get in range, move 7 as a party so that retreating was easier to maintain separation etc. I argued pretty hard that any party without a leader was pretty fragile and much more likely to run into a tpk situation, I was semi flamed into just giving up on the thread.

I know you have acknowledged the possibility of getting healed in your OP but you can't then pretend that the PCs will have lost by the time they take 125 HP worth of damage. I don't think you will ever see a fight get to that point without the PCs using heal well before that. So in effect, they can take more than 125.

Of course, it is still a good idea to do your best to have double the damage output over your opposition... It pretty much guarantees victory.

It's definitely not as simple as I've suggested and I agree the pc's won't be dead at 125 HP's because they'll act to stop that from happening. Monsters also have some healing in some cases though pc's far outshine the monsters in that regard. The orcs in the OP for example have about 70hp's worth of healing as well.

My point here being how much is healing worth in comparison to damage, I admit the PC's have more hit points than I presented in the simple example but my point is still healing is MORE powerful than damage.

It's probably over simplified to say 200% value for pc hit points as to monster hit points but I think I can make a very strong case for somewhere in the middle.

I don't think it's as simple as you're making out.

I don't think there's a magic number you can apply to say this is better than that.

In general you'll be facing things that have more hit points than the pcs do, but I don't think that makes (for example) healing more important than damage because if you take out enemies faster they have less chances to heal you.

If you kill a monster in 2 rounds compared to 4 then you take half the damage from it (generally).

But you're assuming you'll kill the monster twice as fast. Why? Clerics can apply healing without fail (no to hit roll) as a minor. This also increases the value of healing, basically making it a "second attack" in a round for a character. Healing is flexible as well. It can be applied to the person with the most damage which makes getting pc's down much harder than getting monsters down. If every pc had 200% of hit points but there was no healing at all would parties be as tough? I don't think so.

In terms of minions don't forget that area affects tend to wipe them out.

sort of irrelevant. area affects would still damage non minions as well. If you're targeting an area with minions in it you're potentially not targeting another area that has more normal creatures so the overkill or blow-through is still valid. minions also all effectively have the feat evasion. if you miss and would have done half damage they're not hurt all. more wasted damage.

 

[Alisair Longreach]

If you include the Second Wind then PCs and monsters are mostly even in hit points when leveling up. The real imbalance is between monster hit points and the PCs damage output. Monsters gain 8 hit points on average per level but PC damage only increase with ability score increases and better magic weapons.

This means that at level 1 it takes 3 or 4 hits to kill a monster or a PC but at level 10 it takes 8 to 10 hits to kill it. Which means combat takes more time to resolve.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, there are more factors involved. In order to do a complete battle analysis you would have to consider both the damage taking and damage dealing capabilities of each force OVER TIME. You will quickly find out there is actually no 'set' ratio of value you can put on healing vs damage dealing.

Just as a general observation: if the monsters are small in number and have lots of hit points, then healing becomes more of a premium because damage done to the monsters will have little immediate impact on their ability to do damage in return. Thus if you are say taking on a solo monster then healing is generally going to be at its maximum premium since the monster will still be dishing it out until the last round of the fight.

At the other extreme waves of low level monsters attacking the party will maximize the overall ability to do damage since each monster that is wiped out is one less monster that can hit back. Overkill DOES work against that to some extent and as you observed minions are the extreme example. What that tells me is that it is more valuable to have a lower damage and higher hit percentage attack which does more DPR on average. That attack will suffer less 'overkill penalty' and the most precious of all are those attacks which can hit multiple opponents. This is why wizards are so incredibly effective against large numbers of opponents.

Defensive strengths will obviously also factor into the equation, but defense can essentially be modeled like extra hit points, considering only basic damage and not other effects anyway. Which of course brings us to the next part of the question, which is how good are all these stuns and dazes and etc?

Obviously there is a good deal of tactical variation when it comes to effects, but in essence they are going to factor in like extra hit points for your side. If a monster cannot attack, then it cannot hit, and that will reduce its DPR. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense to trade hit points or healing for the ability to put a useful condition on a monster. Again this is subject in essence to the 'overkill tax', it is pretty much valueless to stun a minion in terms of overall enemy effectiveness.

I would also like to point out that the 'test' point is a factor. Overall it is not too important from a campaign character survival perspective to talk about individual encounters. Which is more dangerous, a monster that does a guaranteed 5 points per round to your 1st level party, or one that hits 5% of the time and does 45 points per hit? Obviously the latter monster is more of an actual threat to the party overall. It can on average kill off a PC in a single blow, even though on average it does less damage. It may well be that this high damage monster is less of a threat in a given ENCOUNTER, but a party which constantly faces this sort of brute monster will eventually run out of luck and perish, whereas the party facing mostly the low damage monster type is likely to dish out more overall than it takes and since they know exactly what they're being hit by every round they should be able to easily guage their success or failure right from the start. This is one advantage of minions and other weak damage monsters, they offer a fairly predictable battle outcome.

One can also draw various conclusions about tactics from all of this. Overall a party will have greater chances of long term success when they adopt tactics which minimize the monsters ability to dish out lots of damage in big chunks, thus making it more predictable. Bottlenecking monsters in a corridor for instance is overall smarter than rushing into rooms and taking them all on at once because in that case a lucky group of monsters could simply crush the party. One monster attacking at a time can get just as lucky overall, but the party has a lot more control of that situation (and a lot more easy access to its healing powers).

The ironic thing about leaders, especially the warlord which does a lot of 'party control' style stuff is that they are at their most effective when the party overall is at its LEAST effective. One might almost say having a warlord in the group is a band-aide for the healing bad party tactics. Thus in terms of building an 'optimum' overall party I would say that for a group with good tactics and designing their party for maximum damage and survivability potential they would be better off skipping the warlord. They might even be better off skipping ANY leaders, but that will really be pretty dependent on the nature of the encounters they are going to have.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

Yeah, there are more factors involved. In order to do a complete battle analysis you would have to consider both the damage taking and damage dealing capabilities of each force OVER TIME. You will quickly find out there is actually no 'set' ratio of value you can put on healing vs damage dealing.

Just as a general observation: if the monsters are small in number and have lots of hit points, then healing becomes more of a premium because damage done to the monsters will have little immediate impact on their ability to do damage in return. Thus if you are say taking on a solo monster then healing is generally going to be at its maximum premium since the monster will still be dishing it out until the last round of the fight.

At the other extreme waves of low level monsters attacking the party will maximize the overall ability to do damage since each monster that is wiped out is one less monster that can hit back. Overkill DOES work against that to some extent and as you observed minions are the extreme example. What that tells me is that it is more valuable to have a lower damage and higher hit percentage attack which does more DPR on average. That attack will suffer less 'overkill penalty' and the most precious of all are those attacks which can hit multiple opponents. This is why wizards are so incredibly effective against large numbers of opponents.

Defensive strengths will obviously also factor into the equation, but defense can essentially be modeled like extra hit points, considering only basic damage and not other effects anyway. Which of course brings us to the next part of the question, which is how good are all these stuns and dazes and etc?

Obviously there is a good deal of tactical variation when it comes to effects, but in essence they are going to factor in like extra hit points for your side. If a monster cannot attack, then it cannot hit, and that will reduce its DPR. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense to trade hit points or healing for the ability to put a useful condition on a monster. Again this is subject in essence to the 'overkill tax', it is pretty much valueless to stun a minion in terms of overall enemy effectiveness.

I would also like to point out that the 'test' point is a factor. Overall it is not too important from a campaign character survival perspective to talk about individual encounters. Which is more dangerous, a monster that does a guaranteed 5 points per round to your 1st level party, or one that hits 5% of the time and does 45 points per hit? Obviously the latter monster is more of an actual threat to the party overall. It can on average kill off a PC in a single blow, even though on average it does less damage. It may well be that this high damage monster is less of a threat in a given ENCOUNTER, but a party which constantly faces this sort of brute monster will eventually run out of luck and perish, whereas the party facing mostly the low damage monster type is likely to dish out more overall than it takes and since they know exactly what they're being hit by every round they should be able to easily guage their success or failure right from the start. This is one advantage of minions and other weak damage monsters, they offer a fairly predictable battle outcome.

One can also draw various conclusions about tactics from all of this. Overall a party will have greater chances of long term success when they adopt tactics which minimize the monsters ability to dish out lots of damage in big chunks, thus making it more predictable. Bottlenecking monsters in a corridor for instance is overall smarter than rushing into rooms and taking them all on at once because in that case a lucky group of monsters could simply crush the party. One monster attacking at a time can get just as lucky overall, but the party has a lot more control of that situation (and a lot more easy access to its healing powers).

The ironic thing about leaders, especially the warlord which does a lot of 'party control' style stuff is that they are at their most effective when the party overall is at its LEAST effective. One might almost say having a warlord in the group is a band-aide for the healing bad party tactics. Thus in terms of building an 'optimum' overall party I would say that for a group with good tactics and designing their party for maximum damage and survivability potential they would be better off skipping the warlord. They might even be better off skipping ANY leaders, but that will really be pretty dependent on the nature of the encounters they are going to have.

really insightful stuff, I agree that wizards are extremely powerful in large encounters, usually outperforming the strikers in raw damage delivered though being hampered by the inability to deal it out in massive chunks to one creature. I also agree that tactics are critical for party success and minimizing the number of attackers via bottlenecking or any other means of controlling the number of attacks and actions the bad guys take is all tantamount to success in 4e.

I strongly disagree about not needing a leader. First the ability to heal a character (and this character changes from encounter to encounter) that is in trouble gives a kind of flexible pool of hit points to the party that is not duplicable without a cleric/warlord/insert phb version here. Warlords are good and clerics are better in my experience. Radiant damage being a plus and access to more healing as well as easier access to bonus saving throws being the two primary reasons I like clerics better. They can also put out a fair amount of damage on their own with the right powers. Nothing offsets stun/daze/immobilize so well as sacred flame. Wolf pack tactics certainly has it's appeal but lance of faith and sacred flame as a combo of at-wills are better than any other class at wills with the exception of maybe wizard. temp hit points, bonus saves, or a power bonus to attack and all the while targeting reflex instead of fort or ac which on a lot of monsters are pretty high.

Adventuring without a leader is asking to be killed. Anyone who has ever faced ghouls will attest to the massive benefits of clerics.

3 ghouls vs 4 pcs at level 2. 600 exp level 3 encounter which is n+1 so not particularly dangerous. Take a rogue, fighter, wizard and add any 4th pc and try and play this out. If that 4th pc is not a cleric the party dies more than half the time in most instances. Add a 4th ghoul (n+3 encounter) and even with the cleric it's about 50/50 TPK I'm guessing, probably a 95% TPK without a cleric. Really comes down to some dailies hitting and the wizard having sphere and NEVER becoming stunned.

 

[keterys]

A lot of it depends on how effective the characters are - I just played a session (each) with two different groups in which no combat healing was done. In one, the leader didn't show up that session and we went on to just kill everything just fine - no 'Hard' fights though (so I suggested the DM consider upping the difficulty some). In the other, we had the healing and did two encounters that were in theory hard enough, but we had two leaders, buckets of healing, and the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary... and ends up it wasn't. Sure, people took damage, but no one fell down with good tactics and focus fire.

So... healing is only useful when needed. Damage is always useful.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, that's been my experience too. Healing is pretty handy, but it is really mostly a way to make up for bad luck or bad tactics. I think overall I would vote for having a cleric in most parties just because you'll run into those situations where you misjudge things or just plain MUST retreat, at which point you're probably going to need to keep the weaker party members going if they're getting out.

Of course my original analysis didn't factor in things like 'clerics have attacks that do mass extra damage to most undead'. Those are factors that will always skew things in particular situations. Likewise if you have artillery monsters that melee characters cannot get at due to terrain then you will really need range damage strikers, etc.

Tactically though a few observations can be made. Ranged attackers are generally going to be more flexible than melee attackers. You can always take a bow shot at someone at point blank, you cannot hit some monster that stays at range with a melee attack. Again you obviously cannot take that to an extreme due to OAs, but a party with 3 ranged strikers/wizards has some amazing flexibility in terms of how they can attack. Combine them with 2 defenders and you have a pretty strong combo.

Of course none of this is telling us that such a party is the 'best' in overall terms. It is more fun to have more variety and other types of characters are obviously going to be quite handy in non-combat situations (rogues especially). Still, I think the 'you need to fill all roles' paradigm is a bit oversold, especially at higher levels.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

A lot of it depends on how effective the characters are - I just played a session (each) with two different groups in which no combat healing was done. In one, the leader didn't show up that session and we went on to just kill everything just fine - no 'Hard' fights though (so I suggested the DM consider upping the difficulty some). In the other, we had the healing and did two encounters that were in theory hard enough, but we had two leaders, buckets of healing, and the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary... and ends up it wasn't. Sure, people took damage, but no one fell down with good tactics and focus fire.

So... healing is only useful when needed. Damage is always useful.

I need examples of the encounters to speak rationally about them. More importantly if you're trying to make a point that healing isn't that important, you'll definitely have to back that up with credible examples. Your examples are also kind of poor from the stand point that an encounter where no pc is in danger of being dropped is really not an encounter worth measuring. This kind of encounter is only good for "giving away exp" i.e. the game is more a narrative than a game since your pc's are in no danger. The other use for a minimal encounter is in tying plot hooks in to the story. Beyond that it's sort of an exercise in rolling.

Focus fire is a very viable tactic in 4e. Almost required. That said I'm unsure if you're offering this as a counterpoint to my point about clerics. I can prove mathematically that focus fire alone won't save you in the ghoul example. It won't save you in many examples. Focus fire also works both ways. If you don't kill the ghouls before they attack and the ghouls pair up two each on two pc's the odds of at least one pc being stunned is above 50%. The other is ~75% likely to be immobilized. Put three ghouls on one pc and that pc might be dead. Put all 4 ghouls on one pc with less than 22 AC and he likely is down.

I play in a campaign where we (the dm and players) enjoy the danger level to be high. As such our standard encounter is n+2 and our tough encounters are n+3 or 4 usually. Last week we had an n+2 that was pretty brutal. Hindering terrain, 4 level 5 pc's vs 2 gricks and a grell. grell is a soldier with stun and flying which was tough to handle with the pc's in difficult terrain. The grell can easily hit most pc's as it has an attack +12 vs fort and can immediately follow this up with a powerful minor that both stuns and does damage.

Saying damage is always useful and healing is only useful when it's needed is kind of ridiculous when based upon bland anecdotal evidence of encounters that have no real impact on the game. Even then the healing words would have saved a couple surges after the battle before the short rest. i.e. a 3rd level rogue with 17 dmg will probably be close to 100% with a couple surges or a single surge and healing word.