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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MasterGarrow05" data-source="post: 4632873" data-attributes="member: 57481">Wow, great responses, thanks. I would really like to minimize the amount of changes my players have to make to their PCs, so although I like the idea of having everything deal double damage to a bloodied opponent, I don't like reducing my PCs' hit points. I think I'll use that double damage against bloodied thing in a special environment though, like your arena or in an evil temple. And I really applaud the amount of work done on the -80% monster hp and +1/2 level monster damage suggestion. I started going through my next adventure and making changes, but I realized how much work I was doing figuring out on what attacks to apply the bonus damage, and it was difficult. Not only that, but on some of your examples and my tests, it either looked like too little of a damage boost or way too much at times. I was wracking my brain at how to simplify the system to make it less time-consuming (4th edition has spoiled me in how little time it takes to create good adventures and combats) and to make it less swingy. I think I wil take your advice on Minion damage however, as minions have so many problems at being effective at higher levels. I mentioned in my original post that I already was taking a lot of advice from the boards on reducing game time. One of the things I did last adventure was to just average out the monster damage (round down)--one number for regular hits, another for critical hits. It worked absolute wonders, I loved it, and it was great, but not enough by itself. So related to that, I liked the static maximum damage idea quite a bit. It is as simple and elegant as could be, and I imagine it would be very effective in speeding up combat (more than twice as fast, I bet). My first concern is that it seems like it would cut combat length TOO much. Great on paper, but then I'm thinking it would cut down on the PCs' ability to use all of their encounters in an encounter, and could also spell doom for the PCs very quickly. A massive hit by a brute to a wizard could put the wizard on death's door FAST. Likewise my fancy non-elite NPCs who I want to ham up in combat might not have the chance to utter so much as a villainous taunt. My second concern is what to do with critical hits. With PCs, it's easy enough to just add the maximum bonus afforded by their implement or weapon, or any feats, etc. Most monsters don't have extra dice damage on critical hits though, so it is a question what to do when a monster crits. My third and final concern, and it is unfortunately probably the nail in the coffin for my group, is that without rolling damage dice, I think many of my player's would feel it "wasn't D&D." While I as DM don't give a hoot about rolling a handful of dice and adding everytime my monsters hit, the players would most likely think differently. Still, this is an extremely good idea, and if my players would go for it, I'd try it out for a while to see if it makes combat TOO short or not. Before I saw the maximized damage idea, I tooled around with another idea: monsters have 75% hit points (rounded down), and all monster attacks deal 33% more damage (rounded down). I suck at math, and it took way too long to figure out that 25% more damage and 50% more damage were not mathematically correct. Basically, my logic is that monsters are going to be around for only 3/4 of the time they were around before, so "altered" monsters have to be able to do the same damage in 3 round as their "unaltered" counterparts did in 4 rounds. 33% works. I round down on the damage, but when I tested out the math, I found that if an attack does ongoing damage or extra damage (like extra fire damage) on top of the base damage, the rounding down started to be significant, I ended up rounding down on the principal damage, and rounding up on any "extras." I know this doesn't factor in every consideration, but I thought it was very simple--especially given that I'm already averaging monster damage--and should keep combats going long enough but not too long. So next adventure I think I am going to try my -25% monster hit point / +33% monster damage houserule. If the consensus is that it doesn't work, I will approach my players about the static maximum damage fix. It will be in two weeks that we play again, but afterwards I will try to post my thoughts on how it turned out in practice. Both my houserule and the suggestions of others on this post might be very helpful to other DMs though, so if anyone has any other ideas or experiences to share along these lines, I would be eager to see it. Thanks again for the responses.</blockquote>

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