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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6672427" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!  Well, here's my 2¢...  I think "you" are doing it backwards. Don't increase the HP of the monsters or increase their offensive capabilities. Leave them as-is. What you need to do is decrease the PC's.  Now, seeing as 5e is out and in print, your players may try and fight you tooth and nail against this... after all, you are "taking away their toys", so to speak. For my next campaign, PC HP's will be of the diminishing returns style; the higher level you go, the less HP you gets per level. I haven't decided on the details yet, but I'm thinking "-1 HD Type per 5 levels; after d4, it's a flat +1hp/lvl". So a Fighter (d10) would get d10 up to 5th level, then d8's from level 6 to 10, then d6's for level 11 to 15, then d4's for level 16 to 20. A Wizard would get d6's for level 1 to 5, then d4's for level 6 to 10, then a flat +1hp per level from 11 up to 20. That said, my players PC's (three of the six) just broke the 4th level barrier and have achieved the lofty height of Level 5. Highest anyone has ever gotten since we started playing 5e back with the Starter Set.  Anyway, even at level 4, we have seen that HP's seem to be the end-all and be-all of the system. If you don't have the HP's to last in a fight, you loose, plain and simple. Needless to say, this is not sitting well with us. We'd much rather have a Hackmaster 4e style of HP's.... where you can have a lot of HP's, but with Critical Hits and Penetration Damage, as well as the Follow Through damage, your HP's can quickly dwindle. Kept everyone on their toes and made fights actually seem deadly... even the ones against "walk-over" adversaries had that little twinge of fear. All it takes is a lucky hit from that giant rat, and a kick-ass roll for the crit and BOOM! Your 80hp fighter just lost use of his left foot, is laying on the ground screaming in pain for the next 5 rounds, and about to get nibbled on by the whole pack (which can now hit more easily, and their crits can actually be in the dangerous areas...like neck, head and groin...). What 5e could use is a bit of that "HP's are great, but don't count on them to keep you alive for X number of rounds" type of play.Without integrating some kind of Hackmaster or Rolemaster/HARP style "critical hit system", I think the easiest way is to just reduce the PC's ability to take obscene amounts of damage once they get higher and higher in level.If my HP reduction thing doesn't seem like it's going to pan out, I may very well be forced to trying to import some "critical hit" type of system into the game. On the plus side, 5e is written with just that sort of modularity that it shouldn't be too hard to do! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

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