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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 6107729" data-attributes="member: 17077">I think HP thresholds are a bad mechanic for several reasons.* It forces players to guess what a monster's HPs are (or worse, resort to metagame knowledge). Guessing wrong means the spell is wasted with little or no effect. For example, if I try to cast Power Word Kill on a monster that has more than 50 HP, the spell does absolutely nothing. At least a damaging spell would have reduced its HP and brought the monster closer to death.These spells are binary, they either work or they don't, and the mechanic that decides whether they work or not is not something a player could reasonably be expected to know. Since HP are an abstraction, there really is no way to convey to a player in roleplaying terms how many HP a monster has. There are creatures that have immunities or resistances that make sense in the game world. A player can tell that it is probably unwise to try and trip a gelatinous cube, or that using a fire spell on a fire elemental is futile. But how do you know if something has a certain number of HP? You can't, not unless you cheat. And since the consequence of being wrong means wasting your turn and a daily spell, you often can't afford to be wrong.* Some of these spells use HP thresholds as an excuse not to have a saving throw, despite having a very nasty effect (Power Word Kill, again, being a good example). If you have less than 50 HP and some casts that on you, you're dead. No save. No roll to hit. Nothing. You just lose. These spells are useless if the target has too many HP, and overpowered if they do work. I don't find either extreme to be acceptable.* This mechanic is contrary to the bounded accuracy philosophy. One of the design goals of this edition is that players and monsters don't get large bonuses to stats, attack rolls, saves, AC, etc. just because they're higher level. This gives lower level characters a chance against higher level creatures, but also allows lower level monsters to remain somewhat relevant threats against higher level characters. But there is a stat that does still greatly inflate with level - hit points. And by tying that to these spells, they alone are stuck with the old level paradigm, even though it clashes with the rest of the system. Spells like Charm Person remain just as useful at level 20 as they were at level 1. Spells like Sleep do not.* This mechanic leads to nonsensical player behavior, such as "beat up the shopkeeper so I can charm him!" I know charm person doesn't have a hp threshold anymore, but it used to, and I'm just using it for the sake of example to show how nonsensical this concept is and the equally nonsensical behavior it causes.</blockquote>

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