D&D 5E Will your monsters roll for damage, or have set damage?

[the Jester]

With the possible exception of creatures of law personified, I will always roll for damage. I simply like rolling damage too much not to.

 

[ren1999]

It depends. I usually have other players roll monster attacks and damage to help me. But if there is no time, I assign static damage.

 

[Uchawi]

I can live with both, but I will have to play with static versus random to know when it should apply and to be fair with the players. I don't think it is something you should continually change session to session. The majority of time I would probably use random, but in the pinch when I need a quick resolution system and a characters life is not on the line, then static damage is fine.

 

[Ruzak]

To my mind the uncertainty in both the to hit and the damage are essential to the abstractions of AC and hit points.

 

[Lanefan]

Roll damage every time.

I often just assign monsters a hit point amount to begin with (if it's not already given by whatever module I'm using) rather than roll, in part because I'm slowly starting to divorce actual h.p. numbers from the HD rating of the monsters - I like the idea of a 4 HD monster being able to have 50 h.p. without a ridiculous Con. score, for example. The HD rating I'll still use for its saving throws, fighting ability, etc.

Classed characters of all types (PC and NPC) roll their h.p.

Lan-"roll roll roll the dice, gently 'cross the board"-efan

 

[ren1999]

It's all good.
Assign a static average damage.
Assign random damage within the roll range.
Give other players something to do by rolling monster attacks and damages for you against other players.

kira3696.tripod.com

 

[KidSnide]

I roll for damage roughly 80% of the time, but use fixed damage when I'm running a large number of weaker creatures. Sometimes I'll use fixed damage in the first round or two when I have 20 low-level soldiers attacking the PCs, but switch to rolled damage for the same creatures once the PCs have disrupted the soldier formations and started hunting them down in groups of 1-3.

I will say that -- at least for my purposes -- D&DN has the monster damage format backwards. It should start with the dice expression and have the average damage in parenthesis.

-KS

 

[TarionzCousin]

I think there should be a time limit for damage counting. I've gamed with a couple guys who weren't very fast at math. As we were playing epic level 3.5E, there were regularly 20+ dice involved in damage rolls.

We solved it by having two of the "fast math" guys at the table count the damage, but if that hadn't worked, I would have asked a couple of the players to either average their dice rolls or use a phone/tablet app.

So if one of those guys were DM'ing, I would hope he would use the average damage for his monster hits.

That said, I like having the option, but when I DM 5E I will roll. Yes, I'm fast at math.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I will say that -- at least for my purposes -- D&DN has the monster damage format backwards. It should start with the dice expression and have the average damage in parenthesis.

I noticed that too. Makes it harder to read quickly, since I'm used to the pathfinder notation, but overall a pretty minor problem.

 

[Dausuul]

My default will be to roll, but I'll switch to using average damage when there's a large number of "mook" monsters. I liked 4E's approach of having regular monsters roll for damage while minions get a set amount. I don't normally approve of changing monster stats based on when the players encounter them--that was one of the things that bugged me about 4E--but switching between rolled and average damage is a small enough change that I consider it acceptable.

As far as rolled hit points, I vehemently oppose them with all the fiery wrath of Baator. Average hit points are the only hit points in my games.

Agreed. I might vary monster hit points by a small amount if I notice my players counting monster hit points ("okay, these guys have 25 hit points and we've done 23 to this one, so I'm going to use a low-damage area effect instead of a normal attack"). However, my players don't seem inclined to do this, so I probably won't bother. And if I did do it, I still wouldn't roll monster hit points. I'd just swipe a few hit points from Monster #1 and give them to Monster #2.