I’m just starting to DM, do you disclose how much HP creatures have to your players? Just did a combat sim with my guys last week to see if we understood the combat system and that probably affected how they played.
A common way to get around explicitly giving the HP of a monster and telling them nothing is the "They look… " rule. When they ask how many HP the baddie has left, tell them “They look injured, but not enough to hinder them” or “they look bloody and totally messed up” etc. As a rule of thumb, you can decide their health into quarters and come up with a common phrase for each, or come up with them on the fly depending on the situation: “Grog’s hammer has left some of its ribs broken, but it looks healthy enough to keep fighting for a while.”
Huh, interesting. Thanks! How do you keep track of health? I was using Owlbear’s character text window but, well, I think I’ll adopt that system you mentioned.
Pen and paper for the real number, use descriptions with the players. I even modified how fast the enemies would walk/run and how hard they hit based on how rough of a shape they were in…
I haven’t really touched Owlbear before, but I booted it up and had a play. It has a reputation for being “very lightweight” and boy, it lives up to that. This is great if you don’t want a lot of complicated options - but I don’t see a way in it to “secretly” track a token’s health.
I made this goblin as the GM and the “player” can see the character notes, I don’t really see a way to turn it off (maybe there’s an extension for it.) - If I were running on this, I’d use pen and paper to track health.
If all you need is a quick visualisation to move tokens around, Owlbear is pretty good for that, it’s quick and lightweight and easy to use.
If you’re looking for something with a little more oomph that’s also free, “Roll20” is a very popular free app for running DnD games, it has quite a lot of good tools, can handle full character sheets, and it’s compatable with Beyond20 (Beyond20 is an extension for DnD Beyond that lets you roll dice out of the DnD beyond website into an open vtt.)
If you’re looking for something with a lot of power and flexibility behind it “Foundryvtt” is a system that does everything Roll20 does, usually better, but sometimes a little clunkier (for me, it’s often a bit laggy, and the drawing tools suck - even the “good” modules) - Foundry is really for power users, as you can run independent servers, code your own modules, or install all sorts of mods from the library of modules other people have coded.
If you’re looking to spend a huge number of hours building incredibly pretty 3d environments for your players to explore, “talespire” is available, and seems to be pretty comprehensive… but… oh boy it’s a lot
This is an excellent suggestion that I completely forgot to mention, simply because I don’t use it myself. (Online, I use Foundry and keep the total secret, in meatspace I use pen and paper behind a screen.)
Many tables really like this approach, because nobody needs to remember anything and everyone has the info to hand. If you have forgetful players, or players who don’t pay attention 100% of the time, or if you need to put your information tracking in a public space (e.g. because you run on owlbear, or play on a small table with no DM screen) this lets you track monster HP while not writing down anything the players don’t know.
DM’s: Definitely consider this approach if your players are constantly asking you questions like “how much damage did this ogre take again?” or “which of those two minotaurs has taken the most damage?” - it can really help you out.
Yup. This covers “forgetful players”, but it also helps me: a DM with ADHD that can get very lost in “meatspace” (“which of these four monsters that look exactly the same took 40 damage, again?” or “I am sure I had that monster token here somewhere…”)
So I make tokens with pictures for the creatures on the top and space on the bottom to scribble the damage with dry-erase marker. Really helps.
Also: adding up is much faster than subtracting damage
Really recommend that method for anybody that wants to try and speed up combat
Thanks for the info! I had seen those before. This is the second time we try to get into dnd (it’d be our first game), and I tried to use Roll20 before. It was a little overwhelming, between not knowing the first thing about dnd and a poor UI (to me). We chose owlbear because of its simplicity, if my guys don’t feel like dnd is for them, we didn’t spend too much time or any money on software.
Next campaign though, I’d like to try roll20. If I end up rolling lowest and get stuck with DMing again.
I think owl ear would be good for a first campaign for sure- a feature-rich cry has a lot to learn, and that’s a lot to do when also learning the game.
Oh man… I’ve DMed once and only once. I fudged a LOT of stuff in the spirit of making the game as fun as possible for my friends. All of the bad never played DnD before. I used only Excel spreadsheets for combat. I tracked health secretly and would sometime allow something weaker to die in one hit if a char rolled high and really excitedly said their damage number. I tried to be as descriptive as POSSIBLE about what their sword/mace/arrow did to the inside of the gobbo’s guts/skull.
We played verrrrry loose with rules. I wanted to run full TotM. My partner was the cartographer… they did STELLAR, and told me I described stuff really well.
It was some of the most fun I’ve had. I spent like 60 hours prepping the campaign, and let them know it’ll be kinda railroad-y at first. They made a decision to go off course near the beginning and I made up some convenient reason they couldn’t… then I began writing the next part of the story because one char was VERY intent on going that way. I just needed some time to figure it out cuz I’m new.
It was wonderful. The last thing that happened in our campaign was our friend accidentally killing our other friend with some bad rolls (we agreed critical misses should have consequences cuz it’s funny)
…before we could play again, the friend who was downed died in real life. I love you, ******.
Usually not until they’re below half or unless a player asks, I never give them the actual numbers though as I feel that would detract from the experience.
For me the players having a fun experienceb and building a character’s story is more important than explicitly wargaming
4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP, this represented that one of the attacks on them has been a telling enough blow that they’re showing signs of injury. I brought this with me to 5e, because it’s a useful contextualizer for players to get a feel for how well they’re doing.
One advantage of this system (especially for new DMs) is that if you massively overspec an encounter and the players are in trouble, you have some time to realize it’s going badly, and can drop the monster’s HP pool a little to compensate.
One advantage of this system (especially for experienced groups) is that if the party are doing badly, and haven’t realized it - the moment you say “right, the enemy is bloodied” they realize that they’ve “only” done half the dragon’s HP, and are reminded that retreat is an option they can take. Remember that if the whole party decides to retreat, it can be good to drop out of combat, and make the attempted retreat a skill-based challenge, rather than trying to run the retreat on the combat grid. 5e makes it very very difficult for creatures to “outrun” other creatures that are trying to kill them, and the combat system doesn’t handle retreating well.
If you want a mechanic for it, ask the player who wants to know to make a medicine check - this can add value to the medicine skill (which doesn’t see a lot of play):
If they beat 10, you give them a very rough idea, like “they’ve been hit a couple of times but they look like they’re going strong”
If they beat 15, give them a loose fraction to the closest 1/4 or so “they’ve lost about 1/4 of their HP” etc
If they beat 20, give them a number to the nearest 5 or 10 (depending on if you’re low or high level.)
Increase these DCs by 5 if the monster is something that they’d be unfamiliar with the biology of - how easy is it to tell how hurt an air elemental is? not very.
An important thing to always remember is, every table is different, if one thing works for your group - do that, don’t think that you have to follow any piece of advice just because it came from someone who sounded authoritative, or gave you a lot of numbers.
This is all extremely useful info, thanks! I want to implement something like this, because I feel like it would help my guys roleplay. It’s the first time we ever do ttrpg, and I’d like to give them every help I can get.
4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP
This is in 5e, below half health an enemy or NPC is described as showing injury, below 25% is described as seriously injured, and below 10% is described as near death.
I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.
The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don’t fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of “your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay” gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. “Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)”
Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.
A common trope is “I don’t want my PC to die!”. Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles “concede” and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.
Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don’t need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for “if you really want to succeed but luck isn’t on your side, here’s what you can pay to succeed”
Youre right. Its not like death was part of the mechanics from the start, they also could be ignored.
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
I say all that, but I love death. I WANT my PC to die if he dies. Thats how you get thrills. Suspense. Tension. Playing with cheats on is fun, but gets boring fast.
Played a control/support wizard for almost two years. Died to a power word kill and BBG used his soul as a bargaining chip. Party was too full of themselves and newer players, they called his bluff, my wizard was perma dead. The rest of the session was them as players and characters coming to terms with his death. It was god damn beautiful and one of my favorite memories in gaming.
Please DMs, kill your players. For the character development.
I read the second paragraph first and interpreted it as “kill the person playing the character and make someone else play them so that the character will have a different personality.”
I’ve also seen players devastated by character death. The correct advice is to check in with your players about what they want to do with possible character death. Don’t just spring it on players who don’t want it.
I had two player characters foolishly break into a vampire wizard’s office to try to steal something. It was a series of incredibly foolish decisions, starting with “let’s split the party”, and it escalated to violence. When it was looking especially grim, I asked them if they would be okay with character death. They said yes. The two characters died.
The in-game funeral for them was fantastic. Real tears. But the important thing is they consented to this. If they had wanted these characters to live, it would’ve been a dick move to be like “nah they dead”. There’s no reason to make the players real-life extra upset. I don’t have the hubris to think I know better what kind of story they want.
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
Depends on character level, setting, game tone. Not a universal solution to a universal problem.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
Not every game lends itself well to an unexpected sidequest. Also what is the dead PC’s owner to do in the interim? This introduces a lot of questions and is also not a universal solution.
Did you read how defeat works in Fate? You can have death.
In a conflict, before a roll is made, you can Concede. This is a Player action, not a character action. It means that you give up the conflict, but you get a say in what happens. You don’t get whatever you were fighting over, but so long as the group agrees it’s reasonable you can get something like “taken prisoner” or “left for dead.” You also get a Fate point, which is nice. (D&D also has an extremely lackluster meta currency system, but that’s a separate discussion). Note that it’s not the DM just deciding what happens to you. That’s for getting Taken Out.
If you instead let the roll happen, and you take more stress (damage) than you can hold, you instead get Taken Out. When that happens, you have no say. Barring normal social contract stuff, whoever was coming at you has free rein to just be like “And the spell explodes your head.”
This is in the rules. To me that’s much better than D&D’s wishy-washy “maybe the DM will do this or that” standard. I don’t want to hash this out at every single table I join from first principles.
D&D kind of sucks because it leaves a lot of important things up to the DM, so you get wildly different experiences depending on whatever half-baked whims this table has. And you have to have these conversations over and over again. And some people never will know there’s other ways things could be, and leave the hobby or just be unhappy.
Some people might say “leaving more up to the DM is better” but that’s wrong. Clearly going maximum calvinball “whatever the DM says in this moment” is not the platonic ideal of a game. At least not for me or anyone I know. Some rules are important. D&D is missing some important ones. And has too many rules in other places.
No system is perfect, has every rules and isn’t relying on the master to some degree. But then, if you dont like death as being part of the game, why play dnd at all then ?
It would be like not liking horror and picking CoC.
If you want your PC to always survive no matter what, either play a system with it in the rules or make a deal with the DM. But blasting dnd because its not part of the core rules (besides all the ways to bring a PC back from the dead that are already there) isnt fair.
This is aggravated by DND being mega popular. Many people who would enjoy some other kind of games don’t get to play them . Or don’t even know there are options. Or the alternatives they find are close relatives of dnd that don’t change much of the fundamentals.
Many new players may not even know that you can have a “hey I don’t want my character to die unless I consent in that scene” conversation. If that was in the rules, they would likely know!
But DND simply doesn’t address this. At least not in the phb. It’s very cut and dry “if you drop to 0 hit points and fail your saves, you die.”
That’s a very specific style of play that’s not appropriate for the most popular game.
It’s fine so long as everyone’s on board with PC death, but this is just an example of D&D struggling to hold onto a giant audience with conflicting views. If they get rid of death, the people who actually play D&D the way it’s meant to be played get pissed off. If they don’t, the more narrative-focused players (who really shouldn’t be playing D&D in the first place) will get pissed off. So they just ignore it.
In video game design there is the MDA framework. Where mechanics (rules) create dynamics (gameplay flow) that express aesthetics (genre and emotional expression). Thus in d&d the rules change the actions players take and these actions determine the tone and feel of the game. This is why Silvery Barbs is miserable, the dynamic it creates diminishes the roleplaying aesthetic by breaking suspension of disbelief.
When looking at 5e the fact most players don’t just homebrew a few rules, but gut large mechanics (light, encumbrance, gold, travel) of the game. This has completed removed WotC’s control of D&D’s dynamics. This breaks the aesthetics of the system. 5e in it’s current state is not a heroic fantasy game, but everyone thinks it is. Which is why so many tables fail and new DMs burn out.
Rules don’t have to fail to fudge dice. You do it to curate the experience - the dice give us the illlusion of fairness but that’s about it. Just because we expect them to roll somewhere in the averages doesn’t mean a common bandit won’t roll four crits in a single encounter or one of your playera won’t have a session where they cannot roll above 6.
This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.
And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.
I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.
There is a wide range in how RPGs can be played. For TSR era D&D there it has a lot of in built mechanical flexibility. White Wolf games like WoD or Exalted adds a layer of dramatic flexibility at the expense of in-built heroics, which works well for a dark modern setting.
I really like a lot of games for different reasons. WW games, particularly Wraith, are some of the more interesting to run. Due to the higher reliance on player creativity and inter-character interactions. I really enjoy Wraith’s shadow system for creating interactions between players for character flaws.
Paranoia is perhaps one of the most interesting GM experiences because it encourages so many deviations from standard gamemastering; railroading, PvP, splitting the party, killing PCs, … . Still it works so well.
On the one hand, games should enable you to tell the story you want to tell. If you’re fighting against the games rules and contents to make your story work, changing a rule, or even the system you’re using, is the right call.
On the other hand, we’ve all seen stories where the established rules of the world break for a moment to let the protagonist win a fight they’d obviously lose. It’s always a low point in the story, unless the story is just bad. The audience starts to feel like there are no stakes because physics will just bend to help the hero win.
If the rules of the system already in use would kill a character, then maybe the story is one where that character dies. It’s not the one you planned, but it’s the one that’s happening.
One way to think of this is that the players and the GM are all trying to tell a story together, and dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the stories they’re trying to tell. Or if you prefer, conflicts between their stories and a world that has other ideas.
Normally the player wants something to happen, and the GM calls for a a die roll, the GM is represents the world opposing that event… and that’s one of the many roles they fulfill at the table. However if the GM and the players all agree that the story should go the same way, you don’t need to roll a die at all. That means if the player thinks they made a persuasive argument, and the GM believes the NPC should be convinced by it, then the GM doesn’t have to say “roll persuasion” they can just say “yes that works”
Perhaps a better example - you don’t always need to make a player roll to find traps when they’re looking, especially if their score is much higher than the DC - you can just say “while investigating, you find this trap”. Maybe your story is more interesting because the trap is ingenious and needs something clever to disarm it, maybe it can’t be disarmed, and triggering it is a choice they have to make or go another way. Maybe the existence of the trap is only there to provide context or detail to the group, and it’s not intended to be a threat.
This goes for attacks too. Almost all of the time, the players will have less fun if they know the world is pulling its punches, because they’ll know there’s no risk and they’ll always win - it’s not fun or satisfying to beat a challenge that was rigged in your favour after all.
But… if the GM knows for sure that everyone will be miserable if (x character) dies, and they think it will make the game or the story worse, they can just roll a die behind the screen and not look at it, then say “oh it missed” just… don’t do it every time.
The whole fun of D&D is that nobody knows what the story will be until it plays out. Players don’t know what the DM has planned, and the DM doesn’t know how the players will react. And neither of them know what the dice will say.
On the one hand (again), I agree that you don’t always need to roll. A 29 passive perception will let you see everything from traps to shat pants, and I’ll just skip the perception rolls to move things along.
On the other hand, I don’t want to base my decisions on player actions (good arguments) rather than character actions. Sure, it’s a good lie, but you have a -2 to deception rolls. If I ignore that, then the dude with a +12 might as well have not bothered building a character.
On the third hand, I struggle as a DM with not holding back. I’m TOO nice. I don’t want your character to die either. But if the story is going to have weight and your actions have meaning, that means bad things must be possible. If letting a hero live would feel cheap, it may be worth more to let them die. Plus, memorials and funerals are great RP.
I should make it clear, I’m at no point advocating for planning how the story will play out in advance - there’s no point in playing the game if the story is completely pre-planned. Personally I think if you want to tell a completely planned story “writing” is a great outlet for this! I’m saying that, if in the moment, you get the feeling that the fun of the table is at stake, it can be worth a fudge.
For me, the most common “fudge” is if I’m running an official module with a random tables, especially encounter tables. I’ll usually start by rolling on it, but if I see an option near my result that I think makes a better story in the moment, I’ll swap over to it. If there’s a cool thing I want the players to see, I’ll try and make sure they get to see it over yet another encounter with 2 gargoyles at level 12. (I’m thinking of a real 5e module here!)
There’s a bit of a sticking point with the argument “if you ignore the stats, the dude with the +12 might as well have not bothered building a character at all!” - because “if you ignore what the characters say, then the dude who came up with the brilliant argument might as well have not bothered roleplaying.” - It’s the same kind of argument, and I’m not advocating for either in the general sense. I’m saying “play it by ear”. If in the moment you feel that this argument should convince the guard, regardless of the skill of the liar - don’t roll the dice. That doesn’t mean “don’t ever roll the dice” it means that sometimes when you think it fits the story you’re telling and the mood of the players at the table, you should just say “okay yes, that works!” Dice rolling is for when there are multiple credible outcomes to a situation, and you want to pick between them with chance.
Many DM’s instinctively feel that a player who is creative and who concocts a brilliant believable lie should get some sort of “reward” over a player who just says “I’ve got a +15 to deception, so I’m just gonna invent a lie that convinces him we’re innocent” and rolls. Or as another example, if two characters have +5 to deception, and one tells a great lie while the other tells an unbelievable one, people often feel that the good lie should stand a better chance to work - because that’s how it works in stories.
Good roleplay is, of course, always its own reward, but the story feels more immersive if good arguments and good lies “work better” than bad ones in similar circumstances.
If you’re the kind of DM who wants stuff like this to matter, but you don’t want to just give the players a “free win” you can always implement a “situational bonus” to checks - some DMs will say “I’m going to give you +5 to this deception check because that was an excellent lie” - some DMs might say “Convincing the guard of that like is easier than convincing him of this lie, so the DC is lower” and some might say “that’s a really believable lie, so I’m giving you advantage” or “the guard is really inclined to believe this story, so I’m giving him disadvantage on insight” - all of these can let you make sure that good roleplay feels effective in the story. The core books do talk about situational bonuses as something you should consider for checks in general, and they often recommend advantage or disadvantage as the approach. My preferred method is to adjust the DC for a check, or if it’s opposed, provide a small advantage or penalty.
As always, everyone should run their table how they want. I’m just talking options. The “right” answer to a question like this is “whatever your table enjoys most”, and the “wrong” answer is to stick with a style nobody at your table likes (and the books offer several approaches to these problems, so there isn’t a defined “right answer” by the strict reading of the books)
One way to think of this is that the players and the GM are all trying to tell a story together, and dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the stories they’re trying to tell. Or if you prefer, conflicts between their stories and a world that has other ideas.
It really is conflict between players and the GM, usually. A player succeeding every single roll in an encounter represents a total success for the player. A player failing every single roll in an encounter does not typically represent a total success for the GM, because the GM usually wants the player to be able to succeed. It’s much more conflict between the player and world in the vast majority of cases unless either the GM or the player is a shithead and are making the meta-level relationship needlessly adversarial.
That is one perspective that works for some people but I strongly disagree.
Dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the player and DM stories, yes…but they also exist to create new and interesting situations which neither player nor DM would have chosen.
Yes, the dice can create unsatisfying moments and even end characters or entire parties in a way that doesn’t feel great. But for each time they have done so in my experience, they have created far more awesome moments, simply by following the rules. And without allowing the unsatisfying ones, the good ones don’t really happen either, and don’t feel as satisfying.
This example is what I think of as “a world that has other ideas”
The DM (and players) build the world, but when they do so, the world will have elements that push for certain outcomes by themselves. The DM might choose for story A to happen, and the players might choose for story B to happen, but the elements in the world have defined motivations too, and might push for story C to happen. Often story C is the most exciting thing, because nobody is following a script.
A D&D player won the lottery and decided to spend his winnings in an attempt to “bring Jack Chick’s epic 1984 graphic novel / tract to film.” He got the rights from Jack Chick, ran a KickStarter (the lottery winnings were, after all, a mere $1000), and then he partnered with Zombie Orpheus Entertainment. They made a short film based off it and screened it at Gen Con back in 2014: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Dungeons_(film)
Fun fact - it was not a parody. They took themselves seriously the whole time and stayed true to the source material. Worth a watch, IMO.
I’ve been collecting Chick Tracts I find laying around, and my Holy Grail is finding a copy of the one about the satanic game of dungeons and dragons, titled Dark Dungeons. Unfortunately it’s a niche subject and not included in their variety packs, you have to order it specifically, which means unless I find a very specific crank still caught up in the satanic panic there’s a very low chance of ever finding it in the wild
Do whatever you want but the Dungeon Master’s guide encourages DM’s to (sparingly) fudge rolls to avoid your players getting screwed over by bad luck. It’s not against the rules at all.
“Finally, this rule absolutely eliminates the need for anyone, be he player or, so help me gods, GameMaster, to fudge a roll. Fudging, also known as CHEATING has no place in a game that already has a mechanic designed to eliminate freak occurrences.”
I guess you are right, DMs can fudge all they want. GMs keep their honor and don’t roll dice with Satan.
At least he actually turned up for you! He came the first time and it was great, but I’ve been waiting years for him to come again and nothing. I guess he just doesn’t want to hang.
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