Targeting System
If you’ve ever held a Cheeto-stained icosahedron, you’ve probably heard some variation of the following: “Which one looks more injured? Do any of them seem to be on their last legs? Do I think I could take one out this round?” Push up your geek glasses and strap in, because we’re in for a metagaming discussion.
Let’s start with the easy half of the equation. When it comes to the GM’s side of screen, a combatant’s behavior is often a subjective question of “what makes sense” within fiction. A dimwitted creature might target the closest enemy, the one that attacked it most recently, or roll randomly to determine its next victim. More intelligent enemies might follow a more refined script, seeking to pick off weaker PCs or (with the benefit of a little pre-combat reconnaissance) counter the party’s go-to tactics. If you’re running a module, you might even get some useful instructions (e.g. the “during combat” entries for this lake troll or this sea hag). In all cases there’s a balance to be struck between characterful behavior, smart tactics, and dramatic appropriateness.
That balance still exists when you’re standing on Fighter’s side of the combat. As all good PCs know, roleplaying doesn’t stop when combat starts, and it’s occasionally cool to go for the sub-optimal play in the name of a fun character moment. But all things being equal, you probably want your character to be an effective combatant. Unlike GMs however, players don’t have perfect information. You might not know your target’s AC, weaknesses and immunities, or its current hit points. That means that, unless you’ve got something like the deathwatch spell active, making the tactically-sound play can be down to guesswork.
This is where the metagaming part of the discussion comes in. Questions like, “Which one looks more injured?” or “Do I think a 21 would’ve hit?” or “Did it react when I pulled out my silver/adamantine/cold iron weapon?” all come into play. And just like that, we’ve entered into a bizarre realm of cat-and-mouse between player and GM. What you can plainly see, what your character might guess, and the details that only a trained eye could pick out are all up for debate. More generous GMs might allow a free Perception or Medicine check to glean “enemy status” information. Others might demand you spend some number of actions actively analyzing the situation. If you’re in a system like 4e D&D, you might rely on mechanics like the bloodied condition to inform your decisions.
And because this is such an expect-table-variation aspect of play, I expect that different groups have developed their own ways of dealing with it. Therefore, in an effort to showcase this oft-overlooked aspect of gaming, what do you say we compare notes in today’s discussion? If you were a GM faced with Fighter’s question, how would you handle it? Does he roll for it? Do you just give him the information? Or is it a mystery that he has no hope of unravelling in the heat of combat? Sound off with your own “status report” mechanics down in the comments!
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You know, that is exactly a question that always comes up in my games and I’m not sure I’ve properly questioned the validity of it before. I tend to reply based on what I think the player can tell at a glance, and often give a “you have no idea” response. Or I restate what the players might know but not have kept track of (“you’ve seen the barbarian whack it ten times with an axe, you decide how injured it is”) or (“the one on your right is the one you’d injured before it moved to flank you”) etc.
You have got me thinking though that I reallg should be more leery of this question, for it does, indeed, verge on thr metagame-y. I quite like the idea of a medicine check to determine when it is not so obvious, would make use of a less utilised skill!
Thanks for the idea…
Cheers! And to be clear, I often give players the same sort of answers: “He’s on his last legs,” is my go-to phrase. But I do think that this is an opportunity to give skills like Profession (soldier) or Medicine a little more oomph by providing more specifics. Roll high enough and maybe you get that “deathwatch” effect for free.
I tend to give players general info on how hurt an opponent is free of charge, as that’s something I feel they could easily see with their own eyes. Plus, it means I can use that info against the players just as easily. This exchange of information is made easier in Roll20 – you can set PCs to be able to see the health bar of your NPCs, without seeing the actual numbers, like current or max HP.
Other info, though, I don’t give away so easily, with one notable exception. I have a house rule that if the players hit an opponent’s AC exactly, they automatically learn that creature’s AC. This house rule isn’t really born out of any in-universe logic or mechanical reason, but simply because I tend to say stuff like “Hit on the nose” when that happens without thinking about it anyway, so rather then trying to stop myself, I just codified it as a rule.
I didn’t realize that about that health bar. My knee-jerk reaction is, “Ugh, how gamey.” But honestly, it’s not so different from “what they could easily see with their own eyes.” It’s just translated into read-at-a-glance terms on the VTT.
Roll20 also has an API for tinting the token based on health percentage, which I liked. Foundry has similar methods. Gives them an idea without showing them a real percentage.
I really need to watch some “advanced Roll20” type videos or something. I’ve done enough to get by but I know I’m underutilizing the software capabilities.
Before asking “which enemy has the most hit points?”, you kind of need to ask “what are hit points, anyway? The answer to the latter question will inform your answer to the former.
If you interpret hit points as mostly being about literal physical damage, then just look at which enemy is bleeding the most, or other physical indicators of damage.
If you take the view that hit points reflect the ability to avoid deadly blows, then an enemy with few hit points remaining is moving more slowly, with less confidence, reacting more sluggishly to incoming threats, and not keeping their guard up properly. “The last time you took a swing at the orc on the right, he only barely avoided catching your blade across his ribs. If you line up one more solid blow against him, you don’t think he has it in him to avoid it.”
No! That way lies philosophy.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1034/roleplaying-games/explaining-hit-points
Our party has two DMs, one for Starfinder, one for Pathfinder, with differing methods. Since we use Roll20, we have access to vvisible HP bars. One of our DMs lets us see the HP bars of allies and enemies, so we always know the approximate amount of health a monster has after a few hits of damage, or how close to death it is. We see our own HP’s purely because playing a healer or keeping ourselves alive would be a cumbersome mess and it skips having to say how much HP we have between us. Since it’s Starfinder, we thus see our stamina and HP, but notably not our resolve points, so we don’t know how much of life-saving resources we have left.
Our other DM, playing Pathfinder, keeps the ally HP visible, but hides the enemy HP. It’s pure guesswork whether we will kill something on the next round, unless we devote time to observing or have deathwatch. Thus, we usually focus fire on one target, or if there’s multiples of the same monster, guess the HP from damage that one of them took.
It’s a good point. Especially when you’re actually forced to interact with death and dying rules, reticence about “my teammates wouldn’t know exactly how many rounds I have left” tends to disappear.
There is the slight oddity with resolve with you being able to ‘count’ your resolve points in regards to special abilities that require resolve.
For example, a Mystic with the healer connection can tell the party how many times they can channel healing outright, which somehow simultaneously determines how many times they can recover stamina and how much mortal peril they’ll be in. Or at the very least, they can inform the party when they’ve hit 0 resolve through the inability to recover stamina and using their special abilities.
Envoys are particular oddities in that they can restore stamina, a mostly intangible HP buffer before actual visible injuries, to allies – meaning they outright HAVE to know someone lost stamina for them to recover it through their class feature.
The football ass-slap of the RPG world.
“Get back in there and give ’em hell!”
Rules-intended way: Roll perception checks, heal checks, sense motive.
Perception to figure out which one looks more hurt from a purely visual standpoint, the sound of its breathing, etc.
Heal to figure out, from a medical standpoint, if it’s near death or more hurt.
Sense motive to figure out from its gesturing and emotions whether it looks scared, questioning its odds of survival, looks desperate, is about to go kamikaze, etc.
How it tends to actually go in most combats, because the above actions take up your turn unless the DM is generous: ‘I attack the one that took more damage so far’. Often because keeping track of damage between rounds is sometimes surprisingly hard.
Other meta-based options include ‘the guy threatening our squishy support’, ‘the guy who doesn’t get to have a turn if it dies right now’, ‘the caster’, ‘whoever I can full attack’.
In your opinion, what kind of action is such a roll?
The PC in me who likes to win combats and be armed with knowledge in fights says free action, like knowledge checks tend to be to identify a monster. But the DM might enforce a move/standard action for it if it requires careful observation? Whatever you use for knowledge, probably apply it to those three, only instead of learning about enemy weaknesses/type/name/lore, you learn their HP bars in some fashion. Maybe you even learn their approximate HP (‘this monster is as tough as you’ / this monster could survive a harm spell easily’).
I know that actions like ‘find the exact location of an invisible enemy with imprecise senses’ are a move action in Starfinder – A Shirren might notice a invisible foe lurking about, but they have to spend a action to find where exactly in their imprecise senses range said foe is located.
Fighter, how can you even ask such a question? The obvious answer on who to finish off is ‘both, because I have cleave, because I’m the godsdamned Fighter’.
He is, quite literally, damned by multiple gods.
Wait, no, that was Fighter #27. Never mind, different guy.
Same guy. Different corporeal form.
Multiple continuities and resurrection are a bitch to track.
I can imagine Fighter, on the day he finally retires the character for good, being faced with a queue line of 100+ petitioners / dead versions of himself, all waiting in line to be judged by the local death deity and sent to their appropriate afterlife (mostly the fiend-filled ones).
https://www.aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Petitioner
I’m sure every iteration of Fighter will eventually manage to piss off at least one god somewhere along the line.
A notable thing to put in mind with this question of HP is ‘how is the DM handling monster HP calculations?’. By RAW, the DM has three actual choices.
1) He rolls the hit dice of every single monster and adds up their constitution modifier (or other relevant stat) to randomly assign their HP value, which works similarly to how PCs gain HP. This makes individual monsters have unique amounts of HP, making the possibility of one goblin being Gharbad the Weak, whilst the other is the BigMcLargeHuge of the tribe. This makes every fight unique, but comes at the cost of making combats have unpredictable difficulty (lengthening/shortening combats or making things more difficult/easier for the PCs from the get-go due to random chance) and being a lot of work for the DM to do, as they have to roll/calculate enemy HP for every single encounter.
2) He looks up the ‘average’ or ‘pre-set’ hp of a monster, as listed in the bestiary. This is simple and easy to do, but also becomes very predictable (especially with multiple copies of the same monster – once you kill one, you know what every other version of it has in HP), and lets players who are already aware of the monster stats have a meta-advantage from the get-go. For certain boss or mook monsters, the DM may also instead choose to use their minimum/maximum HP, or assign ‘minion’ monsters that die instantly to any damage (as is a mechanic in D&D 4e).
3) The improv/ass-pull/fudge method. So long as the PCs don’t have a reasonable way of knowing the enemy HP from the get-go, the DM can add, deduct or modify the monster’s HP on the fly, to allow for more cinematic fights or kills – extending the life of a boss monster that was actually one-shotted by that turn 1 crit, killing a monster that would have TPK’d the party next turn after the paladin’s last-ditch attack, and so on. This method is often mixed with methods 1) and 2).
My strat for group is to do ± 5-15 hp for groups of monsters, adding a ballpark deviation as I populate them in Roll20. It’s behind-the-scenes, so folks in my game tend not to notice.
I usually throw them a rough estimate, and I don’t charge extra actions for the information.
Today, my players were fighting a trio of night hags. The question of how injured they looked was asked when the hags were at 104, 68, and 62 damage respectfully. I told them that the bald hag looked like she was very hurt and would likely fall to one good hit from a magic weapon (they’d figured out at this point that the hags resisted nonmagical weapons), and that the other two were starting to show signs of damage (which is flavour-speak at my table for the bloodied condition, or thereabouts: Halfway down, halfway left to go), and both looked about the same level of damaged.
Is it possible for a character to glean more than the “rough estimate” answer? For example, if they actually wanted to spend an action to make a “get more info check?” And within the fiction, what are they actually doing to earn that extra info that a quick glance at the scene wouldn’t give them?
Did you make a typo here, or was the hag with 104 and 68 really the ones that where roughly about the same level of damage while the one with 62 hit points were just a good hit from going down?
68 and 66 are a lot closer togetter than 68 and 104, both in absolute numbers and to my mind in likely degree of damage.
They say talking is a free action; well, so is keeping an eye on the battle going on around you. Accordingly, my group tend to take the attitude that players have enough situational awareness to know who looks like they’ve taken a beating vs who looks fresh… and also if an enemy is looking healthier than they did a moment ago. Details differ with the GM and the game, but generally we’d distinguish between untouched, scratched, bloodied, and looking-shaky.
That applies to friends and foes alike, of course… we don’t know how many hitpoints our friends have left, but we can certainly tell when they’re in urgent need of medical assistance.
That interesting to me, especially when stuff like “guys, I’ve already failed one death save, heal me now” comes into play.
Admittedly, we’re not always very strict on keeping our own status secret. But the same principal applies… “down and bleeding badly” is a reasonably clear cue that someone is failing their death saves without actually coming out and saying it. Likewise, “looking at death’s door” is a fair hint that they can’t afford to fail any more…
I try to signal how wounded an enemy when they get hit, along with relevant defensive abilities. I won’t out-and-out say “the orc has DR/adamantine,” but I will say “A shudder goes up your arm as his rocky skin absorbs some of the blow.”
Similar principle for hit points. I won’t give specific numbers, but I will try to give a sense of how much more fight something has left in it. And I’ll be a bit less subtle if the players are spending five minutes fretting and planning over a foe that could be taken down with a light breeze.
This has gotten me thinking about what to do if it’s close, though. Thanks for that.
Cheers! These are subtle plays that tend to make a big difference at the table.
I know that I’ll point out when DR / resistance comes into play, conceptualizing it was swinging a cold baseball bat and getting that awful shock in your hands. But do players always have that info? Do you make sure to describe magical defenses as well, so that magic-based PCs might have a hint about that mid-combat dispel? All relevant stuff.
I would expect that most magical defenses are reasonably obvious, because they’re making the target unexpectedly hard to hurt. You may or may not be able to see the spell itself, but if it’s doing its job, it’s having some effect that others can discern.
For example, if they’re using transmutation to armor their skin, people will notice that swords don’t cut them. If they’re magically insubstantial, people will notice that attacks pass straight through with little effect. And if they’re using something like mage armor, people will notice that something is slowing their attacks, allowing the target to evade.
Me too. But I can’t remember the last time I verbally described a deflection bonus as a palpable effect.
I tend to describe it as unexpectedly veering at the last possible moment, making a mortal blow nothing now than a glance.
I don’t think questions like the ones asked in todays commentary actually are metagaming really.
The characters are going to have access to enormous amounts of information about their environment that the Pc’s don’t simply due to living inside of it and getting it through all five of their senses directly instead of by the description of someone else talking.
It’s going to be obvious to them that goblin A has a cut on their upper arm (and where exactly on the arm too since they can see it with their eyes) and is bleeding but that this isn’t slowing their movements down, goblin b has gut wound and is grunting in pain whenever they do something, and goblin C has a few scrapes but is otherwise fine.
And that’s just the stuff they can see, there’s also all the stuff they can hear and the tactile feedback from hitting/being hit on the armor/hide/vulnerable flesh, all sorts of information that it’d simply be impossible to convey through words alone.
They also have all sorts of life experiences that we players simply doesn’t to help them interpret all those sensations. Compare the amount of experience fighting life and death battles with medieval weapons against both creatures and hostile people of the average PC and the average Player.
The Pc will have a lot more knowledge about what it feels like to hit a creature with an axe to judge whether it’s different than normal, say due to this target having DR that isn’t overcome.
For these reasons I generally just give the player the answer to questions like fighters, same way I tell them how many doors they can see in the room.
I am sometimes a bit more vague for things that are hard to judge, so I might say “they are roughly equally wounded” if the foes are even if they haven’t lost the exact same number of hitpoints. (how close counts as “roughly equally wounded” would depend on the target, there’s a lot greater variance for the 100 hit point giants than for the 4 hit point goblins)
I have some specifics on this topic. What bothers me about this question is that if you’re invested in the scene, you should know. If you’re invested in fighting the enemies and helping the party not be torn to bloody bits by ignominious minions, you should at least be paying enough attention to know THAT.
If the enemy is really low, I will share that information in game terms , re: “That one is down to 2HP, somebody breathe on him, please.” Outside of that, I use more qualitative descriptors, like shaky, banged up, having a bad day at work, etc.
From experience IRL, granted with lower stakes, I have an idea of what you can see from the perspective of fighting an opponent, and it’s on that topic I need to say something about metagaming here.
Tactical maps are wonderful. They eliminate so many “questions” about how your dude was TOTALLY in that fireball, now make your save. The other night, I had a player locked in melee combat start trying to give tactical directions to the other players in character when enemies moved up into the line behind him, and I was like EXCUSE ME, you’re 30ft away from them, have two guys in your face, and are facing WHAT direction again?
I wouldn’t mind, but for the most part, I play their enemies a little brain dead. Most of my battles feature hazards, so I tone the enemies down a bit. I’m the GM, it’s not my job to win at DnD.
I let people get away with a lot I feel, but once in a while, someone does something that I’m just like wait, stop, NO.
In D&D 5e, I would just refer to the little green sidebar on page 197 of the Player’s Handbook (unless they have some spell or ability that gives the player additional information), which could be summarized as follows:
If the creature is 1/2 or more hit points, it has no sign of injury.
If the creature is below 1/2 hit points, it has cuts and bruises.
If the creature is at 0, leaving a bleeding wound.
I wouldn’t require a Wisdom (Medicine) check to see the above, but they would have to ask. Otherwise, if a character wants to know which of two creatures looked more injured, I would require a check.
In D&D 4e, I would immediately let players know when a creature is “bloodied”, no need to ask.
In D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, I would require a Heal check to determine the rough health status of a creature (again, unless they had some spell or ability that let them determine a creature’s health otherwise).
Using roll20 can kind of negate this, if you’ve got it set up correctly. (Correctly being a pretty subjective term in this case, now that I think about it.) I generally set up HP bars for all enemy creatures, where the players can see the bar, but not the numbers generating the bar. Our table also has an API script that automatically adds a red dot to a token when its HP bar hits 50%, and a red X when it hits zero. It surrenders a bit of control of information from the GM, but it prevents questions like that, and it makes record keeping in combat much easier.
The DM in the game I am a part plays with a very “loose approximation” type of concept for how much damage we have done to a hostile creature. We basically get one of three basic descriptions: hurt, badly hurt, and near death.
We still do not know “exactly” what these words mean in the specifics, but we can guess.
Obviously when one is near death, it means we can probably take it out in our next hit (tho even that can prove to be incorrect information if our rolls end up really bad or we choose the “wrong spell” or some such to “end it”).
If it is “badly hurt” or similar phrasing, then we are fairly certain it is somewhere plus or minus about half its health, but that can mean a lot of things depending on the creature. An giant might still have a couple hundred HP and technically be “badly hurt”, while a goblin might be both badly hurt AND near death for a party of level 2 or higher…
Hurt is of course just indicating that we have hurt it, but it doesn’t really mean we have done serious damage to it.
As for those times when we say “which ever one looks worse off” (which we have done on multiple occasions), Our DM is nice and just picks that one that has the least HP among the choices.
On the flip side, it took us 30+ sessions to get used to calling our targets, because we would just roll to hit “one of them” and with no active target beyond that, our DM would choose the ones that would spread the damage out and keep the creatures alive for another round… teaching us to pick our targets (which we now do).
I personally like the vague-ness of not knowing “exactly” but having some kind of idea.
I personally like the “bloodied” rule. At half health, I’d expect pretty much anything to show it. A bandit would be breathing in heavy rasps, blood dripping from the fresh cuts, clutching at his kidney that just got blasted by a magic missile. A construct or golem would be losing parts of itself, the magic holding it together starting to fail. A goblin would have a glint of fear and terror in its eyes as it contemplates running for his life. The other thing is, depending on how intense the combat is, I think most PCs would be able to keep track of which enemy has been attacked how many times, or remember if one of their compatriots had landed a heavy blow.
at our table the question is usually „who has been hit already“ or „more often“
or „looks off worse“.
and we have caused enough bloodshed that answers come in the shape of „you are sure that Goblin can‘t take another hit like that“ or „you are surprised that the puny creature can tank a hit like that without problem“ which is GM speak for „that thing is just a few levels behind you with class levels“
I typically just tell them vague descriptions. “Unharmed” means the monster hasn’t been damaged at all, “healthy” means it took a little bit of damage, “slightly wounded” means a fair amount of damage (typically 1/4th of its health missing), “hurt” means half, “very hurt” means 3/4th, “extremely hurt, but still standing” means it’s very low on hp but you still might not be able to finish it, and finally “on its last legs” means you should be able to finish it off with no issues.
I vary the terms depending on what comes to mind at the moment and the monster itself, but that’s the gist of it.
I tend to be pretty open with the players about this sort of thing for two reasons. One, it is one of those things where the PCs have a much better understanding of their situation than the players do, since they can actually see the creature that is in front of them. Two, it is basic, relevant tactical information that helps the players make good decisions to overcome the challenge. Making combat decisions is already a largely mathematical exercise (you are making decisions based on what you know of your and the party’s numbers, after all) with non-roleplay aspects like having more than a few seconds to make decisions and being able to coordinate and plan between teammates, so having a sense of how much more of a beating a foe can take isn’t really upending things. I don’t usually give numbers, though – “this one looks pretty bad, those two are someone hurt and that one you haven’t scratched” seems fine to me, similar to how I describe the presence of damage reduction or fast healing without numbers. (Not giving numbers also reserves for me the power to fudge enemy HP a little if drama calls for it.) I see that as more of an immersion thing than a counter-metagaming thing. It also helps the players feel like they are making progress, rather than just wailing on an unchanging blob until it suddenly falls over.
Occasionally I’ll give numbers in order to share something crazy/amusing that has happened with the players. Like this recent incident:
Me: “Wow. The wight rolled a nat 1 on initiative, and you guys managed to bring it all the way down to 3 HP in one round. Very close, but not quite enough. I will now distribute the negative levels.”
Players: “Ah!”
negative levels distributed
Player: “My turn! I throw a goo tube [ration bar] at it for a humiliation kill!”
Me: “You do… 2 damage. It is still standing.”
Player: “Aw…”
Player 2: “I cast +1 spear.”
So for me, I go with a mixed system. I will give basic information for free, if they are untouched, have taken damage, or are bloodied (though we are in Pathfinder, not 4e). Anything beyond that requires a spell or heal check. The heal check itself has difficulty levels. DC 5 for allies, DC 10 for other standard races, DC 15 for standard animal life and other humanoids, DC 20 for non-standard animal life, and DC 25 for non-animal life like plants, aliens or outsiders.
As far as knowing weaknesses and the like, they can roll an associated knowledge check. If they pass by more than 5, I give them that info. More often, I give them leave to look up the stat block. Saves me from having to list out every little thing about them, and I randomize the HP, so it doesn’t give them everything. If they fail that, they can learn it naturally. “That hit didn’t do as much as you would expect” = It has DR for instance.
I would generally answer this question with fairly rough descriptions. I’d generally not give the actual numbers, but players should generally be able to tell if someone was (mostly) unhurt, above half-healthy but with some hits, below half health, or almost dead.
I do tend to give players a status-update on an enemy’s health after they’ve hit. So something like:
player: “I hit it with my axe, rolling a 18 to-hit and doing 12 damage.”
Me: “Okay, you land a solid hit, and the enemy is looking fairly roughed up now.”(OOC meaning: it’s below half health now)
Dodge the question 😀
Player: Which one has taken more damage?
Me: Physical or emotional?
Player: Physical.
Me: Both are wounded, and i don’t feel confortable making assumptions about their health issues.
Player: But which one has the less hit points?
Me: One of them.
Player: Which one?
Me: The wounded one.
Player: Are you enjoying this, don’t you?
Me: Very much 😛
This is like asking which skill you need to roll instead of just playing the game and picking one. You don’t ask the DM to play your character for you, so either your character makes a quick medical check or just pick one. That is why i choose to dodge the question and making loose time for everybody. That player is making everybody loose their time with silly questions 🙂
Unless there’s some reason their character shouldn’t be able to tell, I typically just answer questions like this.
It doesn’t make sense to me to punish players for the fact that they’re not really in that situation with their physical sense to make their own judgement and the game mechanics behave such that 1 hp is a creature that has all their bits and functions at full capacity and 0 hp is a dead creature completely cut apart into its component parts, which does a good job of obfuscating typically apparent answers to such questions.
Too many game mechanics (include the most baseline one of “he whose side with the most actions per round wins”) require getting a kill as opposed to coming close or so on that it seems weird to deny players information they need to make informed decisions to use features they likely invested resources into that could have otherwise been invested into features that don’t require such knowledge.
When you consider things like damage resistance, immunity, temporary hit points, damage reduction, etc. it really makes no sense to make it harder for players to tell what their characters would be able to just see at a glance rather than try and force them to do mental math about the entire relevant actions in the combat so far with a bunch of mystery values for every number.
And then there’s the good meta-meta-game reason to do so. Not giving the information is more likely to cause annoyance and frustration and time wasting arguments that do nothing to benefit the overall enjoyment of the game for anybody. Of which you may very easily find yourself on the other side of in the future. (Especially if you’re dealing with the same group of people and someone decides to be equally or more withholding of information than you were out of spite or “fairness”.)
I borrow ‘bloodied’ from 4e for my pathfinder game.
What I’d really like to figure out how to do is set up on roll20 a 4 dot (preferably colored) health indicator.
4 dots (green): no injuries
3 dots (green): has taken some injuries
2 dots (yellow): bloodied aka 50% or less
1 dot (red): running ragged/on their last legs/single-digit hp
I usually go fairly vague, though I’ll at least try to indicate when things are almost dead (“the bugbear staggers back from that blow, but is still standing”, “the flameskull’s flames are beginning to gutter out”, that sort of thing).
I tend to make more of an effort to be vague when discussing monsters where I feel it would be difficult to gauge level of injury (stuff like elementals, undead, or constructs — the sort of things that wouldn’t react to pain and would continue fighting to the bitter end).
For me, unless the enemy has any terrible wounds or they’re engaged in a duel, it’s going to be a medicine check. I like increasing the value of the more academic skills to normal play, since so many people seem to pass them over in a “typical” campaign.
Typically, if a creature is either in the published material for a game and not explicitly secret, or is homebrewed and common in setting, I’ll let my players metagame as much as they like and even give them stat blocks if they ask- I tend to assume that a wise noble, learned wizard or veteran mercenary with their life on the line will typically know more about monsters than the bored player with a Monster Manual who’s controlling them. This doesn’t usually extend to humanoid enemies or more elite, skilled monsters though, or anything which is meant to be a mystery. Players get to break out the skill checks if they want an idea of what’s going on there beyond how big it is and what it’s carrying.
For the usual “I hit the most injured one”, I typically stick to general descriptions of fatigue and injury except for “bloodied”, which I have enthusiastically stolen from 4E and now use almost everywhere. They usually will wind up hitting the most injured target anyway, because my players almost always use focused fire to take down individual damage sources as quickly as possible, therefore the most damaged target is the last one hit.
As for HP, we sort of add that in with a color marker that shows how beat up someone is.
Hit for the first time would be blue if memory serves since they are marked, but by no means severely injured.
Then yellow, orange, and lastly red for low HP.
If two are in the same bracket, we may know one got hit MUCH harder from a crit, but may not be able to tell who is closer to death…
With things like “Did it react to my silver blade?”…
Firstly, did it even notice this particular blade was special?
I mean one shiny sword looks like another, and all the more if it’s glowing…
That question just sounds like they are trying to work around their low knowledge roll…
If the player is sufficiently well known, maybe the enemy knows he wields Shifter’s Bane, but if everyone in the party just pulled out their weapons, is he supposed to automatically take stock? “That dagger is SUPER shiny. Better avoid that…”
Now after the first hit?
Yeah sure. They’d likely know why that thing burned like fire.
My Kobold Sniper got all the love when he stabbed a vampire with a dagger and did more damage than a small dagger should.
They figured that out fast. BUT I only knew that silver hurts them because someone shouted it.
Generally, I make approximate health totals of every combatant public knowledge, whether by using HP bars in Roll20 or saying things like “You just took away about a third of its health with that hit”. The statuses of other PCs are also public knowledge to make it easier for healers to do their jobs (after one time my bard’s negative levels went untreated because the party cleric forgot about Restoration, I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again). Aside from that, for finding strengths and weaknesses, I either let players make one appropriate Intelligence- or Wisdom-based check at the start of combat or make them find out the hard way; I’ll let them know if they use a kind of attack the target is resistant or vulnerable to, and I’ll tell them when their attack rolls are close to the target’s AC (whether hit or miss) but won’t usually give the exact number.
I’m generally fairly lenient in giving away the relative status of the enemy hp percentages, considering it as something the PCs should be able to visually guess simply by looking (how much blood is coming out of it).
I generally use “It seems pretty injured” (Half hp or less), “On its last legs” (Less than 25%), or “dead on its feet” (Below zero with Ferocity). You want more than that, you better be willing to spend an action, a spell, or something. I did come across something recently in Pathfinder that actually reads how many hp something has.
Heh, this reminds me of my Curse of the Crimson Throne session earlier this week. We ran into a party of orcs and were beating the crap out of them, but they weren’t dying quickly due to my oh so helpful reminder to the GM that orcs have ferocity and the fact that they have a shitload of hit points at the point in the story we’re at. They weren’t much of a threat, but due to how much longer it took to kill them compared to what we expected, we definitely spent more resources than expected and took more damage too.
Love the Holy Grail reference too 🙂
One thing to consider is that actual soldiers are trained to watch for signs of injury or vulnerability in adversaries, in order to maximize tactical efficacy. Heck, nonsapient predators can identify certain kinds of vulnerability and react appropriately (cool example: most sharks attack prey from beneath, and react to anything swimming under them as a potential threat. Divers can exploit this to avoid being seen as potential snacks). So for martial types at least, and sufficiently high level adventurers and BBEGs as a rule, I would fully expect some kind of mechanism to allow for such tactics. That by itself isn’t remotely metagaming.
Now making that work fairly is another manner, and enemies should also have this option as well.
Keep in mind that injury is a lot more complicated than RPGs make it sound, especially when you can only see one side of them. You can probably expect soldiers/warriors to tell the difference between “just a scratch” and “on his last legs,” but anything more specific is harder to argue.
You say that like DMs are expected to keep track of ACs and hit points of up to a half-dozen PCs along with possibly a couple dozen monsters.
Fighter’s question doesn’t come up much at my table, and when it does it’s usually asked in terms of “Is it bloodied yet?”, because we’ve accepted that that’s something straightforward that makes sense.
The medicine skill is so rarely used that tying it down as the basic method of triage seems like the absolute tactic to bring it into vogue. Bloodied is something that everyone just KNOWS even without doing anything. Even a low check would get 100%-90%-50%-10%(Uninjured, Scuffed, Bloodied, Last Legs) scale.
A solid check might get a specific percentage, and at least a basic yes/no in relation to a HP dependent spell, like Power Word Stun(150)/Kill(100). (If target HP < PWrequired-(40-check) then they know they’re safe to cast.
Make a high enough check and just straight up know the hp values for that creatures, but you’re looking at needing to roll High 30s for that, and it would be contested by the target’s Performance check. (deception I relegate to only being used in conversation. I use performance for controlling the information people can gain from observing you without you speaking)
One of the GMs I’m currently playing with gives regular updates at whatever arbitrary/planned thresholds of damage an enemy hits. “Bloodied” (50% HP) is the easiest, though he also lets us know after an attack hits when an enemy is “really hurting” or “barely standing”. I think that’s a fair option to work off of, giving the vague-but functional description as a quick-glance. Anything more specific I think would need a skill check, either Perception or Heal or an equivalent, with a DC and information based on if they want it as a free action or an actual action.
But this also brings up a second question to me: How would you tell the difference between a goblin, which might only have around 12 HP total, being at 3 HP (25%) or an ogre being at 3 HP out of… say, 30 HP total (10%)? Same number, but pretty different “close to death” on each, and how to tell would probably be different, too. Right?