Rolled vs Fixed hit points on monster ect, what do you /tg/ prefer ?
Rolled is mostly pointless, just like rolled stats always are. The one way I could see value in it is having your players uncertain how much it'll take to kill a monster, but if your whole group is obsessing over enemy HP you likely have other issues way beyond that.
>>46813498
Rolled. Stops players from getting too complacent and does a little bit to prevent metagaming.
Rolled on bosses, fixed on mooks.
If I have to pick one for everything forever, fixed.
>>46813498
The real question is - rolled or fixed HP on level up?
>>46813536
Fixed all the way. Rolled HP for the PCs is the fucking worst.
>>46813498
>Nic Cage Demon
Now that shit's really scary.
Especially if he's acting like in the Deadfall
>>46813552
I once had a fighter in AD&D that had less hit points then our wizard at 5 HD ....
>>46813498
Fixed HP on planned encounters.
Rolled HP on random encounters.
Fixed HP for starting characters.
Rolled on level up (or fixed half HD on level up if you prefer). Characters are supposed to grow and "progress". If your fighter has to "progress" into a different set of class skills because you butchered your HD rolls, then play it off as your character coming to terms with how shit a fighter he is.
>>46813604
Exhibit A as to why rolled HP is garbage.
>>46813498
> Using hit points
Wounds and crippling strikes for crits are the way to go.
>>46813712
>not using hit points
Please take your ''"realism"'' elsewhere.
>>46813756
There are way better damage systems than HP which have nothing to do with realism.
>>46813498
I only ever do rolled HP for random wildlife, which I usually keep rare and mostly a thing when they camp in explicitly dangerous areas.
Even for the players I tell them to use the standard fixed HP in the PHB.
>>46813536
Fixed.
1/2 HD + CON makes it so you're not too squishy and not to meaty, which is great when you want to make people sweat and treat HP as more than a finite resource of not-dying points.
>>46813552
I'm a lover of all things random, in a group that loves the spice of random. By popular demand we play with crit fails (though the effects of crit fails aren't spectacular: you drop your weapon, snap a bowstring, maybe hit another valid target, or most often just provoke an AoO from the enemy.). Magic pools that are basically NetHack fountains appear and are used wantonly when they do. Wild Magic sorcerers are considered best sorcerer, heck I know members of the group that would play mages constantly if wild surges were just a thing and not a cost for a perk.
We still use fixed (average) hit points per hit die on level up. Max at first level. Because fuck rolling that shit. TECHNICALLY our group's rules are that you can take the average or roll but if you roll you keep the result no matter what. But nobody, NOBODY does that.
The exception is if we're playing 1e, 2e, or an OSR game. Then, it's all rolled by you knew what you were getting into at character creation.
I use fixed HP for monsters because it saves me time and energy. One less thing I've got to do when setting up a random encounter (or planning a nonrandom one). I might try rolling for random encounters when I've started to learn 5e inside and out the way I did 3e before it.
>>46813536
Either fixed, or reroll hit points from scratch at every level (but keep your former total if it ends up being higher)--that way you aren't permanently screwed over by bad rolls.
>>46813536
Rolled. Fixed HP is for the same crybabies that use point-buy for stats.
>>46817092
It weeds out THAT GUYS who show up to game with 18 18 18 17 16 15 or situations where a dude got nothing higher than a 14 for all his stats.
That and RNG is only good for oneshots where you don't have to think too hard about longevity.
>>46816101
Hm, that's an interesting way to do it. How do you find it works?
>>46817213
>It weeds out THAT GUYS who show up to game with 18 18 18 17 16 15
I don't get why this is a common complaint. My friends and I do all our stat/health rolls under DM supervision.
>>46813536
I prefer rolled HP, but I give my players three options. 1, they take average, no roll. 2, they roll, and keep their roll. 3, they gamble their roll, then I roll, and they keep what I rolled even if it is worse.
>>46817247
Because when one dude comes in with an OP spread while everyone else is more or less balanced save for one shodding bloke who rolled a bunch of shit for his stats, it just imbalances the game further than it already is.
Like, the game's already hard to balance if you have a mixed party of martials and mages, now you have to account for the fact that most encounteres will either end in one turn due to cheaty one-shotting everything or risk a TPK because you overestimated cheaty's power and everyone else was woefully unprepared and underpowered.
At least with point buy, you can keep everyone to a relatively even stat distribution and it's easier to catch if someone's trying to cheat.
>>46817364
Yeah I get that. Stat rolling is way too variable. But the complaint that "oh, anon came to the table with super high stats, he totally cheated" is moot if everyone rolls stats at the table.
>>46817213
>letting players roll outside the DM's field of vision
>>46817413
Even if he rolled legitimately, it still imbalances the game and gives the GM more bullshit to consider (on top of the regular bullshit that comes with designing a campaign).
It's like, cool, one guy rolled godly for his rolls and is capable of one-shotting everything I throw at him while another dude is almost dying in every encounter because a trash mob sliced him with a shitty dagger and it took off almost half his HP.
>>46817453
When you have to manage like 4-6 dudes all rolling stats at the same time, it's kinda hard to tell what they rolled, especially if they're across the table and their dice have those weird coloration that make it hard to tell what number it is.
Even then, that's like 16d6-24d6 to keep track of at the same time and if you have them roll one at a time, it just slows down character creation further.
Fuck point buy.
Something optimizers, theorycrafters, and butthurt 4e types forget is that stats actually don't matter that much for end-character-creation balance. They'll lens a character but a difference between 14 primary stat and 18 primary stat, even at its harshest, is 10% to accuracy. Which is good, I'm not knocking high stats, but you're going to see more than a 10% variance from just about anything else. In OSR materials, the stats matter even less, pretty much just giving you class selection
Point buy leads to cookie cutters, and that's no good. Developing a character for an RPG, rather than a novel, is best done organically, and rolling stats is the very first step of that process. The 0th step is not playing 4e. If you're playing 3e, just follow the fucking rules which say to discard blocks that roll a bonus sum of less than +0 or a highest stat of less than 14 and you will do fine. If you're playing anything else, you can either adopt the 3e reject-and-reroll conditions or just rock the fact that the system will treat the VAST majority of all statblocks as viable. And if you hit the far-sub-1% chance of something that isn't, like the dreaded all-penalty block, a DM that isn't autistic as shit will probably let you reroll in said perishingly unlikely circumstance.
>>46817219
It works pretty well. Not only do you not get screwed forever by a low roll, but the fact that you can keep your old total if your new one is lower*, means that you have a bit of a safety net. Of course, your average hit points don't change all that much, because the safety net only affects the more extreme cases.
Pic is your average hit points at each level using the roll from scratch vs. the standard method. At 1st level the roll from scratch method uses the better of two d6 rolls.
*If you want to be generous, you can say that if your new roll isn't higher, you get your old roll +1.
>>46817658
But yeah, all rolls should be done in the open. This is just common sense,
>>46817658
But that extra +2 can apply both to your chance to hit and your damage. So if the guy with the 14 strength is striking at a guy he has a 50% chance to hit for an average of 6.5 damage (3.25 damage per round on average), then the 18 strength guy hits 60% of the time for 8.5 damage (5.1 damage per round, more than 1 and 1/2 times the damage the other guy is doing). That's pretty significant.
>>46817501
>Even if he rolled legitimately, it still imbalances the game
Yeah, dipshit, I already cleared up that I understand that.
>When you have to manage like 4-6 dudes all rolling stats at the same time
Are you dense? starting with i=1:
1) ith player rolls 6(4d6)
2) write down ith player's stat rolls
3) i+1, restart from 1 until i>number of players
>>46817658
>>46817749
Not to mention the way these things stack.
Having a +1 Con over someone means 20 hit points over 20 levels, which doesn't seem like much but it makes a huge difference. It's even bigger if it's over negatives - An 8 con versus a 12 con is the difference between a crippled fighter and a competent one.
Not to mention that Strength multiplies. It's 18 at start, meaning +2 to hit and +3 damage over a 14, but with the relatively easy to get ahold of +6 strength belts and another +4 from stats, assuming you have nothing better to do, you've got a significant advantage at almost every level.
What hurts the most is the assumptions made by the system itself. It seems like having a fighter with a 14 strength should be able to succeed, right? Well, the way the math for encounters work, they're expecting a +6/+7 to hit at first level in order for the fighter to hit more than half of the time with a challenging encounter. This only goes up, to the point where only a fighter that's considered min/max'd still hits at least half the time - And that's only with their primary attack!
It's bullshit, but that's just how 3.pf is mechanically put together. If you want to be competent at your job, you have to game the system as hard as you can, or else you're behind the curve.
>>46817749
It's really easy to get stuck in the theorycrafting bubble. You compare two numbers in abstract and there are these huge gulfs. But in my experiencing the only one that gets bitched about on the internet that ACTUALLY becomes a problem during gameplay is the 3e Tier consideration. And there are solutions both before and during a game that can wrangle even that issue into line, but it's the only one that actually needs serious addressing.
I should know. There was a time that I fucking lived in that theorycrafting bubble, between my old gaming group becoming headless and drifting apart to assembling my new one with the burden and privilege of being ForeverGM, when I thought about these games and did math about these games more than I actually played them.
So you're not wrong -- not exactly. But try to sit down at the table with Random for a while. Tell yourself "Just for this one-shot" or something and give it a whirl. Different characters are going to be different, but I'd wager good money that in a real world scenario with people actually sitting down to play a game, you won't get problematic, fun-killing skew. You'll get the random input noise that our brains use to procedural generate stories and the characters that inhabit them.
I will add a caveat to my previous statement: When I say Fuck Point Buy, that applies to "Point-buying your stats in D&D". Systems that run 100% on point buy have enough options that you can't trivially min-max, as opposed to having only 6 values to which you can assign points, thus dodging the cookie-cutter issue.
>>46817867
Oh I'm sorry.
24d6-36d6.
Also, I'd rather just use a system that's faster and doesn't allow people to get away with bullshit stats due to luck.
>>46818022
>Point Buy
>Faster
Hoo boy, somebody's never played with the obsessive tinkerer...
>>46817964
Is it really theorycrafting when the game itself is making the assumption that you min/max'd your character though?
Because I was in a game where the highest stat I rolled was a 14 and after three levels was starting to fall behind to the point where even tactics weren't helping me overcome the struggle.
That and I was playing a monk, which was already starting off the game with a bum hand that only got worse as the campaign went on.Thankfully, the game dissolved and we ended up playing another D&D campaign.
>>46817662
Here's one that also shows the boost to average hit points if you go with your previous hit point total +1 if you new roll fails to be higher.
no one who actually runs a game expects monsters to roll for their hp
it's fucking retarded
Fixed for monsters just decided on the go, rolled when I need some variety and to keep people from metagaming the exact value they need to kill them.
>>46818022
Shouldn't take more than 30 seconds per player. That's only three minutes to supervise 6 players' stat rolls.
But yeah, regardless it can end up pretty fucking shitty with the variability.
>>46813536
both
small constant increment plus rolled bonus, both dependent on class
>>46818115
Me and most of my friends are obsessive tinkerers at time but we also know what sort of character we'd like to play.
Like, if you're playing a Wizard or something then why would it take you so long to come up with the idea of pumping INT and dumping STR/DEX?
I use fixed HP for PCs and monsters, but my monsters are either customized or outright custom-made so they can't know its HP anyway.
Rolling monster HP leads to excessively unpredictable combats, where what seems like a decent fight can turn into a TPK (if this monster is a real threat) or a boring slog (if it isn't). On the flipside, it can lead to pointless one-round combats as the PCs one-shot all the low-rolling monsters. No thank you.
>>46813498
Rolled, prevents my players from knowing exactly how much HP monsters have left, which introduces an element of risk to their plans.
>Monster A has 4hp left, monster B has 28hp
vs
>Monster A is almost dead, and monster B is slightly wounded
>>46813498
How does he pull up his pants with those wibbly wobbly hands of his anyway?
>>46813498
Variable. And I didn't stop there.
See, I'm more than a little...all right, spades are spades, I'm pretty fucking obsessed with formulae and spreadsheets and self-propagating randomized forms. I've been asked before by certain people who've seen these forms, and not always jokingly, if I might not be autistic, because of the amount of detail I put into them. I don't do this for a living, I do this for my own personal entertainment.
Anyway, way the fuck back in High School High, when I was just a wee little fucker first getting into DMing, I found I kept having trouble with creating and statting out enemy wizards and other casters, because I not only had to adjust for how many spells the caster had available to him, but his own personal style and methodology - blaster versus manipulator, f'r instance. So, after a while, I figured out - ta da, I could make a spreadsheet to generate spell lists!
From there, I started making more forms, and eventually had complete zone-specific random-encounter generators that would even account for the possibility of a wild animal having been struck by a burst of wild magic from a nearby shaman battle, or developed rabies or similar disease which made it fight differently.
My players loved it. The general consensus was, having the forms meant the fights were still within a level of predictability, but with just enough occasional elements of surprise to keep them on their toes and always guessing.
Really wish I still had those files sometimes. Fucking hard drive got brick'd thanks to an ungrounded power surge during a storm. Took a lot of other things with it too. Shit happens.
>>46818189
>>46817662
>>46817219
And here's the really pertinent one. It shows your chance of getting less than 3 hp per level. (So your chance of having 2 or less hit points at 1st level, 5 or less at 2nd, 8 or less at 3rd and so forth.) Basically, it's your chance to get at least mildly screwed.
Rolling for PC HP is dumb and pointless. With monsters it at least keeps the enemy's HP total a mystery to the metagamers (a little bit; they still know the range and average). Not so with PCs, who always know their own HP totals.
As for ability scores, I have a compromise. Want random stat generation (and thus no tinkering)? Want fair stat distribution? You can have both! Use cards.
What you need is 18 cards, three for each ability score. For the equivalent of 3d6 ironman stats, you use three each of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Shuffle the cards, then draw three for each ability score. The result is random, but always has the same average (10.5)
For the equivalent of 4d6 drop lowest, you do the same as above except you have four each of 6, 5, 4, and 2, and two of 3. This results in an average of 12.33.
>>46819766
>For the equivalent of 3d6 ironman stats, you use three each of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Check out the graph on the bottom left. If you use those cards, it'll be very difficult to get a 3 or an 18. Your chance of getting an 18 for your first stat with dice is 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 = 1/216. Your chance of getting one with cards is 3/18 * 2/17 * 1/16 = 1/816 because with each "6" you draw, there's one less in the deck. You could potentially roll 18s for all your stats (though it's really, really, really, really, really, really unlikely to happen, it's possible as each stat is in play), while you only have one chance with the cards. The first time you draw a 6, that's it. It's that attribute or nothing.
And it's not just about 3s and 18s. The bell curve as a whole is steeper, so you have less chance of rolling a 14 up or a 7 down, consigning you to mediocrity. So I'd propose using one of the top two arrangements of cards. That's either 4 aces / 3 twos / 2 threes / 2 fours / 3 fives / 4 sixes (the top left graph) or 4 aces / 2 twos / 3 threes / 3 fours / 2 fives / 4 sixes (the top right graph).
For 4d6 drop low, I like the nice progression of 1 ace / 2 twos / 3 threes / 4 fours / 4 fives / 4 sixes. You basically just count up with the cards until you hit the maximum of 4.
>>46813536
fixed, what kind of autist would roll for HP?
Or for that matter, stats
