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.
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
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…
Don’t over think it!
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.
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
