FitzTheRuke
Legend
I feel that HP are abstract enough, and "damage" is random enough. No need to roll HP. Sometimes I lower HP and buff damage output to make encounters faster, though!
I also still roll monster damage. I started out in 5e using the average but my players preferred that I roll instead.Y'know, I still roll the damage monsters do (I play in another game where the DM just has the monsters deal average damage), but I always just use average monster HP because its generally too fiddly to do it at the start of an encounter and I've just never considered prerolling since I'm almost always using premade adventures. Are there any 5E adventures where they specify hit points for creatures/NPCs being different from the average?
I do like the idea of quarter, half, three-quarter and full HP to represent different monster qualities - though it'd be helpful to have those pre-calculated somewhere.
dice: 2d8
) [Obsidian will randomly roll the dice in the parenthesis, so it looks like: average-number (obsidian-rolled-number).Nope. CR includes the range. While I could go to the DMG and adjust CR based on HP, damage output, etc. guidance in the DMG, I'm (1) too lazy and (2) never found CRs to be all that useful. There are just too many variable that determine how difficult an encounter is beyond the inputs that used to determine CR in 5e.As a DM who uses XP leveling instead of Milestone leveling, I have a question: if you roll for the monsters’ HP, do you adjust the CR* up or down if it strays too far from the average? A monster with minimum HP is a much different challenge than a monster with maximum HP.
*I know CR itself is problematic, but that’s a story for another thread.