Post/Author/DateTime	Post
terranshadowstaff 03-10-05, 06:22 PM	Hellow everyone, I am a dm and I have the rule, pcs can not shout out the amount of hit points they have left to other pc's at any moment. I thought the spell status helped the clerics with this problem and found out that it only shows if the pc has been harmed. Then I went to the skill heal and there is no rule for it. So now I go to the community to see what you all think I should do. Thank you for your time and comments.
Cloud Divider 03-10-05, 07:10 PM	Hellow everyone, I am a dm and I have the rule, pcs can not shout out the amount of hit points they have left to other pc's at any moment. I thought the spell status helped the clerics with this problem and found out that it only shows if the pc has been harmed. Then I went to the skill heal and there is no rule for it. So now I go to the community to see what you all think I should do. Thank you for your time and comments. The easy answer? PC A asks: "So, B, how do you feel? You took a few solid hits last battle..." PC B answers: "I feel fine" = full HP "It's just a scratch" = 75% HP "That hurt" = 50% HP "I'm trashed" = 25% HP "Oof! I feel faint! I think I'm done for!" = 0-1 HP "..." = I'm bleeding to death PC B has at least some concept of how beat up he is. He can put that into whatever non-numeric words he wants. A Heal check (call it DC 15) could reveal: Uninjured (100% hp) Minor injuries (75%+ hp) Major injuries (<50% hp) Critical injuries (<25% hp) Dying (negative hp). Granted, that's assuming you treat hp as physical damage and not "Script Immunity" or "Luck" or whatnot.
MarkB 03-10-05, 07:12 PM	Drop the rule. There's nothing wrong with competent adventurers knowing how badly wounded they are, or being able to tell others. Or if you really want to keep the rule, allow characters to assess each other's health-status by physical examination with a DC 10 Heal check, or visually with a DC 20 Spot check. A character who has ranks in Heal gets to add those ranks to his Spot check.
zambuka 03-10-05, 07:14 PM	I tried a house rule like that. For the first few sessions it was ok. But in the long run it didn't work. I have been in a number of games where this has been tried the only way it can really work, or even be enforced, is for the DM to keep track of character hp and just return a rough status. The question is, why do you want to use this house rule? The status spell is only really useful when you don't have a visual on the target of the spell. eg when the party is splitting up the cleric may put status on the party members that are going a different direction. The PCs know how badly they are injured and can easily tell the party healer. If the injured party is unable to comunicate then a heal check will generally do the trick. Stopping the players from being able to tell each other their current status is not a good idea, using the hp numbers is just the most convenient and efficient way. Try encouraging a different way of telling how bad a person is injured. eg "Just a few scratches", "I can't take another hit like that", "I'm lying in a pool of my own blood" etc If you really want to push the issue just have the healer make a heal check (perhaps with a DC of 15) before a player can tell the healer how badly wounded their character really is. If they fail then the healer just has to guess.
Gunrock 03-10-05, 07:39 PM	Players will talk in HP, characters will talk in character. Unless your sessions are "live table" sessions (everything said at table is said by characters), this shouldn't be an issue. HP is a quantifiable measure of how hurt or not-hurt a character is. Since everyone has an idea of how much HP everyone has, they all have an idea of how messed up they've become. If it is not a 'live table', and unless you don't want your PCs getting the correct amounts of healing between combats, then there is no reason for this house rule.
kennychuckm 03-10-05, 07:56 PM	Hellow everyone, I am a dm and I have the rule, pcs can not shout out the amount of hit points they have left to other pc's at any moment. I thought the spell status helped the clerics with this problem and found out that it only shows if the pc has been harmed. Then I went to the skill heal and there is no rule for it. So now I go to the community to see what you all think I should do. Thank you for your time and comments. I can see this rule eventually causing more problems than what you're experiencing now because it encourages metagaming. Allow me to elaborate. You tell the PCs they cannot tell each other how many hitpoints they have left. At first they're a little upset/bummed/lost, but eventually they learn to memorize everyone's total hitpoints ahead of time and keep track of how much damage has been done to each player, writing it down so as not to forget. You tell them to stop it. They stop writing it down and start keeping track in their heads. Now your rule is redundant, and you're annoyed because you know what their doing but can't make them stop. The players are annoyed that they have to work so hard to keep someone alive and blame you. No one is very happy. This I could easily see happening with your group. If this had been a group I played with for a while, it wouldn't have stopped there. With their new-found strategy they would start keeping track of damage dealt to the monsters, monster's AC, how many spells they had cast in the battle, all sorts of stuff. With just a little mental gymnastics, they now know exactly what they need to prevail, and started fudging their rolls to meet these requirements. Now you have to work extra hard to find challenges that are out of the ordinary, or vary the NPCs so that they aren't identical and your PCs will have to relearn all the numbers for each individual. After enough battles it just really doesn't matter anymore as the PCs have become so good at metagaming that you really just feel like giving up. It's not any fun anymore. I think this is less likely to happen, but something similar DID happen with a group I played with. It's the main reason I found a new group. In short, just get rid of the rule. Make sure they don't start telling each other everything, or start giving hints on how to act, but sharing their current hitpoint total isn't that big of a deal.
terranshadowstaff 03-11-05, 01:30 AM	Thank you all for commenting on my question. Again, thanks cloud driver for giveng me a detailed answer, but I think the majority says to drop the rule so I shall. The rule does make more paper work than I thought and it slows down combat and I figured that pc's will metagame there hp total and other aspects of there character. Thanks again everyone and till next time.
Salla 03-11-05, 09:25 PM	Thank you all for commenting on my question. Again, thanks cloud driver for giveng me a detailed answer, but I think the majority says to drop the rule so I shall. The rule does make more paper work than I thought and it slows down combat and I figured that pc's will metagame there hp total and other aspects of there character. Thanks again everyone and till next time. I think some of this depends on just how 'deep' you expect your group to get. I assume that some things get 'translated' from player-speak to character-speak. For example, Eberron wouldn't use feet-inches-yards-miles for measurement, but it's simply not worth the effort for the players to convert the measurements about. So I just assume that when a player says "Ten feet", his character is saying the equivalent distance in whatever units of measurement Eberron has. The abstract nature of Hit Points makes a quick call on this difficult. Two characters may both have 50HP, but one may prefer to describe the HP loss as last-minute dodges and parries (as he's playing a quick swashbuckling halfling), while the other character (a brutish half-orc barbarian) defines his HP as weathering the blows. So, in-character, the swashbuckler would be nicked up a bit, while the barbarian would be battered and bruised, even though both are at 4 HP out of 50. Different amounts of hitpoints (both total and current) mean different things to different characters.