Just halve everyone HPs!
With this, combats are going to be brutal fast and i dont need to make much math, because i only need to see the bloodied value on monsters and my players can calculate they HP when making they sheets. I was thinking in leaving HS value normal, so healers dont suck comparing to the damage output.
Maybe 3/4 hp?
Comment why this is a great or a ($#*$@*( bad idea! Anyways to improve this system?
What do you mean swingy?
Anyone with experience in 1/2 hp and double damage monster? Because my sugestion is on the same idea.
It won't really break the system, except that Minions get stronger (because they still have 1 HP) but you should be ready for an increased chance in random character death because of two or three bad (or good) rolls in a row.
To swingy for my taste imo, you can be dying on the first round of combat with basic attacks (and possibly dead with negative bloodied if someone is hit with a monster encounter power), with a lot of other sideeffects that I didn't like.
Simply increasing monster damage fitted my style better, increasing static damage.
Besides swingy combat, any other problem in doing this?
I can make minions do half damage.
Besides swingy combat, any other problem in doing this?
-Leaders become more needed than they already need to.
-Initiative can very well determine the winner of the combat.
-Damage will be the most important thing in the world, overshadowing status effects.
-Thanks to the above, Strikers become even more glorified.
I can make minions do half damage.
Besides swingy combat, any other problem in doing this?
-Leaders become more needed than they already need to.
-Initiative can very well determine the winner of the combat.
-Damage will be the most important thing in the world, overshadowing status effects.
-Thanks to the above, Strikers become even more glorified.
Yeah, this. The striker thing is probably the biggest point. A human Brutal Scoundral rogue can easily do an average of 16 damage with an at-will at level 1 (Rapier Proficiency, Backstabber feat, +3 strength bonus = 3d8+3, or an average of 15.5 on an at-will power), which is enough to one-shot a level 1 monster with half HP. Crits, especially at low levels, could be instant knockouts.
On the other hand, the monsters will be able to destroy that same rogue in one shot, because he has about 12HP, and a monster does 1d8+4 damage.
The problem is alleviated somewhat at higher levels, but Level 1-5 will be a game of rocket tag.
1- Body
2- Arm
3- Legs
4- Head (Damage is doubled)
This makes combat theoretically go faster if you get a headshot. Sometimes we forget to roll the d4 rule XD
I think the adaptation that I use had been termed 4E Brutal. I've run 2 1/2 combats using this so far and it has gotten a very positive response from my group. All the changes are on the DM stat side so it does not cause any problems for players or changing encounters.
The changes to the creatures stats are:
1 3/4 HP, and adjust Bloodied by the same. This helps the creatures go down faster. Do not adjust any healing abilities
2 Reduce all the creatures defences by 2 to a minimum of 10. The players enjoy hits more than misses.
3 Increase all of the creatures attacks by 2. The creatures hit more.
4 Increase the damage of all creature attacks by 1/2 their level.
The combat should speed up as the monsters drop faster and it end ups being more exciting for the players as they are in reasonable danger now and have to use tactics.
I did something kind of similar. It's a tweaked version of a fairly common house rule, but it's worked well for a year now with my group. Monster's have half hit points, but do double damage with at-will attacks and recharge encounter powers twice as fast. Doubling an at-will attack's damage isn't nearly as swingy as doubling all damage. It's the encounter powers that can really wreck a party. One double damage dragon breath or dragon breath attack vs. a 1/2 HP party can bloody the entire group and can drop lower HP PCs like wizards. Add an AP and you'll have two PCs down. The only other adjustment I made was to double resistances and regeneration, the monsters either do too much damage for the resistance to be useful and fights don't last long enough (about four rounds) for regeneration to be useful. Also, you do have to be careful with a few of the newer monsters (MM3 & DS), some of the higher level monster attacks do a lot of damage now. Straight up doubling it, can be dangerous.
If you do go with your rule, I suggest you be really careful with focus fire on the PCs, you'll drop them fast. Even Rocket tag can be kind of fun until you're the guy hit with four rockets in one round. Critical hits will also be murderous on your PCs. It's fine for them to be murderous on monsters, they're designed to be killed, but PC death should not be a simple matter of a single natural 20.
[Why do I start so many posts like that?
]I've been using lowered hp/increased damage for monsters for a while, and from what I found, combat went fairly well - unless the players had a run of bad luck with their attack rolls. It didn't matter too much who went first, because at level 4-5 the PCs couldn't be knocked down in one hit and had a good amount of healing available.
So far, while I've managed to bloody, and really hurt the whole party on quite a few occasions - and most battles end with at least one character badly hurt - I've only had four, or maybe five, characters knocked all the way down to 0hp.
One thing that did cause problems was creatures that had a counter attack as an interrupt. I remember when they encountered two security eyes (converted from Final Fantasy IV) which did max hp/4 damage and only ever counter attacked when the players hit them... [Which wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been paying more attention to the party's hp]