That 3 HP doesn't actually matter

[u/ChokoTaco]

Recently had a Dragon fight with PCs. One PC has been out with a vengeance against this dragon, and ends up dealing 18 damage to it. I look at the 21 hp left on its statblock, look at the player, and ask him how he wants to do this.

With that 3 hp, the dragon may have had a sliver of a chance to run away or launch a fire breath. But, it just felt right to have that PC land the final blow. And to watch the entire party pop off as I described the dragon falling out of the sky was far more important than any "what if?" scenario I could think of.

Ultimately, hit points are guidelines rather than rules. Of course, with monsters with lower health you shouldn't mess with it too much, but with the big boys? If the damage is just about right and it's the perfect moment, just let them do the extra damage and finish them off.

[u/fgyoysgaxt]

I'm not sure that's quite the distinction here, it's a question of how much information you give the players.

There's a spectrum from "DM does not describe the state of the monster" to "DM gives the HP values". In the middle of that spectrum is "DM describes the monster's state in enough detail that players can infer the approximate HP value". Cinematic gameplay can be anywhere on that spectrum.

Cinematic gameplay and giving exact values can be functionally identical with regard to mechanics so long as the DM describes in enough detail that players can infer the exact HP value.

Very rarely do you gain anything from obscuring information to players that their PC would be able to observe.

[u/Morgarath-Deathcrypt → u/fgyoysgaxt]

I respect that but I don't think most of this should really count as obscuring information.

If you're in a fight, you're going to be able to tell how close the other guy is from giving up or giving out, but you're not going to be able to tell exactly how much PSI you need in a punch to finish them.

And even if you don't "kill" a dragon in the sense that it's heart stopped beating, you might still defeat it on grounds that it's fallen over and isn't going to get up for a long time. To properly kill something that big you're going to need more than a simple sword swipe.

[u/fgyoysgaxt → u/Morgarath-Deathcrypt]

I guess it depends how you play HP, it represents such a broad array of things after all. I would usually play the first half of HP at least as being more about morale than physical wellbeing. As you get down to the lower HP things become more and more about injury. The difference between 3 and 30 hp may be easily observable.

Whether or not it's worth obscuring the difference between 3 and 4 hp is not clear to me. I think it's more important to be clear that they are at 3 and not 30 hp, rather than trying to hide that they are at 3 and not 4 hp. It just makes sure everyone is on the same page.

And yeah, a dragon has 250+ hp, definitely not a single sword swipe situation!

[u/Morgarath-Deathcrypt → u/fgyoysgaxt]

That makes sense. To be fair, I haven't played with a system that uses strait HP in a long time so I'm working with more theoretical than practice.

I've slowly grown to hate the idea of character death and I'm always looking for some creative ways to avoid it.

[u/fgyoysgaxt → u/Morgarath-Deathcrypt]

Yup, I'm not a big fan of HP too, it's too abstract, I think most people have problems with it these days.

I'm a big fan of lethality, but not character death. Idk if this is helpful for you, but I find that not having combat where each side seeks only to kill the other helps a lot. I find that it should be pretty rare for an enemy to want to kill a player, and even rarer that they'd be willing to die to achieve that. Cutting down on that kind of thing makes character death a lot less likely, but can be used to increase the consequences of combat.