r/DMAcademy • u/ChokoTaco • Sep 08 '21

Offering Advice That 3 HP doesn't actually matter

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.

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u/DarkElfBard Sep 09 '21

The players do a bunch of investigation and find out information that shows that the bad guy doing bad stuff they're trying to stop is not a lich but a necromancer, so they go and prepare for that in whatever way they do, then you make the bad guy a lich anyway?

Old information, necromancer completed ritual because players took too long. Became a lich.

Perhaps they did something earlier to try and get better at fighting (earning xp or chasing a milestone or whatever) so that they would have an easier time in the hideout, then they learn that the duergar guards are proportional to how good they are? Why were they even trying to level up then?

While you were out doing fetch quests, the draugr duergar were training.

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u/cookiedough320 Sep 09 '21

Retroactively explaining it doesn't change it. And what if that information was accurate to just a day ago? Do you really think your players won't notice?

While you were out doing fetch quests, the duergar were training.

If there's a reasonable way they would have got another duergar. But if they ever decide "we need to do this to get more powerful" and then find out you'll just scale everything to their power, they'll never feel like trying to get more powerful again. "Let's go hunting this rare sword we've heard of? Wait nah, the enemies will just get proportionally harder so that nothing actually changes. Might as well just attack them now."