Marcia writes with airtight logic that 1 HD = 4 hp. But hit dice are meant to be rolled!
From my perspective, the ideal is to split out unbloodied and bloodied tracks. The unbloodied track is a known quantity; it represents the minimum level of how much a thing of that order can take. The bloodied track is a mid-combat surprise: you've tested this guy's mettle, and here's how tough he really is.
It's an anti-railroading device, much like reaction and morale rolls. If you're mechanically transparent and let the players roll for opponents' bloodied hp, you've removed any worry that players will think you're fudging for dramatic convenience; if for the sake of logistical convenience you want to say "yeah I think you've pretty decisively won this fight we can montage you winning the rest rather than play it out" you can do so from a position of credibility.
It's a cinch to calculate, either starting with monster HD or monster HP. Starting with HD in an old-school system, you can have unbloodied equal to 2xHD, and then bloodied equal to 1d4xHD (I recommend a single d4, the result of which is multiplied by HD.) If you have a suggested HP, then you can go with bloodied as equal to half default HP and bloodied equal to d(default HP) - round to nearest at-hand polyhedron (good use for Zocchi dice) or take 1d10 and multiply by closest multiple of 10. (So 35 hp becomes 17 ub, d30x3 bl.)
It's a bit gamey but diegetically plausible, as sometimes you don't know how tough someone is until they're battle-tested.
It avoids the traditional scaling issue of traditional rolled HD, in that as you roll more and more dice as HD goes up, swinginess goes down and there's a lot of calculation to do.
It builds in pacing and surprise into combat, as suddenly things may turn out to be much tougher or easier than expected. Strategies may have to be adjusted.
No comments:
Post a Comment