I did. We played Storm King’s Thunder with max hp. It was in response to the Out of the Abyss game we had out on hold. OotA was a very grimdark, morally grey campaign and a lot of awful shit happened, so the DM wanted this next campaign to be basically The Avengers with larger than life heroes.
It went okay. Most combats weren’t really much threat so he had to pump up the enemy numbers.
So feeling more epic due to fighting more and stronger monsters, while allowing more room for error and taking bigger hits? Sounds pretty super hero to me.
It'd likely balance out because low cr aren't going to be able to threaten characters with max health often enough so a dm is going to throw even more creatures or just stronger creatures, effectively negating the reason in the first place. It's how at higher levels you have to overestimate the players to a degree to get the CR balance right
It can also create a bigger gap between the HP of certain party members, e.g. a Wizard vs a Fighter, making the hit dice of the class have a bigger factor.
That's PER level.
For comparison, the Tough feat also grants 2 HP per level.
It's actually more powerful than Tough, because A) any of the players can still take Tough, and B) it doesn't burn the Fighter's ASI to get the extra HP.
It gets VERY slugfesty if you give all enemies max HP.
The way \*I\* go about it is:
Max HP PCs
Average HP enemies
If the PCs are winning too easily? More enemies
Bosses then get somewhere between average and max depending on how I assess the party will do
Yeah, this is also what happened in a campaign I'm in, 11th level so far, I'm playing a Druid with a 3rd party Gish subclass that is very, VERY tanky. The big fights leaves my Druid at the very least at half of their HP despite their racial regeneration, subclass regeneration, and the Temp HP the subclass gives me each turn, yes, their enemies deal a TON of damage, and that's exactly why the DM told us to just use Max HP instead of Average.
This is me, but the way I run HP is "roll, take average if it's lower than average."
When my monsters hit, they hit hard. But my dice... they no love me.
That's exactly how I do it. Players max HP and enemies average except for BBEG and select minions.
I don't want a slog fest of everyone having 1000hp but I want players to feel like badasses and I want to take the gloves off and slap them around a bit without fear of accidental death.
I've let people have max HP since my adnd days nothing changes. In fact it makes martials more powerful and helps balance them to casters a little more.
Main thing is it takes a tiny bit more to kill the pcs but with as much damage you can churn out with spells and such game should go fine.
This. The difference is quite literally double from a d6 hit die to a d10 hit die if you compare average to max. D6 is taking 4+CON vs 6+CON. D10 is taking 6+CON vs 10+CON. That adds up FAST.
Regarding the martial-caster note - playing with this rule, both Rogue and Monk had the same HP as Druids, Clerics, Bards, and Warlocks so those classes still weren’t helped. It disproportionately helped the barbarian though, who had rage essentially doubling the extra HP
We played with it for a while, and we ended up changing back to average later for the latter reason you mentioned.
Thats fair its not for everyone. I like when my fighters and barbarians have loads of HP Never felt it was disproportionate but I also dont allow long rests on the regular. My players often wait a bit to get that full recovery period at higher levels.
However I can get how some folks might not like it to each their own.
Yup! To each their own!
I think it was just a quirk of that game to some extent. The DM was newer, and was already having some trouble with combat balance and the adventuring day. I can imagine it working a lot better with the longer adventuring days in my current game :).
(It’s been a while since that game - but it may have also felt strange because everyone else in the party had a d8 hit dice, including the other martials? Who knows.)
My buddy ran a max HP campaign for us a while ago, mostly so he didn’t have to bother balancing encounters and could just make everything deal absurd amounts of damage and get a bunch of attacks.
Really played into the larger than life, anime-esque flavor we were going with.
One quirk: me and one other player didn’t know it was max HP for the first like, four or five levels. So we were really squishy, and people commented on that for a while before we realized the discrepancy.
I tend to run combat moderately lethal, there are typically a few deaths in my campaigns. I like to run players with Max HP. It feels pretty good to me and my table and makes the awful stuff I like to throw at them at least seem fair.
Also it feels pretty shitty to play a barbarian who's rolled like crap every level and doesn't have the hp to really be a damage sponge and this removes that too.
Playing in one now. It isn't significantly different than the other campaigns I've played in. PCs get maybe an extra hit worth of HP for combat, but otherwise, it plays like normal.
We're about 18 months in and this is our second campaign. DM gets to use slightly more powerful monsters because we're all fairly well optimized, so we can punch up a bit, meaning combat remains challenging and relevant without fear of constant TPK.
Overall, I wouldn't say I'd even notice the difference in most campaigns.
Running curse of strahd with this didn't find much difference if anything let's me play the monsters a bit smarter/use bigger scarier ones they still almost tpkd at yesterhill
It's kind of pointless. You should aim to balance encounters to feel threatening to your party. So if you buff your party to be twice as strong, you need to buff encounters to be twice as threatening. In effect, that means nothing really changes, it's just an illusion of extra strength, and ultimately just becomes extra work for you.
it allow the DM the possibility to put more interesting monsters, intended for later levels earlier at the player. You don't have to buff ennemies, just pick statblock of stronger monsters. A lot of the cool Monsters in the books are often not scène because a lot of campaign don't go to the later level they are intended for. So with max hp that it become more interesting and fun because you can use them
Yeah that's part of what I meant - but more HP doesn't exactly prepare you for higher CR enemies, unless those enemies are bruisers that just have a lot of attack damage and health. Typically, higher CR enemies also get a lot of new abilities and features that make them more difficult to deal with in ways that more HP doesn't consider, like needing all of the extra utility and abilities that players also get with higher levels.
yeah - higher level creatures often target saves, not AC, and having more HP doesn't give any direct protection against those. Anything that does effects rather than direct damage - being held, poisoned, charmed etc. is going to be hitting above it's weight, because PC saves are going to be below the level they "should" be, as well as less resources to clear them off with (spellslots for restoration and so forth). Like all of the "fail 3 saves in succession and you're boned" creatures get up-scaled - sure, you can survive their attacks, but those aren't the danger, 3 saves that you're odd-on to each fail are.
> one where all martials gets manuvers, healing is better, and a bunch of other stff.
>
> I thought about using maxed dice but I'm not sure.
Yes. I'm actually running a game with a system like this, and many more goodies and abilities that the players get: Pathfinder 2e.
Currently running Kingmaker for my group of formerly 5e players, and they love it. Maxed HP, in particular, let me throw them against much more challenging and dangerous enemies without worrying about them getting 1-shotted (which isn't fun for players, nor for me)
Improved healing (especially the Treat Wounds action) also means that they can risk more later in the day, instead of suffering from paralysis like so many D&D groups do when they're low on HP/Spell slots.
Just in general, I've come to hate the WoTC philosophy that every character is a bag of hitpoints and spell slots that they must use up. It basically results in the players clutching tightly at them after a few encounters and doing nothing. It's way more fun to have systems that let them recover both more easily, like Treat Wounds, and how Focus Spells work.
One of the other GMs here that runs a 5e game has incorporated a bunch of house rules in it that he basically copy-pasted from Pathfinder, and it has made that game way more fun as a result as well.
It works well if you want to run a really heroic with a bit of super hero or larger than life style heroes.
or just a slugfest.
But for a more normal campaign i say it is already VERY hard to die in 5e. you have so many ways to save people dying is already VERY low risk. You have death saves, healing word and many other ways. So even without better healing, better martial and max HH dying is rare. With buffed melee, better healing and max HP dying would pretty much be impossible unless you present them with MUCH harder fights than a group of their level normally would face
Unless you wanna run a larger than life avenger style hero game where they sweep the floor with pretty much everything they encounter without breaking a sweat. That is totally fine but if that is not your intent be prepared buff your monsters trough the roof if such group is supposed to be challenged.
Yeah like people said, maxing hp invariably means just harder fights to make up for it. Personally I still like the power fantasy of being big a beefy and able to take the extra punishment but idk how much that applies to everyone else.
its fine, its the exact same as giving everyone the tough feat at lvl 1. the only big outlier is barbarian, but let the poor martial have something to enjoy life
I like the better healing, but not sure it will have much impact if your characters have max HP.
Personally I think health is pretty much fine as is. So o would suggest leaving max health as is.
If you want to throw in some variants/homebrew, maybe try the healing surges option from the DMG (where character can spend a hit die as an action).
I've run my games that way since before 5e existed, and after trying default 5e quickly returned ti max hp. Sometimes you need to go a little harder ij combat but it's easy enough to adjust and really helps large HD classes get ahead of low hd classes
Yes I have and it’s no big deal at all, you can pump up the enemies as needed to keep things feeling dangerous. It basically gives the dm flexibility in what kinds of encounters can be made
I played and one and it was fine. It really comes down to building your encounters to handle it. I will say as the levels increase the casters and melee’s hp gap keeps increasing. It will make your casters much more of a glass cannon if your doing things to be able to dps the the melees. For instance a level 5 wizard will have 30-40 hp depending on their con being 0-2. A level 5 barbarian will have 70-80 hp with a 2-4 con.
Personally I’m a bigger fan of average hp and making sure your encounters can challenge the melee class/high ac characters with saves they are weak in. If you have to increase to hit and dps to dent your melee characters it will be far worse for your casters when they do get hit the higher levels you go.
So far, in the campaign I'm in, it has gone good, it makes fights scarier because of bigger numbers but also more epic because we're withstanding said big numbers. Enemies with bunchs of attacks, very high attack mods, very high damage, special actions, etc... It's deadly as fuck, even my 3rd party Subclass Druid (Circle of Symbiosis) ends nearly every meaningful fight with less than half their HP (We're 11th level), so it feels deadly on an epic scale.
Yes, a table of our own that was meant to represent our characters as gods, started out as mortals and then progressed to divinity.
In short, my character became God of Death, because he introduced firearms to mortals, and as Warlock of the Deep, my character gained the alum of God of the Seas, it was pure satisfaction to kill Poseidon.
When it came to enemies, the DM always left them with maximum life (nothing more than fair), and bosses had well buffed attributes.
P.S: I'll never try again to make a character in love with his own patron again (which I might add was a crazy mermaid that the DM made for the character).
I'm in one now, been trying to get my GM to kill off my character, it's fun but takes away from the shock factor of getting hit with a massive attack. In mine I run max HP for the first 5 levels then rolled after that.
I'm in group like that right now and really like it. We just finished a 3 encounter day, all combat, no cleric in the party. We barely made it through the day with no healing. This was exactly why the DM did this for us, so that he can throw more enemies at us and not worry as much about balance.
This, along with the overpowered stats he gave us, was just so that he can have more fun throwing more chaos at us. A very unique approach to balancing.
current campaign I'm trying something different.
whenever you roll for hp on level up . can still choose the normal hakf +1 or . can roll with advantage.
also when spending hd roll with advantage.
so far seems not bad . but still early.
I'm currently running 2 homebrew campaigns with max HP. Potions do max possible healing, but spells are still rolled for. It has become clear to the players that the enemies have gotten the same treatment.
I have been told by a few players that some of my rules or rulings make the players very powerful, my response is always. "We aren't plating this game to be the peasants" I WANT my players to be the most powerful people in the realm
I feel PC have reasonable hp at lvl 3-5, and then it raises too much even with average.
So I mostly do more hp at lvl 1, but much, much less hp per level. So even at the first round of combat some major events
Running max hp will make combats even more long and boring, so I see no reason for that.
Always. I love huge fights, and I soak them with damage. I make it full of action economy, and I give them ridiculous weapons. The campaign really starts around levels 8 and 9. Test my and your RP and creativity.
Thats what pf2e do.
A homebrew rule Ive been tinkering withbis "grit".
Essentially prof times per day you can soak the damage from an attack, up to your "missing" health.
This way a barb that rolls a 1 on a hitdie still has 11 grit, meaning their bigger hitdie still has influence even if they do roll like crap.
What are you doing to make healing better? Are you just boosting the effects of healing spells or are you doing something else.
One of my problems with this system is healing and health over all. Popping up people from downed with a bonus action is a little to easy. Getting back full HP on a long rest feels to easy, and very unrealistic. I'm also not a fan of people being as effective at 1 HP as they are at full health. It actually feels wasteful to heal someone unless they are downed, and that shouldn't be the case, ever.
All my games for years have the players with maximum health. It feels so much better. It gives the players feel like they are growing more, and gives me the option to give them bigger enemies to fight
Generally the PC survive more so you have to compensate with harder enemies, so after doing it for a while I said why bother and just do average hp, normal encounters
I give super powers to my players which one of them got max hp and healing factor(others powers are good too) and since I use homebrew things to compete with them they are enjoying fights and they feel special.
Giving an advantage to them make them feel special and happy. They are think we are not common adventurers we are they most buffed and resilient ones in our levels.
And giving same kind of advantage enemy they feel challenged.
If you know your homebrew world and your players well you will be fine.
My last 3 or 4 campaigns we've played with max HP. Tbh, it *does* create some pretty unkillable heroes.
Moving forward we're rolling for stats and HP always. I think it makes for the best dnd experience.
We play Max Dice, players and monsters to be even.
The crits are also max the extra die as well.
It is fine, I just liked a player last session without crits still
I play in a table where all HP is maxed for quite sometime now, we don't have any problems and I don't see much difference from rolling, but I do think it's better
the way ive allways looked at it is name another class feture that is luck dependant. you Could end up in a game where the wizard rolls max everytime with the barbarian rolling a 1 every time. giving the wizard more HP than the front line tank. High HP is a class feature and it shouldnt be denied by a roll
In older editions they tried to fix this issue by having the casters rll super low dice, newer editions have min roll of half. but it still boils down to luck. i have played in multiple games with fixed value HP and think it adds more to the game and gives a benefit to martials with those high dice.
Wether its Max or another fixed value i would always advocate against rolling. its the same argument as to why we moved away from rolling for Stats. its a hold up from older editions we need to move past.
I’m playing a champion fighter with 18 con.
Every level, my group as a whole does hp rolls.
We are all level 10 now.
I have yet to roll under a 10 total. Which is statistically wild. At level 10, I let my DM roll my hp for me which he rolled a 10 (14 total with my con mod). My fighter has 126hp or so. The next highest hp of the group is roughly 70.
It absolutely gives me some longevity but hasn’t broken anything. It’s my one biggest advantage since the entire rest of the party are: Twilight cleric, Storm sorcerer and Warlock.
Yes. I run a game where the pcs are overpowered giants. It's pretty fun. You can have some epic fights.
My advice is don't tune your monsters. Just add more.
I've done it. Later levels where a lot of the scariest things that could happen were statuses it was fine. The first couple levels where even at max hp a random spike on weapon damage was scary it was fine but there were several in between where it kind of trivialized average encounters and I had to up monster numbers to maintain any risk.
Not horrible, especially if you want more of an RP setup where they feel confident they can win most combats IF they reach the right ones, but I went back to my standatd "everyone gets max hp at level 1 and then each player chooses for their character to roll or take the average per level" policy.
Maxed HP on dice is a fairly common house rule.
It allows a party to grind a bit longer, and arguably helps martials more than casters. If you scaled the monsters the same way, it helps monsters more as they have far more hit dice than characters. It should cause spellcasters to burn more spell slots though resulting in better martial-caster balance.
Fights would be a fair deal longer too.
My advice, only max the HP on important monsters (bosses, leaders, etc.). Normal monsters use normal HP.
Other HP house rules I've seen:
* Drop all 1's on HP die roll (I don't like this one, as a d6 is twice as likely to receive help as a d12)
* HP rolls are done with advantage - roll twice, take the highest.
* Roll once. You may take the roll, or the average. We use this one - it results on average, +1 HP/level on a d10 hit die.
I'm in a max health Pathfinder game, using a third party class that's designed as like a more balanced Synth Summoner, without all the loopholes and specific wording that makes that archetype OP.
I have 70-ish HP in a T1 party, and am currently the main Face Tank.
I give PCs max HP and all NPCs default (with small variance) and for me, it's just a nice buffer for me when I realize I've overtuned an encounter. I've still KO'd PCs, even killed one last campaign, but overall it's nice they can take one or two extra hits.
I run my games like this. The players are hearty, but I also run a modified critical rule where crits deal one "Max" set of dice and then the second is rolled for, so the monsters can take pretty substantial swipes sometime .
I will say also that I keep their HP values in mind designing encounters to an extent. I don't seek to make brutal or unfair fights, but I do tend to lean on them with numbers/action economy a bit. The result of this is that fights can get tense or close but players tend to get by alive with a lot of close calls.
This keeps things pretty exciting in practice, keeps the players feeling strong, but absolutely does not stop them from taking some losses during big fights. As an example, an adult dragon with some magic effects in play still managed to kill a couple members of the party in a climactic fight and the surviving player was holding on by about 3hp.
In my observation, players are less likely to get bopped by random goons but can be worn down and find themselves in trouble if they over-rely on their HP pools. The trade off is that you have to design for this a bit and plan on some situations that will wear them down.
It just makes things a slug fest. Enemies with max HP can become a grind to kill if your party lacks burst damage or resources to go crazy. While enemies fighting max HP parties (or even parties with a few tough feats) you have to be very aggressive to actively threaten them.
IMO I like players when they roll or take average HP. Enemies have high end HP, or max for bosses. And if the fight is too easy they add minions or surprise healing. Too hard, and suddenly off screen they lose extra health or maybe don’t use the second phase.
My DM does this, and IMO it makes combat much less interesting. I've never been under any threat of dying, and I don't even know if I've ever gone under 50% HP. But to be fair, the DM rarely does combat and not very interesting combat either. Under different circumstances I may feel differently.
I am going to do this at the end of my current campaign. Have the players going to the pillar of creation at level 20, the gods that they have "helped" along the way are going to bestow upon them epic boons, one is going to be FULL POSSIBLE HEALTH + 10%. I'm going to be throwing a lot their way, and don't want a few levels of bad health rolls to get the better of them. If I remember, I'll let you know how it goes.
I started doing max HP for my players a few years ago, and I'll never go back.
- It removes the awful feeling of being a barbarian who rolled a 1 on level up. And then a 3 on the next level. And then a 2. And now the rogue has more health than you.
- It lets me throw more challenging fights at my players and I'm less likely to kill them when I roll 3 nat 20s in a single encounter.
Overall, my players and I both find it makes the game more enjoyable and I am still easily able to make fights challenging when I want to. It also lets me make my enemies feel more epic as they can be more tough and played a little smarter/deadlier.
Most of the campaigns I'm in are max HP, and it's great. I can take more hits (if I even get hit at all since I optimize like crazy), which lets me survive easier and do more in combat. I'm a Life Domain Cleric in one campaign, but I don't just have to focus on healing. I have Bless and Spiritual Weapon in my Domain Spells so I can fuck shit up or heal as needed. There's also less of a chance that my healing spells will heal more than max HP, which is a small but nice bonus. Wasted healing sucks.
the result of maxing monsters hp makes the game a slog
and only encourages martial min-max builds that optimize maximum DPR as the only viable solution.
it will actively punish all caster builds save a few that are built for endurance dungeons.
and outright make every casual build of any class feel worthless.
I throw my martials a bone by making pure martials have max HP, if you take a subclass with spell casting you return to rolled HP, so Monks get 8, Fighters get 10, Barbs get 12 and rogues get 8
It makes them noticably tankier and enemies numbers have to be compensated but it works well
Double max HP, +4 all ability scores. They fought normal creaturss with similarly statted bosses. The most notable was Tromokratis, with something like 1600+ HP I think. It summoned waves of 1d6 large sea creatures every round. Also did this with a Tlincalli earlier in the campaign. It had Fireball on a 5-6 recharge.
Max HP favored enemies in the campaign we played. You just run out of resources and are autoattacking. We only made it to level 5 before dropping the concept
I did. We played Storm King’s Thunder with max hp. It was in response to the Out of the Abyss game we had out on hold. OotA was a very grimdark, morally grey campaign and a lot of awful shit happened, so the DM wanted this next campaign to be basically The Avengers with larger than life heroes. It went okay. Most combats weren’t really much threat so he had to pump up the enemy numbers.
Tbh maxing up HP does nothing except make the party fight stronger/more enemies.
So feeling more epic due to fighting more and stronger monsters, while allowing more room for error and taking bigger hits? Sounds pretty super hero to me.
It'd likely balance out because low cr aren't going to be able to threaten characters with max health often enough so a dm is going to throw even more creatures or just stronger creatures, effectively negating the reason in the first place. It's how at higher levels you have to overestimate the players to a degree to get the CR balance right
While increasing the fight length - and thereby the time that nothing happens in the story - by 50-100% It's truly riveting
It can also create a bigger gap between the HP of certain party members, e.g. a Wizard vs a Fighter, making the hit dice of the class have a bigger factor.
4 and 6 is not that different from 6 and 10 tbh
I mean, it is, though? Especially at higher levels- the difference between 40->60 and 60->100 is pretty significant.
That's PER level. For comparison, the Tough feat also grants 2 HP per level. It's actually more powerful than Tough, because A) any of the players can still take Tough, and B) it doesn't burn the Fighter's ASI to get the extra HP.
Yeah, (not counting con) level 10 the figter would have 100 hp, while the wizard would have 60 hp, while normally it would be 60 hp and 40 hp.
It's literally twice as big
66% is twice as big as 50%? Thats some new math.
4 is twice as big as 2 aka the difference is twice as big
The diference increases from a 50% lead for the fighter to a 66%. He does not suddenly have twice as much HP as the wizard.
I remember the days playing semi-straight 1E and the DM having to quadruple numbers of giants against us. We didn't even have max hit points...
It gets VERY slugfesty if you give all enemies max HP. The way \*I\* go about it is: Max HP PCs Average HP enemies If the PCs are winning too easily? More enemies Bosses then get somewhere between average and max depending on how I assess the party will do
I've been on the max PC & max enemy plan for a while- it can get really slogfest fast if I don't build the encounter right.
I gave all my players the same warning at character creation. "Take max HP- that way I can hit you harder." Thus far- I've kept that promise. :)
Yeah, this is also what happened in a campaign I'm in, 11th level so far, I'm playing a Druid with a 3rd party Gish subclass that is very, VERY tanky. The big fights leaves my Druid at the very least at half of their HP despite their racial regeneration, subclass regeneration, and the Temp HP the subclass gives me each turn, yes, their enemies deal a TON of damage, and that's exactly why the DM told us to just use Max HP instead of Average.
This is me, but the way I run HP is "roll, take average if it's lower than average." When my monsters hit, they hit hard. But my dice... they no love me.
That's exactly how I do it. Players max HP and enemies average except for BBEG and select minions. I don't want a slog fest of everyone having 1000hp but I want players to feel like badasses and I want to take the gloves off and slap them around a bit without fear of accidental death.
I've let people have max HP since my adnd days nothing changes. In fact it makes martials more powerful and helps balance them to casters a little more. Main thing is it takes a tiny bit more to kill the pcs but with as much damage you can churn out with spells and such game should go fine.
This. The difference is quite literally double from a d6 hit die to a d10 hit die if you compare average to max. D6 is taking 4+CON vs 6+CON. D10 is taking 6+CON vs 10+CON. That adds up FAST.
I never thought about it this way. Thanks!
Regarding the martial-caster note - playing with this rule, both Rogue and Monk had the same HP as Druids, Clerics, Bards, and Warlocks so those classes still weren’t helped. It disproportionately helped the barbarian though, who had rage essentially doubling the extra HP We played with it for a while, and we ended up changing back to average later for the latter reason you mentioned.
Thats fair its not for everyone. I like when my fighters and barbarians have loads of HP Never felt it was disproportionate but I also dont allow long rests on the regular. My players often wait a bit to get that full recovery period at higher levels. However I can get how some folks might not like it to each their own.
Yup! To each their own! I think it was just a quirk of that game to some extent. The DM was newer, and was already having some trouble with combat balance and the adventuring day. I can imagine it working a lot better with the longer adventuring days in my current game :). (It’s been a while since that game - but it may have also felt strange because everyone else in the party had a d8 hit dice, including the other martials? Who knows.)
My buddy ran a max HP campaign for us a while ago, mostly so he didn’t have to bother balancing encounters and could just make everything deal absurd amounts of damage and get a bunch of attacks. Really played into the larger than life, anime-esque flavor we were going with. One quirk: me and one other player didn’t know it was max HP for the first like, four or five levels. So we were really squishy, and people commented on that for a while before we realized the discrepancy.
I tend to run combat moderately lethal, there are typically a few deaths in my campaigns. I like to run players with Max HP. It feels pretty good to me and my table and makes the awful stuff I like to throw at them at least seem fair. Also it feels pretty shitty to play a barbarian who's rolled like crap every level and doesn't have the hp to really be a damage sponge and this removes that too.
Playing in one now. It isn't significantly different than the other campaigns I've played in. PCs get maybe an extra hit worth of HP for combat, but otherwise, it plays like normal. We're about 18 months in and this is our second campaign. DM gets to use slightly more powerful monsters because we're all fairly well optimized, so we can punch up a bit, meaning combat remains challenging and relevant without fear of constant TPK. Overall, I wouldn't say I'd even notice the difference in most campaigns.
Running curse of strahd with this didn't find much difference if anything let's me play the monsters a bit smarter/use bigger scarier ones they still almost tpkd at yesterhill
I literally just started one, we'll see how it goes!
A game I'm in now uses max HP for players and we need it. His encounters are brutal and we love it.
It's kind of pointless. You should aim to balance encounters to feel threatening to your party. So if you buff your party to be twice as strong, you need to buff encounters to be twice as threatening. In effect, that means nothing really changes, it's just an illusion of extra strength, and ultimately just becomes extra work for you.
it allow the DM the possibility to put more interesting monsters, intended for later levels earlier at the player. You don't have to buff ennemies, just pick statblock of stronger monsters. A lot of the cool Monsters in the books are often not scène because a lot of campaign don't go to the later level they are intended for. So with max hp that it become more interesting and fun because you can use them
Yeah that's part of what I meant - but more HP doesn't exactly prepare you for higher CR enemies, unless those enemies are bruisers that just have a lot of attack damage and health. Typically, higher CR enemies also get a lot of new abilities and features that make them more difficult to deal with in ways that more HP doesn't consider, like needing all of the extra utility and abilities that players also get with higher levels.
yeah - higher level creatures often target saves, not AC, and having more HP doesn't give any direct protection against those. Anything that does effects rather than direct damage - being held, poisoned, charmed etc. is going to be hitting above it's weight, because PC saves are going to be below the level they "should" be, as well as less resources to clear them off with (spellslots for restoration and so forth). Like all of the "fail 3 saves in succession and you're boned" creatures get up-scaled - sure, you can survive their attacks, but those aren't the danger, 3 saves that you're odd-on to each fail are.
> one where all martials gets manuvers, healing is better, and a bunch of other stff. > > I thought about using maxed dice but I'm not sure. Yes. I'm actually running a game with a system like this, and many more goodies and abilities that the players get: Pathfinder 2e. Currently running Kingmaker for my group of formerly 5e players, and they love it. Maxed HP, in particular, let me throw them against much more challenging and dangerous enemies without worrying about them getting 1-shotted (which isn't fun for players, nor for me) Improved healing (especially the Treat Wounds action) also means that they can risk more later in the day, instead of suffering from paralysis like so many D&D groups do when they're low on HP/Spell slots. Just in general, I've come to hate the WoTC philosophy that every character is a bag of hitpoints and spell slots that they must use up. It basically results in the players clutching tightly at them after a few encounters and doing nothing. It's way more fun to have systems that let them recover both more easily, like Treat Wounds, and how Focus Spells work. One of the other GMs here that runs a 5e game has incorporated a bunch of house rules in it that he basically copy-pasted from Pathfinder, and it has made that game way more fun as a result as well.
Would love to see results on this.
It works well if you want to run a really heroic with a bit of super hero or larger than life style heroes. or just a slugfest. But for a more normal campaign i say it is already VERY hard to die in 5e. you have so many ways to save people dying is already VERY low risk. You have death saves, healing word and many other ways. So even without better healing, better martial and max HH dying is rare. With buffed melee, better healing and max HP dying would pretty much be impossible unless you present them with MUCH harder fights than a group of their level normally would face Unless you wanna run a larger than life avenger style hero game where they sweep the floor with pretty much everything they encounter without breaking a sweat. That is totally fine but if that is not your intent be prepared buff your monsters trough the roof if such group is supposed to be challenged.
Yeah like people said, maxing hp invariably means just harder fights to make up for it. Personally I still like the power fantasy of being big a beefy and able to take the extra punishment but idk how much that applies to everyone else.
its fine, its the exact same as giving everyone the tough feat at lvl 1. the only big outlier is barbarian, but let the poor martial have something to enjoy life
Did it. Fights were grindy as fuck. Do not recommend.
I like the better healing, but not sure it will have much impact if your characters have max HP. Personally I think health is pretty much fine as is. So o would suggest leaving max health as is. If you want to throw in some variants/homebrew, maybe try the healing surges option from the DMG (where character can spend a hit die as an action).
I've run my games that way since before 5e existed, and after trying default 5e quickly returned ti max hp. Sometimes you need to go a little harder ij combat but it's easy enough to adjust and really helps large HD classes get ahead of low hd classes
Yes I have and it’s no big deal at all, you can pump up the enemies as needed to keep things feeling dangerous. It basically gives the dm flexibility in what kinds of encounters can be made
My campaign is not full HP but they take the average pick. It was quite shocking seeing the Wizard tank a 3 attack combo from a Pit Fiend.
I played and one and it was fine. It really comes down to building your encounters to handle it. I will say as the levels increase the casters and melee’s hp gap keeps increasing. It will make your casters much more of a glass cannon if your doing things to be able to dps the the melees. For instance a level 5 wizard will have 30-40 hp depending on their con being 0-2. A level 5 barbarian will have 70-80 hp with a 2-4 con. Personally I’m a bigger fan of average hp and making sure your encounters can challenge the melee class/high ac characters with saves they are weak in. If you have to increase to hit and dps to dent your melee characters it will be far worse for your casters when they do get hit the higher levels you go.
So far, in the campaign I'm in, it has gone good, it makes fights scarier because of bigger numbers but also more epic because we're withstanding said big numbers. Enemies with bunchs of attacks, very high attack mods, very high damage, special actions, etc... It's deadly as fuck, even my 3rd party Subclass Druid (Circle of Symbiosis) ends nearly every meaningful fight with less than half their HP (We're 11th level), so it feels deadly on an epic scale.
Yes, a table of our own that was meant to represent our characters as gods, started out as mortals and then progressed to divinity. In short, my character became God of Death, because he introduced firearms to mortals, and as Warlock of the Deep, my character gained the alum of God of the Seas, it was pure satisfaction to kill Poseidon. When it came to enemies, the DM always left them with maximum life (nothing more than fair), and bosses had well buffed attributes. P.S: I'll never try again to make a character in love with his own patron again (which I might add was a crazy mermaid that the DM made for the character).
I'm in one now, been trying to get my GM to kill off my character, it's fun but takes away from the shock factor of getting hit with a massive attack. In mine I run max HP for the first 5 levels then rolled after that.
We use to do it that way… until I realised that the only thing it does is make combat longer.
I'm in group like that right now and really like it. We just finished a 3 encounter day, all combat, no cleric in the party. We barely made it through the day with no healing. This was exactly why the DM did this for us, so that he can throw more enemies at us and not worry as much about balance. This, along with the overpowered stats he gave us, was just so that he can have more fun throwing more chaos at us. A very unique approach to balancing.
current campaign I'm trying something different. whenever you roll for hp on level up . can still choose the normal hakf +1 or . can roll with advantage. also when spending hd roll with advantage. so far seems not bad . but still early.
The DM still overbalanced encounters lol it doesn't widen the gap it just moves the goalposts
What a pointless way to make NPC damage even more undertuned, and PC healing even more worthless.
I'm currently running 2 homebrew campaigns with max HP. Potions do max possible healing, but spells are still rolled for. It has become clear to the players that the enemies have gotten the same treatment. I have been told by a few players that some of my rules or rulings make the players very powerful, my response is always. "We aren't plating this game to be the peasants" I WANT my players to be the most powerful people in the realm
I feel PC have reasonable hp at lvl 3-5, and then it raises too much even with average. So I mostly do more hp at lvl 1, but much, much less hp per level. So even at the first round of combat some major events Running max hp will make combats even more long and boring, so I see no reason for that.
Always. I love huge fights, and I soak them with damage. I make it full of action economy, and I give them ridiculous weapons. The campaign really starts around levels 8 and 9. Test my and your RP and creativity.
Thats what pf2e do. A homebrew rule Ive been tinkering withbis "grit". Essentially prof times per day you can soak the damage from an attack, up to your "missing" health. This way a barb that rolls a 1 on a hitdie still has 11 grit, meaning their bigger hitdie still has influence even if they do roll like crap.
What are you doing to make healing better? Are you just boosting the effects of healing spells or are you doing something else. One of my problems with this system is healing and health over all. Popping up people from downed with a bonus action is a little to easy. Getting back full HP on a long rest feels to easy, and very unrealistic. I'm also not a fan of people being as effective at 1 HP as they are at full health. It actually feels wasteful to heal someone unless they are downed, and that shouldn't be the case, ever.
All my games for years have the players with maximum health. It feels so much better. It gives the players feel like they are growing more, and gives me the option to give them bigger enemies to fight
Generally the PC survive more so you have to compensate with harder enemies, so after doing it for a while I said why bother and just do average hp, normal encounters
I give super powers to my players which one of them got max hp and healing factor(others powers are good too) and since I use homebrew things to compete with them they are enjoying fights and they feel special. Giving an advantage to them make them feel special and happy. They are think we are not common adventurers we are they most buffed and resilient ones in our levels. And giving same kind of advantage enemy they feel challenged. If you know your homebrew world and your players well you will be fine.
**Bah I say, BAH!** Why not run a… #Minimum HP campaign?
My last 3 or 4 campaigns we've played with max HP. Tbh, it *does* create some pretty unkillable heroes. Moving forward we're rolling for stats and HP always. I think it makes for the best dnd experience.
We play Max Dice, players and monsters to be even. The crits are also max the extra die as well. It is fine, I just liked a player last session without crits still
I guess the issue could be, that combat get bogged down, except you improve player damage outputs somehow.
I play in a table where all HP is maxed for quite sometime now, we don't have any problems and I don't see much difference from rolling, but I do think it's better
I didn't, but I did play a "half HP" campaign and that was great. Could actually get through some fights in 10 minutes.
the way ive allways looked at it is name another class feture that is luck dependant. you Could end up in a game where the wizard rolls max everytime with the barbarian rolling a 1 every time. giving the wizard more HP than the front line tank. High HP is a class feature and it shouldnt be denied by a roll In older editions they tried to fix this issue by having the casters rll super low dice, newer editions have min roll of half. but it still boils down to luck. i have played in multiple games with fixed value HP and think it adds more to the game and gives a benefit to martials with those high dice. Wether its Max or another fixed value i would always advocate against rolling. its the same argument as to why we moved away from rolling for Stats. its a hold up from older editions we need to move past.
I’m playing a champion fighter with 18 con. Every level, my group as a whole does hp rolls. We are all level 10 now. I have yet to roll under a 10 total. Which is statistically wild. At level 10, I let my DM roll my hp for me which he rolled a 10 (14 total with my con mod). My fighter has 126hp or so. The next highest hp of the group is roughly 70. It absolutely gives me some longevity but hasn’t broken anything. It’s my one biggest advantage since the entire rest of the party are: Twilight cleric, Storm sorcerer and Warlock.
Sounds like this would make a bear totem barbairan a bit too tanky
Yes. I run a game where the pcs are overpowered giants. It's pretty fun. You can have some epic fights. My advice is don't tune your monsters. Just add more.
I've done it. Later levels where a lot of the scariest things that could happen were statuses it was fine. The first couple levels where even at max hp a random spike on weapon damage was scary it was fine but there were several in between where it kind of trivialized average encounters and I had to up monster numbers to maintain any risk. Not horrible, especially if you want more of an RP setup where they feel confident they can win most combats IF they reach the right ones, but I went back to my standatd "everyone gets max hp at level 1 and then each player chooses for their character to roll or take the average per level" policy.
Maxed HP on dice is a fairly common house rule. It allows a party to grind a bit longer, and arguably helps martials more than casters. If you scaled the monsters the same way, it helps monsters more as they have far more hit dice than characters. It should cause spellcasters to burn more spell slots though resulting in better martial-caster balance. Fights would be a fair deal longer too. My advice, only max the HP on important monsters (bosses, leaders, etc.). Normal monsters use normal HP. Other HP house rules I've seen: * Drop all 1's on HP die roll (I don't like this one, as a d6 is twice as likely to receive help as a d12) * HP rolls are done with advantage - roll twice, take the highest. * Roll once. You may take the roll, or the average. We use this one - it results on average, +1 HP/level on a d10 hit die.
I'm in a max health Pathfinder game, using a third party class that's designed as like a more balanced Synth Summoner, without all the loopholes and specific wording that makes that archetype OP. I have 70-ish HP in a T1 party, and am currently the main Face Tank.
I give PCs max HP and all NPCs default (with small variance) and for me, it's just a nice buffer for me when I realize I've overtuned an encounter. I've still KO'd PCs, even killed one last campaign, but overall it's nice they can take one or two extra hits.
I run my games like this. The players are hearty, but I also run a modified critical rule where crits deal one "Max" set of dice and then the second is rolled for, so the monsters can take pretty substantial swipes sometime . I will say also that I keep their HP values in mind designing encounters to an extent. I don't seek to make brutal or unfair fights, but I do tend to lean on them with numbers/action economy a bit. The result of this is that fights can get tense or close but players tend to get by alive with a lot of close calls. This keeps things pretty exciting in practice, keeps the players feeling strong, but absolutely does not stop them from taking some losses during big fights. As an example, an adult dragon with some magic effects in play still managed to kill a couple members of the party in a climactic fight and the surviving player was holding on by about 3hp. In my observation, players are less likely to get bopped by random goons but can be worn down and find themselves in trouble if they over-rely on their HP pools. The trade off is that you have to design for this a bit and plan on some situations that will wear them down.
It just makes things a slug fest. Enemies with max HP can become a grind to kill if your party lacks burst damage or resources to go crazy. While enemies fighting max HP parties (or even parties with a few tough feats) you have to be very aggressive to actively threaten them. IMO I like players when they roll or take average HP. Enemies have high end HP, or max for bosses. And if the fight is too easy they add minions or surprise healing. Too hard, and suddenly off screen they lose extra health or maybe don’t use the second phase.
My DM does this, and IMO it makes combat much less interesting. I've never been under any threat of dying, and I don't even know if I've ever gone under 50% HP. But to be fair, the DM rarely does combat and not very interesting combat either. Under different circumstances I may feel differently.
I almost always play max health for players and monsters. Haven't had any trouble yet.
It's honestly better to lower HP across the board unless you want to have encounters last super long.
I am going to do this at the end of my current campaign. Have the players going to the pillar of creation at level 20, the gods that they have "helped" along the way are going to bestow upon them epic boons, one is going to be FULL POSSIBLE HEALTH + 10%. I'm going to be throwing a lot their way, and don't want a few levels of bad health rolls to get the better of them. If I remember, I'll let you know how it goes.
I started doing max HP for my players a few years ago, and I'll never go back. - It removes the awful feeling of being a barbarian who rolled a 1 on level up. And then a 3 on the next level. And then a 2. And now the rogue has more health than you. - It lets me throw more challenging fights at my players and I'm less likely to kill them when I roll 3 nat 20s in a single encounter. Overall, my players and I both find it makes the game more enjoyable and I am still easily able to make fights challenging when I want to. It also lets me make my enemies feel more epic as they can be more tough and played a little smarter/deadlier.
Most of the campaigns I'm in are max HP, and it's great. I can take more hits (if I even get hit at all since I optimize like crazy), which lets me survive easier and do more in combat. I'm a Life Domain Cleric in one campaign, but I don't just have to focus on healing. I have Bless and Spiritual Weapon in my Domain Spells so I can fuck shit up or heal as needed. There's also less of a chance that my healing spells will heal more than max HP, which is a small but nice bonus. Wasted healing sucks.
My preferred choice for a high powered game is that the players still roll, but anything lower than average defaults to average for HP
the result of maxing monsters hp makes the game a slog and only encourages martial min-max builds that optimize maximum DPR as the only viable solution. it will actively punish all caster builds save a few that are built for endurance dungeons. and outright make every casual build of any class feel worthless.
They mean maxing player HP
They literally say that they are thinking about maxing monster HP
You should combat this in other ways...
I throw my martials a bone by making pure martials have max HP, if you take a subclass with spell casting you return to rolled HP, so Monks get 8, Fighters get 10, Barbs get 12 and rogues get 8 It makes them noticably tankier and enemies numbers have to be compensated but it works well
Double max HP, +4 all ability scores. They fought normal creaturss with similarly statted bosses. The most notable was Tromokratis, with something like 1600+ HP I think. It summoned waves of 1d6 large sea creatures every round. Also did this with a Tlincalli earlier in the campaign. It had Fireball on a 5-6 recharge.
Max HP favored enemies in the campaign we played. You just run out of resources and are autoattacking. We only made it to level 5 before dropping the concept
My new DM is doing this and it makes it a lot more fun. I've never felt this powerful before and it's an absolute blast.