D&D Next Monsters: Part 13: Rebooting The Math: Hitpoint Review

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Wherein Surf reboots monster hitpoints....

Reworking monster hitpoints was also relatively easy.

Hit Points

Scaling Up

HP vs PC Damage - Current

HP vs PC Damage - Derived

HP vs PC Damage - Power

Under further analysis the HP progression of Normal creatures still seemed appropriate. Initially a Normal monster will take 1.04x of standard PC damage (aka StdDmg) to go down. This makes them pretty easy for any modestly damage-focused PC to take out. By level 5 they are up to 1.53x StdDam, reaching 2.0 at level 15 and 2.14 at level 20. If we extend this trend out to level 25 we get 2.26. While this progression is appropriate I have made a minor correction to my previous Normal formula based on further analysis. This is simply a byproduct of marrying up formula with derived results.

The key to revising this data is a Power based curve for the Monster_HP:PC_Damage ratio. Building this out appropriately was not a difficult task. And from this it was fairly easy to match an appropriate Power formula to the final curve.

Scaling Out

Where I feel Hitpoints need some tuning is in the modifiers for Tough and Solo creatures. Based on their XP a Tough is "worth" just under two Normal creatures, with a Solo being "worth" four Normal critters. Yet the HP multiplier for a Tough appears to be 1.5 and for a Solo seems to be 2.0. Now I get that making these multipliers 2.0 and 4.0, respectively, can cause problems. Who really wants to simply whack away at a sack of hitpoints forever, right? And as monsters scale up they accumulate an increasing suite of resistances, immunities and other mitigations. But even so the multipliers for scaling out are obviously quite low. This is one of the reasons that higher level monsters feel comparatively weaker. So I've conservatively increased these multipliers.

 

Hitpoints
Level	Easy	Normal	Tough	Solo
1	4	10	18	25
2	7	18	31	44
3	10	24	43	61
4	12	31	54	77
5	15	37	64	92
6	17	43	75	107
7	19	48	85	121
8	22	54	94	135
9	24	59	104	148
10	26	65	113	161
11	28	70	122	174
12	30	75	131	187
13	32	80	140	200
14	34	85	148	212
15	36	90	157	224
16	38	94	165	236
17	40	99	174	248
18	42	104	182	260
19	43	109	190	271
20	45	113	198	283
21	47	118	206	294
22	49	122	214	306
23	51	127	222	317
24	52	131	230	328
25	54	136	237	339

For the reader's convenience I have included a full hitpoints table to the left that corresponds to the derived/power formulas.

Formulae:

• HP (derived) = (1.04 x Level ^ 0.24) * (9.581 x Level ^ 0.57065)
• HP (Power) = 10 x Level ^ 0.81
• Easy HP = HP x 0.40
• Tough HP = HP x 1.75
• Solo HP = HP x 2.50

 

 

Check back in a few days for the Attack Bonus reboot...