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Show damage or not?

Discussion in 'Pathfinder' started by Lonewolf147, Feb 28, 2017.

  1. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    I'm curious, when you run your games, do you prefer to let the players see the health of the enemies, or leave it a mystery until it dies (or they do a proper Heal check)?

    Lately I've been keeping it hidden. It seems to leave more to the imagination with it that way, and the anxiety level of the group goes up. Why didn't that Zombie drop from the 12 points I just dealt it, when they've always dropped with less than 10?! Bwahahahaha
     
    #1 Lonewolf147, Feb 28, 2017
  2. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    I don't like to keep it hidden as it keeps the players from being able to see the current state of the party, and the party should know how hurt they are. Now if you could hide the damage of the monsters, but still let the PCs see how hurt each other is, I'd be all over that. In that case I'd stick a status marker on the ones that had taken damage.
     
    #2 Tay-Dor, Feb 28, 2017
  3. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    You can show players and hide moysters. One of the options is to hide all except Party and Dead/Dying. You just have to make sure the party is set to the Party group.
     
    #3 Lonewolf147, Mar 1, 2017
  4. owlbear

    owlbear Administrator
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    In my own games I use the show numbers and health bars to account for the "free" heal skill check a player would make to assess the battlefield.

    It's worth keeping in mind that our players characters are probably a lot better at judging where to place a blow or heal then our players themselves. Giving this meta data helps to allow players to see a character perspective of the battle. It would be kind of cool to only provide this output to specific players -- but I'm avoiding add new features to the feature request list at the moment :)
     
    #4 owlbear, Mar 1, 2017
  5. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    I could see the use to make the damage visible to specific characters. Wouldn't really work for my group though, since we all sit around the living room looking at the same map on the TV and a couple shared laptops. :p Although the heal check is indeed free, I see it that the character needs to have some knowledge of the monster too, else, how can you accurately tell if you're doing damage to it or not?
     
    #5 Lonewolf147, Mar 1, 2017
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