Here's a Reddit thread with a DM talking about how they've not tracked monster hitpoints for ages. They say they've actually just been making it up on the spot in response to some 'softer' mechanical considerations and doing what comes naturally to the fight's narrative. I came across this via a Twitter thread, which also has some interesting thoughts on the topic.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I've written previously on here about the tools I think D&D* equips its players with and doesn't vs fiction-first TTRPGs. (A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D & Fiction-First TTRPGs.) Some loosely ordered thoughts:
- I ran a Monster of the Week game a few weeks back, and anecdotally found it much easier to turn out a really satisfying final battle with little prep and no on-the-spot maths vs D&D.
- Obviously those two games have many more general differences that factor in to that.
- I wrote a Twitter thread last year about boss monster design in D&D. On the one hand, I actively enjoyed that calibration process and it lead to something very tailored for the group and produced a battle with a good narrative 'shape'. On the other, it was still a bunch of work.
- The thread gets into the topic of game balance in D&D, which I know is a somewhat vexed issue. Personally, this has never been a huge issue at the tables I've run or played at. Not that there haven't been issues of balance in either direction, but they've been things that actually haven't mattered in their presentation, or that we've felt equipped to deal with as a set of concrete, specific problems (much easier to address vs systemically).
- Reading that thread back shows me the ways in which its hitting the same point -- a lot of the design I'm doing in there isn't about arbitrary difficulty numbers as much as specific narrative or pacing or feeling effects. Which I think is 100% right. Those are the things people remember, and they are artefacts of how the crunchy mechanical numbers work (I guess c.f. Layers of Ruleson that).
- It reminds me also of pseudo-randomness in games. I'm going from memory here, but e.g. the experience of missing multiple 95% to-hit chance shots in XCOM feels disproportionately terrible and unfair relative to how probability actually works. So, the system nudges things slightly, and temporarily increases the chances of hitting (in a way not surfaced to the player) if this happens repeatedly.
- I'm sure there are other examples of this style of randomness, where it works like people think it should feel rather than how regular probability feels.
- I think if you asked most people if they wanted this or 'real' unbiased probability in their games, they'd pick the latter. And maybe awareness of it would make it feel less bad. But I think they'd have more fun in the first case [where that was deemed necessary to include by the designers to make the game play better. Sort of by definition.]
- And that doesn't seem remotely like a bad thing to me if it makes the game feel better. Obviously not the right thing in all instances, and it depends on what people are getting out of those games, but: a big part of a game designer or game master's job is to make the game feel good in the right ways.
- Which doesn't actually mean 'giving the players what they want', possibly ever. It's about figuring out what the players think they want, then what they actually want, and finding ways to deliver that.
- Compare that with always giving players the narrative outcome they want. Sometimes that's great, and I think a lot of people would tell you that's what they want. But the best outcomes are those where you don't get what you want, but something else that's surprising but stil feels earned within the game itself.