Minion concept expanded

My printed copy of Dark Fantasy X is out for delivery, so I should get it later today. Sigh. Sadly, I'm now considering a radical alternative to some details in my monster list. Although perhaps this is better as an alternative than as a default anyway.

I've been watching a lot of the early Dungeon Craft YouTube videos in the background while finishing up my work for the year before the holiday starts (officially this afternoon is my last moment of work! Whoop!) Although we do have some differences here and there—he's very sold on a lot of early D&D stuff for system although we both don't really care that much about system and run the game basically the same, while I don't like those systems all that much—and he really likes terrain and I prefer not to use it (although he also recognizes that for many situations, terrain doesn't work in game, and I do like terrain for its own sake, even though I prefer not to use it during the game.) The reality is that we play and run the game almost identically, which is kind of a funny coincidence given those differences and others. Although I've been watching him for many months when he uploads a new video, I never really got into his back catalog of early videos before, so I didn't actually realize this until just now. 

But occasionally he's reached an epiphany about a minor issue here and there that never occurred to me. So, while I heartily endorse the minion concept (monsters that die when hit, regardless of damage) and I also heartily endorse what I sometimes flippantly call Schrödinger's hit points for enemies; i.e., just as the combat is starting to flag and become a little tedious, right as the fun factor peaks, the next hit kills it and ends the combat—I hadn't really quite cottoned on to the idea of replacing enemy hit points with hits. 

This is an expansion of the minion concept. If a minion dies with one hit, regardless of damage, minor sub-bosses can die with two or three hits, regardless of damage. In fact, you can scale this up as far as you want. Cthulhu himself, who has 200 hit points in my monster list, could be converted to a twenty or twenty five hit monster. Not that anyone's going to hit him that many times (if at all) before dying. But you get my drift. If a dragon has 75 hit points, I could convert that into hits, by using the concept that an average damage roll by a player character is—what about 10 hit point or so, flexing up or down by about 3-4 based on level and party composition. A dragon therefore has 7-8 hits, and going to all of the trouble of calculating hit points as they go down is probably more trouble than it's really worth. Does it really matter if my averages are a little off and the dragon needs one or two more or less hits to be killed? No, not at all.

So, this alternative, which I think is best to just do as a GM thing and not really tell the players too much about, will do exactly that; monsters hit points can be converted to hits. There are two ways to do this; convert their hit dice to hits, regardless of the actual hit dice, or simply divide the hit point total by 10 and round up or down, depending on taste. The results between the two methods will be pretty different; that same dragon with 75 hit points has 15d8 HD, which means it would have 15 hits. Because d8 is the most commonly used hit dice, and the average of a d8 roll is 5, that means that using the hit dice vs using the divide by 10 method will give you pretty different results; the divide by 10 is obviously going to give you only half as many hits as what is effectively divide by 5. The point, however, is that neither of these is the "correct" way to convert hit points to hits, both are merely reference points. Exactly how many hits you want to get out of your hit points are going to be up to you. In general, I'd suggest that shorter, faster combats are—with rare exceptions—better than longer ones, however. I'd recommend using the divide by 10 method, and then throwing a couple extra hits on top of that if it seems too low for what you're looking for.

Anytime a player character rolls a critical hit, or otherwise rolls in the top 20% or so of his damage range, count 2 hits rather than one. Stefan Clevenger, a 4th level fighter iconic character, for instance, has a 1d8+6 damage range with his longsword. That means that his damage range is 7-14 on a successful hit, with an average of about 11½. Stefan's player, when fighting enemies in game, will roll his damage normally, but a GM who has taken the hits vs hit points shortcut will consider all hits as simply one hit against a monster, unless he rolls a total of 13-14, or gets a critical hit, in which case it will count as 2 hits. If he's fighting, and I picked this monster more or less at random, an elf (sidhe lord) who has 8d8 hit dice, and 40 hit points, I—as the GM—would first have to decide if I wanted a quick or long option, or somewhere in between. The eight hit dice and forty hit points can be converted to 4 hits, 8 hits, or somewhere in between to strike a middle balance. Let's say for the same of argument that I'm going the fast combat style (which is more likely); I'd have the Sidhe Lord have 4 hits. A damage roll of 13 would be two hits.

You can see that the math here is a bit on the loosie-goosey side, which is why it's probably better as a behind the scenes GM shortcut and an alternate rather than a default in the rules. How many hits does this sidhe lord have? Four? Six? Eight? That's a DM decision that needs to be made on the fly as combat starts. Maybe it can even be altered in the middle of combat if it makes the combat more fun. Again, just don't tell the players exactly how the sausage is made behind the screen, though. If you pick four hits and a damage roll of 13 causes two hits, that's the equivalent of turning your damage roll of 13 into 20. Again, a bit loosie-goosey, and don't let the sausage factory come into view.

But it's a great tool for GMs to improve the efficiency and ease of use of the game. Here's the real secret; those hit points that all entries have in the monsters and other foes section? I just made them up in the first place, and then I arbitrarily changed a bunch of them as part of a redesign later. They're not heavily play-tested, and even if they were, they don't represent some magical truth. It's just a number. I've been in too many games (both computer games and regular RPGs) where combats just dragged on. The outcome was not in question, but there was nobody with a sense of editing who could fast-forward through the tedious part of getting there. Even I, as the designer of the game (kitbasher would be a more fair description) can't tell you the "correct" or optimal number of hits to take down a monster. It varies from game to game, and even within the same game, from encounter to encounter. Use your judgement as the GM to optimize each of your own combats. 

And one tool to make that a bit easier is to convert hit points to hits for many if not most of your combats; an extension of the minion principle even to monsters that have more hit points than, say, a goblin would.