IT ONLY HAS 16 HP



So a forum member on apocalypse­world.com asks about monster strength:

"Also, lets take the Purple Worm. It's GINORMOUS but it has 20 HP and 2 Armor

whereas the Elemental had like 27. What is to keep a few good swipes of sword from killing this

giant beast?" "...why not make a Purple Worm have 250 HP? or even 2000HP?"

This was the response:

We've all played ages of video games and 'classic' RPGs (with the classic fantasy tropes)

where we're taught that fighting the monster is a matter of just doing enough papercuts that it

falls down while living long enough to do so (the WoW or Final Fantasy model).

But in Tolkien Smaug wasted a village, killed thousands, but was killed by a single

arrow placed correctly in a missing scale.

Think of these fights more in terms of literature and pacing instead of the classic 'they

have X hp and we have to swing Y times with Q hits to drop it'. The problem in this context is

that there is no accounting for fiction, this is a mechanical solution (a simulation) of a sword

doing consistent damage, and scaling monster HP to allow for the same tool (swing) to be

applied to every problem (monster).

I had this problem. I did a quadruple take when I read that a DRAGON has 16 hit points

(a level 1 ranger can do that on a max damage roll). However let me describe a fight to you and

maybe this will give you the 'inkling' of what's happening.

So the party needed a magic item, and they researched and found that a hero wielding

said item was slain by a dragon. They get some info from a different dragon's

drake­in­human­form servant, and go and steal said item. Remember, magic in this world doesn't

mean 'magic' in the +'s sense, but this spear can pierce souls and is thus necessary to defeat a

sorcerer king. Ok, so we have a very angry dragon about to attack something. 16 hp again ­

The party is riding back into town ready for a nice hot bath, some resupplies (their

rations were running low), and a re­focus on hunting down the sorcerer king. The moon goes out

for a second, they feel the wind shift, and then something lands on city hall with a massive crack.

They have a few seconds to blink before they see a serpentine head snake down and shred a

guardsman in mail in a single hit (announce future badness, this is the 'messy' tag). They kick up

the speed and head towards town. I plop down paper, and quickly draw some snaking streets,

sketch out some boxy houses, plop down a big die to represent the dragon. As they're about to

walk in, I pick up a handful of red tokens, and describe the inhalation they feel from this far, and

the words in dragon­speech, and basically drop a pile of red on town and explain it's on fire and

how the flames themselves are being shaped and commanded by the dragon.

Their horses freak. They manage to get off (a few taking some damage from a panicked

horse running and one being hit by a branch). They start advancing through this hellish

landscape, where an inconsistent shadow would swoop down and split someone in half, and

people burning to death beg for mercy and help while holding swaddled children turning to ash

The group starts to help the townsfolk (this is not a magical node, so the wizard can't just

ritual up some rain) when a building shatters with the landing of a 4­5 ton creature, and it opens

up it's pipes, it's golden eyes burning and it's metal hide resonates with a roar (terrifying).

Their charges scatter, the PC's have to defy their own terror to attack the thing. They do

negligible damage (yay 4 armor) for those that DO anything, and realize that the only person

who has a shot at killing this is the armor­penetrating wizard spells. Unfortunately, so does the

What ensues is horrific. One fighter takes up defensive position, when the dragon strikes

it doesn't just do 1d10+5 damage, it rips off his arm (messy remember?) and shreds mail like

tissue paper. It does breath weapon attacks that cause ALL of them to defy danger or burn.

The party breaks and runs. The dragon laughs and settles to ash the village and eat any

The Dragon had 16 hit points. The party did 9 to it before they left. And when I said left,

I mean they ran like rabbits into the night with few provisions, no easy means of recovering

them, and no thoughts in their heads other than survival.

The moral of the story is it's not about the hitpoints. In my 4e game the party had a

dozen dragon kills under their belt. The dragons were mechanically threatening, they were

tricksy, they were tactical, but their claws and teeth didn't do damage, they did numbers. After

this session they explained that they had never been so scared of a monster.

Make the fights epic. Use the fiction. Describe their skin curling black from fire. The

bones shattering from the unyielding stone grasp of the earth elemental. Most fights clean up the

fiction by saying you take 5 damage. Make it stick, make it hard to heal, make them scarred and

battle hardened having earned every mark, and every wound a story.

You don't need 2500 hp to make a fight scary or hard.