Another HP thread and what we do about it at my table.

Dungeon World is an amazing game breathing life into a genre that Wizards of the Coast have done their best to squeeze the life out of. There is, however, one area what DW is, to be frank, ass backwards/completely wrong - and that is the are of HP and the philosophy surrounding them.

"The best answer here is that fighting a dragon is harder because the dragon is fictionally stronger. Just stabbing a dragon with a normal blade isn’t hack and slash because a typical blade can’t hurt it."

I totally get that. Dragons and fabulous monsters are dangerous because, fictionally, they have extraordinary powers and abilities. Dragons can blast you with fire, fly, and are big enough to have lots and lots of reach on you. Thats what makes them dangerous, powerful, and interesting to fight. But lets really cash out that example. Rogar the fighter and his daring company, in an effort to defeat a terrible and powerful dragon, quest far and wide to assemble the ingredients necessary to enchant/craft/find a blade potent enough to pierce the dragons plate-mail like hide. No normal blade could POSSIBLE harm this great and terrible beast... but now, after a long and perilous journey Rogar has a weapon that... will STILL kill the dragon in one only marginally lucky hit. Now THAT violates the fiction of MY world. That would be like me going up to a whale, stabing it with a stake knife, and it dying instantly.

The fictional powers of monsters make them interesting and terrifying combats but in a system where HP exists AT ALL ultimately fiction and math will collide. It simply makes no sense that a terryfing and epic beast can be slain in essentially two shots - after all the questing to discover a weapon that will harm it, after all the trouble and the zig-zagging of even approaching the beast you're telling me that I'm going to drop such an enormous creature so easily? I think we're off the rails here.

HP should be an abstraction, a measure of how much punishment a creature can take - how many mistakes they can make before they fall. Surely, a tough as nails creature is capable of surviving several, if not tens of blows before falling. Dungeon World currently does not have HP system that supports this idea - it violates its own principle. A fictional dragon is going to survive plenty of blows before it goes down (Unless your magical weapon kills it instantly, which, IMO, is a really shitty/anti-climactic fiction).

So what do I do about it...? I just use the HP listed in the 3.5 D&D Monster manual. Creatures like gnolls, goblins and orcs have very similar HP and other monsters my players are interested in fighting stand to present a battle where more than 2 blows are traded with the BBEG. Everything else about dungeon world is rock solid, IMO. This is just one house rule that we use at my table and the reasoning behind it.

It seemed to work fine for Sigurd.

It seemed to work fine for Sigurd.

While I pretty much agree with those who talk about literary monsters being defeated in one or two blows (Bard and Smurg, for example), I would point out that a tabletop game with a team of four or five characters needs slightly different pacing to a book where all attention is on one protagonist making that single, fateful blow.

Maybe 16 HP is still enough; if it's not, my ballpark figure would be HP equal to the combined average damage of each character.

I agree, If you go to all that trouble for the uber weapon then why not have it instant kill? The fiction of the fight will still require some work to get said weapon into a position to be used in the first place, it's not like you just walk up and poke the dragon with it.

On pacing: I have no issue letting one person be 'the' hero, if not of the campaign, then certainly of the moment. There will be other adventures, and I'll get my shot in the spotlight.

My default is this: It's your game. If you change the HP of your Dragon, the RPG police will not show up at your house and issue you a ticket. :)

I'm much more interested in the move the Dragon makes if and when Rogar manages to fictionally position himself to engage in deadly melee with said dragon and fails his hack and slash roll.

No dragon slayer worth their salt takes more than one blow to kill a dragon.

When I'm running DW I don't use hit points for monsters/NPC's. I don't know that my system is very reproducable but here's what I do.
I consider the following when a character attacks:
- Weapon type
- Class Damage Die
- Player narrative of the attack
- Opponent's armor/toughness/abilities

From there I "follow the fiction". In general the better the player description the more "damage" a hit inflicts (damage being the way I describe the hit's effect). If the character does more damage on a 12+ (fighters) more "damage" is inflicted.

In my mind I basically think in terms of how many "awesome" (12+), "good" (10+), or "mediocre" (7 - 9) attacks a creature can withstand (most creatures can take a couple "good" attacks).  I also make sure that all "damage" is vividly described and has a "visible" affect on the creature. In general mooks and minions drop with a successful attack. Creatures on par with the PC's drop after 2 or 3 attacks. Big bads take enough hits to make the fight interesting but not so many as to drag an encounter past the point of excitement and into "lather, rinse, repeat".

Having said that, at the end of the day I ultimately make creatures as durable as they need to be in order to produce a fun and challenging experience for the players.

It's a totally valid point: the fantasy "genre" encompasses a lot of different styles, and individual groups just increase the possible playstyles further. If your campaign is all about long, knock down drag out battles, then by all means make your dragon appropriate to the world you've all created. That might mean it's tougher than the gods and requires days of battle to wear down. It might mean that it dies in a single mighty blow from an ancient blade. All that matters is that you stay true to the world your group has established.

One big risk, though, is that you're denying players what they've worked for. Never do that. It's not your job as GM to make your dragon easier or more difficult because you want the fight to run a certain way. It's your job to facilitate a world where the characters can form reasonable expectations about what they're facing and plan accordingly. If they've been told the Mighty Dragonblade will kill the thing instantly, then by god don't rob them if they hit a 10+. If you've built up this battle to be a long affair and a couple lucky rolls end it quickly, then you're obligated to play fair and give the PCs what their luck and skill has earned them. Otherwise the system is just window dressing and it's all really fiat.

Just be honest, that's the core of it. Everything else is cool!

Good point Scrape.

One thing I've learned over the years is to stop having preconceived notions about a fight, especially when running Dungeon World. Monsters and NPC's are so easy to come up with on the fly that I could care less about how quickly a creature dies. Also, instead of focusing on how tough a specific creature is, I focus on the overall encounter. When I want the encounter to be more difficult I don't just throw higher stat monsters at the PC's. Instead I do things like; use more creatures, fill the area with hazards, crazy environmental effects, and forcing the PC's to focus on objectives other than combat itself (rescue or protect an NPC, stop a ritual, etc.).

In general whenever I want to up the challenge level of an encounter I force the PC's to make more rolls. I find that this is the "secret" of Dungeon World, the more the PC's roll dice the more potential moves the GM can make and the more difficult the encounter! My players have picked up on this and I've noticed that DW is the first game I've ever run where players stop and think for a moment before rolling the dice. In other games players tend to make check after check because oftentimes there is no price for failure; for example, six people making a Knowledge check to figure something out. If that happened in DW my group would never get to the sixth roll after I had made five "hard moves" against them!

All true, Reno! Those are great tricks for increasing or decreasing difficulty.

As a side note, I wanna reiterate that adjusting difficulty is something you do because the fiction demands it, not because you wanted a more pr less climactic fight. That's essentially pre-writing the story. If your players ace their rolls and use good strategy to defeat the big bad, they earned it! If they are scattershot and rolling poorly and suddenly a couple kobolds become a Big Deal, you're not obligated to lessen the blow. That's emergent storytelling's at its best!

But if you've got this image of The Black Knight as a true force of nature, a challenge for the mighty, and he's not shaping up that way... THAT'S when you gotta readjust. Clearly, you messed up in your portrayal, so fix it. Maybe you let them charge in with a hack and slash when really, in the group's established fiction, The Black Knight laughs at such foolhardy tactics. Be honest with the players, like "hmmm, this dude is a legend, right? Does anyone else feel like I'm making him into a pushover? I feel like he can easily deflect a wild blow, right? Fighter, tell me how you caught him off guard like that..."

So you're not punishing them for success. You're honestly portraying the world; that's your job. (Reno, clearly you get this. I'm making it explicit for people reading who might not realize this stuff yet)

And what about the Dragon that have already received a few dozen hit ? Do you think another weak hit should drop it ? You see, DW has a mechanic for that. When your characters land a hit on him even with this all powerful sword, you can decide that your Dragon doesn't receive any damage, but he get more angry and start to open himself for the few decisive strike that will put a fitting end to an epic fight. 

Remember, it's your game ! You do what you want with it as long as when the characters succeed at the moves they make, you describe how their succes IS a success.

One way to do it :

After a few hit where the players are trying to find how to kill the beast, you givve them an opportunity.

Fighter, you succesfully dodge the Dragon bite and make a good hit at his face that will blind him on one side. The Dragon roar in rage but leave it's thoat exposed, this could be a fatal mistake, but he move in a frantic way weaving his huge claws at the group. What do you do ?

Now you see, other hits didn't take off any hp off the dragon, but they were still success as they made the fight progress.