I do love that ICRPG is easy to tweak if you know what you want.
I’m thinking of modding the hearts to 5 HP each and starting the heroes with 3 hearts, here’s why:
Talk me out of it?
I’ realized that this will make a fight last longer and making things more fiddly. I was watching Hankerin again and he suggested 1hp for mooks.
BUT! it means when I award a character a heart (5hp), they don’t automatically outstrip everyone.
I guess I’ll change it back. This is a stream of consciousness thing, if you can’t tell.
Monsters don’t follow the rules for players. Want weak monsters? Give them 1, 3, or 5 HP. Skip hearts altogether for monsters.
Hearts is an abstraction, a roll up of 10 HP to make an easy-to-use shortcut. But it’s not mandatory.
I regularly introduce monsters with 1 HP. Or even no defined HP, but “one hit” - any successful hit from a player will destroy the monster.
Hearts are for the big bads.
Try it out. You can always change it back if it doesn’t seem to work how you want it to.
I use 1 hit for small monsters, and 6 HP chunks instead of hearts because it lets me use d6s to track. That said, I also use armor as damage reduction, so the math is fairly similar to RAW for larger monsters.
So I would totally encourage you to go ahead with your changes, and 1/3 (which probably becomes more like 2/3 in game due to bonuses) sounds like a good chance for defeating weak, but not super weak, opponents.
GM and players are playing a different game!!!
You can express 5/10 goblins as 1 heart.
As such they can do D10 damage ~D2 damage as they diminish.
In some variety they are a “horde” but it depends on your flexibility as a GM. Not in the rules per say…but there for use.
I like a 5hp enemy. I like that a normal human in the street, or a weak enemy can die in one hit but not exactly every time.
I also start my players with 20hp because I don’t want to have 2 or 3 orcs attack, I throw a whole tribe at them.
They need the extra heat stone. Lol
I like the five-point heart idea. I think 3 hearts (15 points) is a bit much, but starting them at 2 (10 points) is solid.
A bonus is that you can track HP with d6s.
Agreed. I’ve been tracking monster hp with d6s for decades… I’ve also used sheets full of heart-shapes that track 5hp per heart, an obvious value given the roughly pentagonal shape of a heart. That ICRPG uses a 10hp heart is convenient for me, as I simply double the hearts. The added granularity of 5hp per heart is quite useful for both players and GMs who find clerical work distracting.
How about just expressing that as a half heart? Doesn’t change anything at all, you just draw a half heart for monsters you want to have 5 hp. Or a heart and a half for 15
Absolutely!.. I just happen to have a trillion d6s at my disposal. Plus, I’m a sucker for the 1974 rules (the DIY spirit of which is alive and well here!)… Back then, monster hit dice were d6s, so you could just roll up their hit points on the fly. Interestingly, weapon damage was also d6, so you didn’t even need to track hit points, just hits. That is, a 5HD monster could take five hits on average. Players were none the wiser… as it is and forever should be! 
Sounds great!..
Regarding my above diagram (as I mentioned in another thread):
Slashes can be used for 5hp hearts (my preference).
Combination of slashes and X’s can be used for 10hp hearts (official rules).
The beauty of all the tools and techniques I discover on this site is that they’re all so versatile!.. Testament to the fertile ground of ICRPG and the old-school spirit in general.
See I did not grow up playing video games, 'cause there weren’t any (ok we had olympic decathlon on our apple2) so hearts does not resonate the way Hank describes. But the principle - quit worrying about 17 or 23 it’s all the same as 20, and undo the bloat - that I love. So I would let players get a 5hp increase as loot to allow for some granularity, but foes will be 1, 10, 20…
I think heart=5hp is the best balance, considering most weapons roughly hit for 5, once bonuses are applied, so hearts most likely will mean “hits” during most encounter.
It also further separates “adventurers” from commoners. 5hp vs 10hp may seem too much, but it is way more manageable than average 4hp vs 7-15 starting hp on 5e.
