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.
One mod of the classic minion rules I like that works well in ICRPG is a threshold variant.
The one hit point minion never sat well with me; I think it was 4e D&D that introduced these normally tough and powerful creatures in multiples retaining all of their abilities but only having 1 HP—just because they work for the BBEG and have some friends. Death slaadi should not die from a paper cut. It fractures my suspension of disbelief regardless of which side of the DM screen I am on. (I understand that there are thin justifications for this rule based on the expected damage per round output of higher-level PCs, but that reasoning only hobbles its reasonable implementation. I want a mook rule that makes sense and has universal implementation.)
The hit point threshold rule for minions I made up for my own table seems to work pretty well for me. I set a damage threshold for my minions—usually half a heart, or 5 HP, but the GM can adjust—and I kill off mooks after a single hit that meets or beats that threshold.
Got a horde of thirteen pesky goblins? No problem. Now they shrug off wimpy little hits of one or two points all day because they are tough little buggers, but they will keel over dead when somebody lands a solid hit of 5 HP or more—and the GM never has to keep track of how many hit points Goblin #7 has compared to Goblin #11. Imagine if whack-a-mole had an accelerometer.
Now the party can still wade through a flood of inferior opponents Conan-style, but there is some meaningful granularity introduced to provide some interesting texture to the event. Verisimilitude is better preserved under this threshold rule than under one-hit kills because it respects natural variation in combat and allows the GM to tailor the threshold to the encounter, but it still saves the GM time and effort while running a many-versus-many combat encounter. I think it’s a little more realistic and a lot more fun than the one hit point rule, so since it’s also less work than strict HP tracking in a horde, it’s a win-win for me. I hope other folks give it a try and see what they think of it.
It feels like there are two issues.
This is an excellent approach and one I will be incorporating moving forward, thanks for sharing this!
