How to track many monster’s hit points?

Whenever we have more than one monster fighting the characters, we are tracking multiple hit point pools. For me, that’s where I get the most confused during a large battle. “Wait, which goblin did you attack?” is a common question as I’m trying to figure out where to track the damage. What if we rolled all that accounting for an encounter into a single damage tally?

The SlyFlourish Damage Tally

Mike Shea over at slyflourish.com gives us the damage pool (what I’m calling the damage tally) to track damage done to multiple monsters. Here’s how it works:

1. Track damage done to all monsters not individual monsters in a single tally.
2. Remove monsters from the battle whenever the damage tally goes above an individual monster’s hit points, then reset the count to zero, carrying over damage done above the individual monster’s hit points.
3. Keep track of the rising and resetting damage tally and of how many monsters there are left.

Mike recommends this system for running hordes. So instead of tracking the HP of 20 individual skeletons, we round their individual hit points down to 10, and track damage done to the horde not individuals in a single damage tally. Whenever the tally reaches 10, the characters have killed a skeleton.

For example, the rogue does 16 damage with a sneak attack to the skeletons. That means one (worth 10 HP) skeleton dies, and 6 damage carries over. We remove one skeleton from the field. The monk then hits with three unarmed strikes, dealing a total of 15 damage. With the 6 damage left over from the rogue, hat kills another two skeletons, and one damage is carried over. There are 17 skeletons left.

How do we track area of effect damage?

When an area of effect damages the monsters, we figure out how many it affects, how many make their save, sum up the total damage, and add it to the tally, removing as many monsters as necessary.

For example, a fireball does 27 fire damage to eight skeletons. Regardless of whether they make their saving throw or not, even half the damage is enough to kill a skeleton, so we remove all eight from the battle.

If a smaller area of effect hits the skeletons, for example a burning hands spell, it might hit only three of them and deal 10 damage. One skeleton makes their saving throw, so the total damage dealt is 25 (10 + 10 + 5) which removes two skeletons in the area and leaves 5 damage on the damage tally.

Damage tally for encounters that aren’t hordes

The damage tally works well for hordes of monsters. But it can also ease the hit point accounting we DMs are doing for smaller battles. We can tally the damage done to a rider and its mount, an assassin and its companion, or a squad of thugs. All we need to track is the damage done in a single pool.

For example, the PCs are fighting a death knight on its nightmare mount. We track damage done to the pair in one tally, and remove the mount once the damage tally reaches its maximum HP. We reset the pool to zero, carrying over any damage. Narratively, the death knight is infernally bound to the nightmare, so the knight can only be damaged once the nightmare is killed but any damage done above the nightmare’s HP carries over to the death knight.

A drow assassin and its giant spider could work the same way, or an evil ranger and its beast companion, or twin fire giants, where the second-born absorbs the damage for the firstborn.

With only two creatures the accounting benefit of the damage tally isn’t great. But once we get to four or more monsters, it pays off. If we’re running four thugs assaulting the PCs, we simply track damage done to the squad, and remove thugs once the pool reaches 30. After 30, we remove a thug–most of the time, the one that was last damaged. Then we reset the tally to zero and carry over any excess damage.

Players rarely notice

This approach can seem like too much abstraction. After all, we’re not minutely tracking the individual hit points of all the combatants. Won’t the players feel cheated? If we have very tactically minded players the damage tally might not be the best for that game. It removes any benefits gained from singling out enemies with attacks and damage.

But in many cases, players won’t even notice what we’re doing. Instead they’ll appreciate the fact that their attacks can damage more than one thug. And we have one less thing to track during combat, and can instead focus on epic descriptions, high-stakes action, and a dynamic combat.