Still how would you go about not bumping hp, and still make it a difficult fight?
Did you played ToEE? A lot of people complain about how ToEE is hard and ... No HP bloat. Just put more enemies, more traps and so on.
All D&D turn based games avoided HP bloat. And all good D&D games too.
Part of the appeal of D&D is a heroic power fantasy. If your powers are worthless and you need gimmicky to kill enemies, you kill it from the game.
I really don't want to see HP bloat either. It belongs in grindy MMO's with 15 random people raiding a boss. Not here.
"Bosses" can have resistances and they have minions. They can have an unfair advantage that is more intelligent than giving them +100HP.
For our characters to feel heroic, their stats, including HP, need to be comparable to the enemies. We need to be able to believe that we fight in the same league. Maybe we could 1v1 a boss.. with a little help. But all that is thrown out the window the second something has 10x your HP or some ridiculous amount in the hundreds or thousands. It instantly means you need an MMO style gang, or you need to CHEESE somehow. Like plopping down 8 barrels from your inventory and blowing them up for 300 damage on an "unsuspecting" enemy. D&D isn't about that and I don't want that in BG3. "Video game" doesn't cut it here.
I strongly agree and even mmos, was much better BEFORE the bloat was the norm.
See for eg, ultima online and dark sun online : crimson sands. Even bosses could die in matter of minutes...
Yes, 0.1% of players will do it, but it will be interesting for everyone to watch on YouTube
No, that would be a extremely boring thing to watch.
