Ok cool, so you have a lot of experience - how do you justify rolling each individual creature's HP and tracking it for every encounter over thousands of meaningless (sorry players!) encounters when its just there to give a little zazz to the game, get some XP, add some story, some items maybe, and now that theyre down some resources have a real fight that matters? Will I update a character sheet where its a creature 14 ac and 32 hp and a +5 to attack doing 1d6 and say these creatures at all 16ac, 40 hp, +7 to acck and its 1d6+3 damage? Yeah. But treating them as individuals? I honestly am interested in hearing how swapping HP and maintaining the same NUMBER you planned for combatants and saying "I dont care what I roll for these 5 creatures, I chose 5, and ill stick to that max hp or minimum hp" and theyre gonna have a cake-walk (kind of a waste of time) a normal or a hard (why was that so hard, we are just on our way to take a poop in the woods?). Because, again, DPR with an enemy that you cant quite kill in the same round economy means DPR is up, theyre taking N% more damage per round just with a little change that keeps 25% of the force alive 2 rounds more and now youre looking at lethal. Or...just follow the book. You want a harder fight? Swap in some hobgoblins. Add some wolves. Keep the headcount low and increase difficulty with abilities or auras, or any of the things the MM gives you. Adding a bunch of HP just to drag it out is just time consuming and miserable and rolling for the honor of wasting a bunch of time on a meaningless encounter...I don't see the upside.
