I finally got a new campaign up and running after a small hiatus. One of the players brought up an interesting flavor to introduce.

Instead of just telling the players, “you take 10 points of bludgeoning damage”, I keep track of the damage and just describe their status to them. It avoids the meta gaming of, “hey, the barbarian is at 1hp, I’m gonna go heal him”.

The rest of the table jumped at the idea. Now, I already say the enemy they are fighting appears “bloodied” if they’ve reached half their max hp. But I’m in need of better descriptors now to help them judge roughly how they are holding out.

I had been thinking of something for when they hit certain percentages of their max hp. Like at 75%, 50%, etc.

But I’m turning to you guys to see if you have better suggestions on how to describe how damaged they are, without telling them how damaged they are.