[RPG] How to resolve a basic attack in D&D 5e

dnd-5e

My friends and I have started playing 5th edition with no previous knowledge of D&D. We're about 12 hours in and still learning the rules as we go, but I think we may be doing basic combat wrong. Here's what we're doing, whether a monster is attacking a player or vice versa:

  1. Attack roll (1d20+ modifiers).
  2. If the attack roll is greater than or equal to the target's AC plus modifiers, it hits.
  3. Damage roll. Let's say the attack is 1d6+2 and we roll a 3, that's a total of 5 damage.

OK here's where I'm not sure. There's this thing called "Hit Dice" which I've been unable to fully understand. We've been doing an extra hit dice roll on every attack which causes a damage buffer for that attack only. So for example, I'm about to be dealt 5 damage and I roll my hit dice. A roll of 3 would cause me to take 2 damage. A roll of 5 or more would cause no damage at all (even though the attack "hits").

In the book, a monster's hit points are displayed something like this:

Hit Points: 7 (2d6)

To the best of my understanding this is "MaxHP (HitDice)". So in the above case we'll roll 2d6 every time damage is about to be dealt to see how much (if any) is actually subtracted from the target's current hit points.

I'm really unsure about this Hit Dice thing. Granted we are all level 1, but when we use hit dice like this is seems to take forever to do any damage to monsters. When we don't use it the monsters are able to easily do a ton of damage to our party members, sometimes killing them with one hit. We aren't familiar with the pace of combat so we're not sure how it's supposed to be.

I watched a video of people playing out the first premade scenario online and they did not appear to use hit dice, but every character was able to one-shot the monsters, so it seems like they could have been doing it wrong as well.

I thought basic combat rules would be easy to look up but it's harder than I thought, and everyone I asked who plays older versions wasn't sure. Are we doing this right?

Best Answer

Hit dice have something of a misleading name. It would be better to call them something along the lines of "hit point dice".

They serve two functions in the game. First, they determine your max HP. At L1 a PC gets the maximum roll of their hit dice (so like hte fighter's hit die is a d10, so they get 10), plus their con mod (we'll use +2 for our example here). This means that a L1 fighter starts with 12 HP. Each time they level up after that they get to roll their hit die (or take the high average), and add that plus their con mod to their max HP to get their new max HP. So back to our fighter example, when he goes from L1 to L2, he gets to roll his hit die, lets say he gets a 6, which is the high average), and then add his con mod. So a L2 fighter would have 20 HP.

The other thing that hit dice are used for is for healing during a short rest. If you take a short rest following combat, you can spend (roll) hit dice and add them to your current HP to take you up to you max HP.

So yes, you are currently using your hit dice wrong. The monster stat blocks are worded like that to show you how the monster's HP are arrived at (2d6's average is 7). If you want to randomize the HP for your monsters you can roll instead of taking the average (it's the same thing for monster damage, they give you the average, you can choose to randomize it with the dice expression provided).

If you were watching someone play the first adventure of the 5e starter set, most of the monsters there are goblins with 7 HP and, yeah, most L1 PCs can one shot goblins. This is normal.