Enemy Health Bar Visible? (Please Vote)

I have been running a successful campaign and I have a problem. Some of my players want to see player health bars, and I want to get a consensus because, honestly, Roll20 is changing the way we do table top gaming. I think it makes the battles MUCH more intense if I can't see the health as a player, but I suppose some don't agree. What do you think? Should the health bars be visible or no?

If you were sitting down in person and your players asked each other 'how many HP do you have left?' Would you tell them not to answer? To me viewing player HP bars is the same thing. If they're a team that's working together, they should be able to see how hurt their comrades are. Enemy HP bars? Absolutely not.

For as long as I have been playing GMs have often used descriptions to indicate how badly injured someone is. The idea behind that is that with many living creatures you can see how badly injured they are and with many non-living creatures you can still tell how badly damaged they are. The verbal descriptions amounted to a ratio. Healthy might equal 100%, Some injuries might equal 75%, etc. The bars basically do the same thing but in a graphical manner. Sure they are a bit more informative than a verbal description but for some of us (myself included) this is both a time saver and a better gauge for the player at how effective their attacks are than some nebulous phrase by the GM. In short: if I should be able to see my enemy is severely wounded then yes, bars make sense to me. If I should not be able to see this then no, I wouldn't use them.

I think health bars for Enemies are too descriptive. You shouldn't be able to look at someone and say.."yeah he looks about 85%". I play D&D 4th edition, and the bloodied (half life) state works great. It's plain and simple...Ether it's hurting or it's doing fine. I suppose you could further detail that with a Fresh (Green - 75%+), Rough (Yellow - 50% to 75%), Bloodied (Red - 0 to 50%) states. Just my 2 cents.

I do not let the players see monster health bars. I will put a red dot status indicator on any monsters who become moderately to severely wounded, because I believe the characters would be able to see the effects of that. But that is as much detail as I provide.

Both games I play in show the health bars. It's useful for not wasting big attacks and helping to speed up combat.

Yes, I reveal the enemy health bars to the players. If they want to know anything else about the monsters - HP, stats, whatever - I tell them that, too. In addition to the meta information, the players and I offer vivid descriptions in the fiction because, well, it's fun. They can justify their knowledge by any means they like, most commonly because they're experienced adventurers and know how to gauge these things better than the players controlling them. Sharing this information in my experience matters little to the challenge level and combats go by much quicker. I most commonly run D&D 4e.

I use the status dot on tokens script for health, but modified it. Players cannot see other players bars, only their own, and cannot see enemies bars. But they can see a single dot based off damage as a rough feedback of other characters and enemies. full is green dot, changes to yellow at 50%, orange at 25% and red at 0%, with big X for 0% AND dead (some things dont die at 0%). its easy for them to understand since the one dot follows the logic: green->yellow->orange->red->dead. Without giving them exact bars to look at. That way its more like table top without having to pause and ask "how bad does it look hurt", they get rough indication by the color of the status dot. And same for team mates, like tabletop you have no idea exactly how many hit-points you group members have just if they are roughed up looking, (unless you directly ask them). Also clears up some clutter on big battles, since each player sees only 1 set of bars, his, the rest are just a single dot on each pc/npc.

I run with the HP bars for enemies turned off. If someone's made an appropriate Knowledge check on it, then I allow a further heal check (by anyone in the party) to turn on the HP bars for that particular creature.

I'm with William R on this one. Granted, using a Health bar would be far to complicated for our game, with four different health tracks and slightly different ways of calculating each one. It's easier to just tick off each track as they reach it and apply the modifiers accordingly. Plus, one of my main goals with this campaign (surprisingly enough, with Roll20) was to get back to that whole "theater of the mind." So I don't want the players to be able to eyeball an opponent's health like some boss monster in a shoot em up at Dave and Busters. I want them to ask.

Health bars for players so they don't have to ask each other taking up vent. For enemies I use a yellow dot for wounded and a red dot for bloodied.

Just adding my vote here; BillU and I have discussed this before and we agree to disagree on it, but that doesn't mean he can get away without my voting in his poll! q;} I like to have the bars visible to players, for both other PCs and monsters. I believe this simulates knowledge of the relative health of the beings, and without actual numbers it's just that... relative. Extremely careful observation can disclose a more accurate numerical value, for those who care to do so, I suppose. But really, 'almost completely healthy' or 'nearly dead' or whatever are things the PCs would know at a glance, more or less. Additionally, I think having the bars visible speeds combat up; there's no need to keep asking "Has this one been hit yet? How badly harmed is that one? Which is the one that's almost dead again?" and so on. That kind of questioning slows the game down and does nothing to improve play, in my not-so-humble opinion. So there's another vote for bars. Deal with it, Bill!

I am a big advocate for health bars being on. At least for the style of game I run/play in. Primarily, because it helps keep combat from being bogged down unnecessarily. The next reason is that the party would know if they'd hit someone or not, and they are experienced adventurers, so I figure they'd have a bit of knowledge on how hurt someone seems since their day job is to literally hurt things. Like I said, there's an easy in game justification for the party to know relative percentages of where a bad guy is at, but the main one is simply that we're only playing for two hours a week, and if we can eliminate 10 minutes of asking who has been hit before, and if any of the bad guys look like they're badly injured then that's an extra 10 minutes of advancing the plot.

The way I play, I don't think they should be visible. A quick glance could tell you if someone is unhurt, barely wounded, injured or near death and that should be enough. I dislike things getting too mechanical and people being like "okay, this monster does 1d6+6 damage and you have 13 HP so I know I don't have to heal you yet". I don't want to play with perfect information. People ask me how badly hurt my guy is, I'll make up a description. If he's almost dead he'll be clutching a massive gut wound and coughing up blood or whatever. If that doesn't motivate people to heal me, but the anouncement of "I'm at 5 HP" would, then I'm in the wrong group.

I don't display them for players. I'm with Fishy on this actually. I give descriptives when enemies start getting seriously wounded. But allowing players to see enemy health opens up to much room for metagaming (IN MY OPINION) and takes away from the scene (again IN MY OPINION). So - nope. No bars here.

I would prefer not to have any health bars up, because I think they clutter up the screen. But my players like to see at a glance where everyone's health is currently at, so I do have the bars enabled for characters. But for monsters, a red status indicator dot for wounded is all they see.

My vote goes to having them off atleast untill my players are higher levels i think it adds to the suspense of battle and I usally describe when an enemy is becoming winded and wounded

I do not let my players see health bars. BUT we do have a universally recognised "bloodied" marker. So players know when the enemy is bloodied. We play D&D 4e.