Monster attacks and Strength

One of the things I really like about Forbidden Lands is that Strength is both the skill you use to do damage and hit points, so as you get hurt you can hurt other people less, until eventually you’re basically staggering or on your knees, flailing around trying to hit people and failing. This feels like how combat should be, unlike how so many games take a Monty Python’s Black Knight approach of “one hit point means I can hit you at full strength”.

This is promptly thrown out of the window when it comes to monsters, though, and I have a problem especially when it comes to human-like monsters, because stuff like skills, talents etc. are ignored in favour of a d6 table that says “roll a bunch of dice and do a particular type of damage”.

I can see why they’ve done this, because if you say that a dragon can use its 32 strength to attack you, (a) the GM is going to run out of dice and (b) the players are going to be Broken very quickly. If you were going to model a dragon more like a player character, they’d probably have a base Strength of 8, with a weapon bonus for the claws and a penalty for attacking many people at once, and that would be more complicated than a simple d6 table.

Still, it feels like once you’ve weakened a monster enough it should look weaker. “Does it look like we’ve hurt it?” is a standard player question to a GM, after all. And the moment of exhilaration when the monster that was wiping the floor with you is now just a little bit slower, its blows are landing with a little bit less force, is amazing as a player: it suggests that there’s room for one last thrust and maybe this hell of a fight will finally be over.

(Maybe it’s not, and you hear the phrase “did you think this was my final form‽” etc. but that’s another trope.)

So maybe a house rule would be that once a monster is either below a specific threshold, or has taken more than half / 2/3rds / however much damage, it should be rolling fewer dice?