No perfect solutions to be found.
Lower stamina/HPs puts a higher premium on defenses. Either higher Avoidance/AC, more AR/Damage Reduction or both. Leadership & other healing also becomes more important. Thats not necessarily bad. But if neither side has an easy time hitting and doing significant damage, then again combat can slow down.
In a home game you have the option to run simpler fights. Four thugs with shortswords attacking from both ends of a 10' wide alley is A LOT easier to process than:
Eric's Fiendishly complicated scenario! Take THAT you cocky players!!! wrote:
...A running fight through a burning building filled with traps, while trying to beat a doomsday clock ticking down until something BAD happens, AND battling furiously with an enemy group that consists of an arcane spell caster, a divine spell caster, a stealthy Ghost Scale Assassin bowman no one can reliably keep in sight & a mobile tank who has passing attack + juggernaut's hammer & keeps knocking PCs into fire or out windows & stairwells. And oh yeah, all of them have leadership and Die Hard to keep themselves on their feet...
It sounds like you have players who are new to role-playing. in addition to a a "roll" solution, maybe think about a "role" solution. Talk to your players about Roll-Playing. I have this one friend who doesn't get scary movies, she always goes on and on about never going off alone or going into the basement, attic and/or cornfield. Of course most scary movies NEED to get someone off alone. Its part of the tropes of scary movies. Similarly one of the tropes of roleplaying games is that conflict is resolved with swords.
IME a lot of new people think about what THEY would do in any given situation rather than what their CHARACTER would do. Eric Gorman (mostly) lives in the real world, and despite doing a lot of martial arts training, does not resort to violence to solve problems. Tukufu, often chatty and not particularly violent by PC standards, "solves problems" with guns and steel (and magic) on a regular basis (like repeatedly on 5 different missions last June...). So you know, if you have a player who has a "Barvarian Fire Wizard" and dreams of knighthood in Milandir the mental question they should be asking themselves continually is not "what would I do?" but something like ... what would the Knights of the Round Table do in this situation if they had flamethrowers?"