Hit Dice Should be Rolled, Take Two
I had a silly idea the other day. It should be an edit of my old hit dice post but since it’s been updated and published in KNOCK! #1, I don’t really see the point. (Or maybe I should republish the whole thing here? Sound off if you think it’s a good idea.)
Hit Dice Mean You’ve Been Hit
Simple, right?
When your character is hit by a monster, you roll a hit die: it’s a small, red d6 your referee gives you from the little bowl of small red d6s she keeps by her screen.
“A 5-in-6 chance of staying up when I’m hit? Easy!” You say. But no, because the next time you get hit, you roll your new hit die AND any hit dice you received previously. Your 16% chance to go down jumps to 30% with the second hit, and rises slowly after that. It’s at 84% with the 10th hit die.
It would make sense to have a limit to the number of hit dice a character can take, regardless of the roll. Say, twice their level for most classes, with once per level for magic-users and three times for fighters/barbarians?
Healing and resting is simple to handle: give the hit dice back to the referee, at a rate and under conditions aligned with your gameplay philosophy.
Critical hits and heavy weapons can simply confer more than one hit die to their target.
Taking Armour into Account
In a roll vs Armour Class system, it’s already taken care of. In a roll-under system, where armour reduces damage, an option is to have armour step the hit die up to d8. Heavy armour can step the die more than once, up to d12.
Which leads us to considering different hit dice types…
Class Hit Dice
Giving each class a different hit die makes immediate sense. Like, the same die your ruleset gives the class for its hit points.
A 5E barbarian will almost never go down until they’ve reached their hit dice limit. But they’ll never be certain they can tank the next blow.
A B/X magic-user, on the other hand, has 25% chance of going down from the first hit, and 43% on the second. But a lucky player may keep fighting for a good while!
Variable Damage
If classes don’t get a different die type, maybe weapons do? It becomes a bit counter intuitive as bigger weapons use smaller dice, but it probably works. You can also step a hit die down with a critical hit.
In Conclusion
I don’t know if I’d use this to replace hit points in a D&D game, but I’ll definitely consider it next time I’m working on an risk-and-reward, gritty ruleset. Or if I’m running an FKR session.
It would make damage rolls more tense and dramatic, and it feels like the accumulation of little red dice on your character sheet would build tension and push gamblers to risk their characters in wild ways.
Let me know if you try anything like this in one of your games!