I got tired of players rolling a 1 for hit points when levelling up – especially the warrior-types, as they need a lot of hit points to function in an effective manner – and because I want to be able send monster after monster after the PC’s, and this works best if their resources are not too low.
Once the resources of the PCs are spent, they retreat and rest – that makes sense – and if the warrior of the party hardly any resources have (in the shape of HP’s), they are likely to retreat early. The resources of the rogue, the wizard and the cleric are in a sense stable, as they gain a fixed number of spells and skill points, when gaining levels, just as the fighter’s combat abilities improve in a stable manner, but when characters rely on a variable, things change (and since everything else is fixed, i.e. no variable amount of new spells, feat or skill points, why is it that hit points are not, besides tradition?), and things change especially when you roll abysmally.
Thus I presented the following rule:
Heroic Hit Points
Half the hit die is rolled, the other half is gained automatically. This results in the following changes:
- d4 = d2+2
- d6 = d3+3
- d8 = d4+4
- d10 = d5+5
- d12 = d6+6
This ensures that the fighter gains between 6 and 10 hit points at each level. This works for us.
Roles, Dice and Fun 
That’s a nice idea!
In my campaign, I use the following house rule:
We keep the record of all the Hit Dice rolls, and at every new level, a character “increases” the original roll by 1, for all the previous levels. (up to the die maximum)
For example:
A second level fighter would have the following Hit Dice Rolls (For a D&D 3.x game):
1st Level Roll: 10 (max)
2nd Level Roll: 5
When this character levels up, his rolls would be like this:
1st Level Roll: 10 (max)
2nd Level Roll: 6 (5 +1)
3rd Level Roll: 9
At every new level, the character increases all the non-maxed rolls by 1.
This method showed to be very useful in my campaigns.
Hope it helps!
A couple of house rules my group has used over the years including setting a minimum (half the die value) or setting fixed HP gains. These became popular after a campaign where for a while the healer had more HP than the fighter-types.
Hi,
Thanks for your comments.
It is always interesting to see how people deal with hit points, and the rules can be tweaked.