D&D 5E Hit points -- how do you roll?

[Kobold Stew]

How do you do hit points when you level up in your 5e group? I see people concerned about the 2d8 for the variant Ranger, and I suspect that there are straw men in the discussion. Let's see if we can weed them out!

1 Roll a die, live with the consequences.
2 Average hit points - fair and equitable.
3 Player's choice - roll or average, different players choose different options.
4 "Gentlemen's re-roll" - some way to ensure no low results.
5 Max hit points all the way.
6 Something else (please explain).

I'm asking specifically about your experience with 5e. If you are in more than one group, choose how you prefer to play. If you do roll and live with low results (option 1), I'd be interested if you could link to characters that have made do with only a 1 or 2 on the roll when levelling up. That, specifically, is the straw man that's in the rules but which I haven't seen in play, either in a face-to-face game or online, and which I suspect is not a regular part of most people's play.

Thanks!

 

[Mercule]

I voted "average", but I realized that it's actually "player's choice". I just don't have any players who want that choice.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

For the first time I told the guys that they can roll or take average. But they must choose before rolling. I'd roll all the time myself and prefer it but for this new campaign I told them they could take which one. We always roll stats and I'm sure for 6HD classes they will take the 4 most of the time but I think the d10 and d12 classes will take a shot and roll.

 

[CanadienneBacon]

I give players a choice of either average prescribed by the 5e PHB, or a die roll. Probably if someone rolled a 1 on said die roll, I would allow them a re-roll, but it hasn't come up yet. Most players have preferred to use average.

 

[halfling rogue]

We roll and live with it. I can't recall if anyone has rolled a 1 or 2, but I don't think we'd re-roll.

 

[Halivar]

I make my players roll. My wife makes her players re-roll 1's and 2's.

 

[Paraxis]

Players choice, but I strongly encourage them to take the average.

I just have a couple players that love to roll, I don't do a minimum on the roll or allow re-rolls though, we game using roll20 so it is right there in front of all the players and is recorded in the chat log. After one unlucky roll at 2nd level for a barbarian of a '2', even the die hard "we want to roll" players have started taking the average for the lower levels until they get a good cushion.

 

[Staffan]

In 5e: When I DM it's player's choice, but I make sure they're aware that the "average" result is better than the average roll, and they're strongly encouraged to take it.

When I was running Pathfinder, my rule was that you could reroll hit points with a die one step lower. So if you rolled a 2 on your d10, you could retry with a d8. If you still weren't happy, you could roll a d6 instead, and so on. I just now realized that this is similar to Magic's mulligan rule, so I think I'll call it that from now on.

 

[Remathilis]

My last few games went thus:

3.5: Averaged (extra hp every odd level: 5, 6, 5, 6...)
Pathfinder: Rolled
Pathfinder: Modified Rolled (d6: 1d4+2, d8: 1d4+4, d10: 1d6+4, d12: 1d6+6)
5E: Fixed (as PH)

The averaged PCs tended to drop a little quicker, so they were more challenged by a normal range of monsters. The Rolled HP quickly fell into buckets of hp and could shrug off attacks that would kill monsters of their CR. I often found I couldn't do enough damage with anything short of CR +8 to even drop one, and if one got low on hp the cleric burst/healed him back to near full in a round anyway...

 

[ad_hoc]

Not rolling is superior to rolling RAW. You get .5 more per level and don't have as many levels where you will get wiped out in a hit or two.

So I change the roll to reflect this. 1d8 becomes 2d4 and such.