How do you guys do Hps? And why?

[Murrdox]

We allow re-rolls on any hit die roll less than 1/4 of your hit dice.

d4 rerolls 1s
d6 rerolls 1s
d8 rerolls 1s and 2s
d10 rerolls 1s and 2s
d12 rerolls 1s, 2s, and 3s.

Basically, this ensures that while its still possible to have a character with less than AVERAGE hit points, it isn't possible to have a character with HORRIBLE hit points.

 

[Skaros]

Max at first level.
Max at second level.
Reroll anytime you roll half or less.

Very generous....then again, the monsters are scaled up to match, so fair is fair.

-Skaros

 

[RedSwan78]

Here's the way my group plays:

I look at PC's like this: they're HEROES. Heroes should stand out, above and beyond your "average" person. If you look at the MM, it gives all monsters HALF of their hit die. So, uhm, WHY should the PC's EVER get *less* then that??

What we do is this, roll your hit die. You get half or better. If you're a fighter, you can never get anything less then a 5. If you roll a 1, 2, 3, or 4, it becomes HALF of your hit die- 5. If you roll a 5 you obviously get a 5. If you roll BETTER then half (6,7,8,9 or 10 ), you get what you rolled.

It works out pretty well and everyone is happy because no-one has sub-standard HP's.. the way it SHOULD be!

That's our take on it at least

 

[Rel]

I think I stole this from Old Ones campaign... I roll hidden behind the screen and the player rolls, then he tells me which roll he takes.

Allows me to throw some more fireballs at them

Ditto to this method (including the source). Basically, the player rolls a die. He can keep that result or opt to take whatever the DM rolls but if he goes for the DM roll, he can't go back to what he rolled even if it was better.

I will say that so far the people in our games (myself included) have been amazingly lucky on hit point rolls and when they have opted to take what the DM rolled, it is usually a high number too. A notable exception to this was recently when the Cleric in my RttToEE game rolled a 2 on her hit point roll. She opted to take what I rolled and I rolled a 1. Tough luck that one.

 

[mikep18103]

What we do is this, roll your hit die. You get half or better. If you're a fighter, you can never get anything less then a 5. If you roll a 1, 2, 3, or 4, it becomes HALF of your hit die- 5. If you roll a 5 you obviously get a 5. If you roll BETTER then half (6,7,8,9 or 10 ), you get what you rolled.

My group works HPs the same way as Redswan78. It also works the same way for the monsters when I DM. It makes the PCs heroes like they should be. We have never had a problem with this. I like it.

Mike

 

[VGer]

This is how we do in my group:

The player rolls his dice.
He can then choose to keep it or letting the DM roll for him.
If he chooses the DM roll, he keeps it, whatever it is.

We tend to get above average results, but it has happened that the fighter, who rolled a 5, gets greedy, chooses de DM roll, and ends up with a 1.

I don't know why we use this system. But we have been using it for years. I suppose it works, since I don't remember anyone complaining.

 

[Gumby]

We let the player re-roll anything under half the hit die in question. A fighter would be stuck with a 5, but re-roll a 1-4.

 

[Belbarrus]

In my campaign we just use maximum hit points. No rolling at all. Wizards gets 4 + CON hit points per level, Barbarians get 12 + CON bonus per level, etc
We did this for a few reasons:
1) Easier. Gain a level, add a number, no need for rolling. No need to worry about if someone is "honest" with their rolls, etc. No need to come up with rules to prevent a player getting "shafted" by a bad roll.
2) Fair. Avoids the Barbarian-rolls-bad-and-gets-one-hitpoint-per-level problem.
3) For years and years players were devising different ways to make sure the hit point average was fair (re-roll rules, roll lower dice and add a number rule, re-roll ones and twos, etc, etc).

Maximum hit points solves all these problems
4) As a DM, characters with more hit points means you can throw more/nastier stuff at them. And thats a good thing.

Monsters follow the same rule as well, of course.

 

[drnuncheon]

Deja vu - I think we had this thread a couple of weeks back.

Anyway, another possibility that I believe I got from the 3e Birthright conversion is 'training' - spend X amount of time training, and you get to reroll your hit points. If you roll above your current value, then they go up by 1.

You could adjust this by changing the amount of time required for a reroll (day, week, month) and the amount of 'boost' a successful roll gives you (+1 hp, the average of the two rolls, replace the old with the new).

The nice thing about this method is that it doesn't help the people who have already rolled well nearly as much as those who roll poorly.

J

 

[Destil]

Rolling for perminent things is out in my games. Right now I'm running 32 point buy, average + .5 HP / HD, myself. Next game I'm going to be a bit more statisticaly accurate and make it average rounded up on odd levels and rounded down on even, which should produce an exact avrage.