D&D 5E Playing with Hit Dice

[jimmifett]

There are more ways to play with Hit Dice other than forcing the consumption of them. For example, a Disease may reduce all your hit dice by one size category. Going down from d8s to d6s. Perhaps a cursed item does this until you can get rid of it.

You still gain the full hit dice of your class when leveling, only counts towards healing.

Multiple sources of size drain would stack to a minimum size of d4.

 

[Astrosicebear]

There are more ways to play with Hit Dice other than forcing the consumption of them. For example, a Disease may reduce all your hit dice by one size category. Going down from d8s to d6s. Perhaps a cursed item does this until you can get rid of it.

You still gain the full hit dice of your class when leveling, only counts towards healing.

Multiple sources of size drain would stack to a minimum size of d4.

Or increase for that matter.

1/day you coould spend a HD to get back a spent class ability (that recovers on a long rest).

Spend a HD 1/day to make any short rest ability recharge on a d6.

Expend a HD permanently to recover from a disease.

Expend 1 HD to gain a second action, once per short rest.

Lots of options to play with. Lets see if we can think of more out of the box ones.

But I do also like the idea of treating HD like Wound Points.

 

[jimmifett]

Expend 1 HD to gain a second action, once per short rest.

IMO, that's a bit cheap for an additional Action. Given 2-3 short rests on average between adventuring days, I'd limit this if used, to 1/day.

 

[samursus]

I also am intrigued by the many ideas posted here. Seems like a concept ripe with possibilities!

 

[Astrosicebear]

The trick is to balance the use. RAW you get back 1/2 HD on a long rest. So there are two fold factors here, balance with resources as given, and balance as resources at higher levels.

Using some of these suggestions is a no brainer at lvls 1-4 where a cure wounds or bard song can recover alot of your lsot HP without spending HD. At higher levels you need alot more healing, so HD become used more frequently but you would also have more of a pool to use them for abilities.

And obviously you would want to make sure you dont allow a full monty (4e style daily) round where chars jsut blow everything they have.

 

[jrowland]

I've been toying with adding a new resource, "Wounds", which would track with critical hits. In my version HP are fatigue and "wounds" are meat. Basically, combat is a lot of fatigue with an occasional crit = wound (spells crit on a 1 if it is a save spell).

Anyway...In a current ad hoc version, HD + Con mod = Wound Threshold (how many wounds you can take). Exceed wound threshold and you fall unconscious and are dieing (normal death save rules apply).

My issue with my ad hoc house rule is at higher levels that is a lot of wounds you can take before going down. I've upped how criticals work (+1 for rolling a 20, +1 for bloodying, +1 for reducing to 0hp, +1 for specials like brutal crit feature, for 1-4 wound crit) but that almost seems too deadly at low level. However, this would help nicely...at low levels, you don't really face energy drain type effects, but at higher levels you do, so the drain represents your diminished ability to be wounded. Since, in my system, wounds are the "slow heal" resource (or ritual+gp heal), it can make high level play not seem a cake walk. I may have to up the number of creatures that do HD damage for it to balance right, but certainly a way out of my conundrum.

 

[Boarstorm]

The trick is to balance the use. RAW you get back 1/2 HD on a short rest.

I'm sure you meant long rest, but I thought I'd clarify just to keep any misconceptions from moving us off the same page.

 

[Astrosicebear]

I'm sure you meant long rest, but I thought I'd clarify just to keep any misconceptions from moving us off the same page.

I did, Ill edit ofr clarity, but duh moment.

 

[Quartz]

I'm looking preferentially at the exhaustion system, so an initial energy drain would give you 1 level, etc. This would tie in very well with movies where the victim of the ghost or vampire is presented as becoming more & more sickly.

 

[FireLance]

I'm currently re-tooling my homebrew lumin race for 5e, and one of the possibilities I am considering is to allow a lumin character to burn a Hit Die to add +1d8 radiant damage to a weapon attack or a cantrip that deals radiant damage.