Starting Bonus HP

[AnimeSniper]

Any suggestion are appreciated.

As a player and sometimes DM/GM the occasional outcome of enacted NO Resurrection/ETC. rules or encountering the enemy, BBEG, or monster is the sometimes but not often moment when the player rolls dismally or the GM rolls atrociously godlike rolls resulting in a PC dying outright... please make a new PC!

In the past I thought of what if agreed upon by the players and GM that at the character creation the PC gains a small amount of Bonus HP. Nothing grand but here are a few of what I can recollect right now.

I will find my doc notes on what I figured for the Core Races later today.

Variant Rules;

1 HP for every year lived. For longer lived races maybe divide the amount by two.

 

[Pauln6]

1 bonus hit die at level 1 works fine. Even in 1e having 2d8 hp for a level 1 ranger made a huge difference to surviveability. It's up to you how you dish it out, either 1d8 for medium races and 1d6 for small races, or max hp from class plus one additional free hit die from that class. The few extra hit points increase low level survival and don't unbalance the game later on.

 

[jhingelshod]

I was reading this article by The Angry DM earlier today (boy, is he angry!....and fair warning, he likes to use the f word a lot, albeit disguised with lots of #$£*'s) which addresses similar issues. He suggests a variation on the Endurance/Fatigue system that's been around since at least the late 70's in SPI's Dragonquest. I found the reasoning in his article interesting and I liked the mechanics.

http://theangrygm.com/fighting-spirit/

 

[Einlanzer0]

Starting HP being barely higher than the HP you gain per level is one of the most eye-rolling steps backward they took with 5e. It doesn't make any thematic sense and makes low level play way, way too luck dependent. 4e probably started you with too many, but the idea was sound.

Even though it's probably the most "balanced" way to do it, I'm not a fan of just giving an extra HD at level just because I like the simplicity of 1HD/level. Instead, I give 6 free HP to all characters at 1st level, which also represents base HP for NPCs with no combat/adventuring training or experience. I also dislike how in the core rules you can automatically take the rounded up median, which defeats the incentive of ever rolling for HP. I require a die roll or coin toss for players to determine whether they take the rounded up or rounded down median at level up, so by level 20 characters are likely to have slightly fewer HP than the do in the core rules.

 

[was]

In a recent campaign, I altered the starting HP. Instead of class + Con. bonus, we used class + 1/2 Con. score instead. I.e. a fighter with a 14 Con started out with 17 HP (instead of 12). It's not a big change and it was only at first level. It did seem to work well, however, and my players responded favorably to the change.

 

[AnimeSniper]

Good stuff so far and like Was posted this is a ONE-time Bonus meaning at level 1 for a human it would an 18 year old human; 18 + Barbarian roll 7+ Con. Mod of 3 that player would only have 28 HP to start and barring the horrendous fail should survive the trek from A to B with low CR monsters

 

[was]

Good stuff so far and like Was posted this is a ONE-time Bonus meaning at level 1 for a human it would an 18 year old human; 18 + Barbarian roll 7+ Con. Mod of 3 that player would only have 28 HP to start and barring the horrendous fail should survive the trek from A to B with low CR monsters

Variant Rules: 1 HP for every year lived. For longer lived races maybe divide the amount by two.

...Be careful, this might be open to abuse by your players. Consider dwarves (who typically mature at around age 65) or elves (who typically mature about age 115). Does your campaign make allowances for folks who start with an extra 32 to 57 hit points? Add on to that problem, players who then choose to create characters who are year or two shy of middle age.

...Consider this, your level one human barbarian with 28 hp vs. a level one elven wizard who starts with at least 61 hp. It could create a problem.

..Maybe divide the age number by 3 for dwarves and by 4 for elves?

...or maybe figure starting HP as normal and then give them a bonus equal to their full Con.?

 

[AnimeSniper]

Still it should be a ONE-time bonus and I agree that non-human races, elves, dwarves, drow, and the multitude of other races that players can utilize for their PC is vast an would need some form of division or divider to cut the 115 for the elf wizard to cut down to a manageable sum where the other players do not feel slighted... Somewhere I have a flat sum of bonus hp for the core races that I was expanding to include other non-core races, i.e. troll, giant and etcetera...

Did any company release a starting Age, Height, & Weight errata for the non-core races like the troll, centaur, and etcetera.

 

[delericho]

For my later 3e campaigns I gave each PC a one-off bonus of 5 hit points at 1st level. I haven't tried this in 5e, but see no reason it shouldn't work just fine.

(I should note that I also used fixed HP per level, including the same fixed value at 1st level. So that one-off bonus was partially to compensate for that. So Fighters gained 7 hit points per level, and a 1st level Fighter would start with 7+5=12 hit points.)

 

[delericho]

One other rule I have considered at various times is a "hit point advance" rule - characters start with triple hit points (or some other multiplier) but then that total remains fixed until their new total would exceed what they already have.

(So here, if a 5e Fighter gains 10 to start and 6 per level, the character would start with 30 hit points. However, at 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level his total would remain at 30. It's not until 5th level when his total would rise to 34 (10 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6) - that being the first point where his new total exceeds what he started with.)

The advantage of this is that it gives low-level characters more of a buffer before dying without giving high-level PCs lots of extra hit points. The disadvantage is that it's a mite more complex than just giving a flat bonus.