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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6873500" data-attributes="member: 4937">I play a house ruled version of D&D 3.0e.  All creatures, including PCs, receive bonus hitpoints based on size class.  I believe you will find this much more realistic, balanced, and have fewer edge cases than basing bonus hitpoints on age, to say nothing of being easier to calculate.Bonus hit points as a function of size class:Fine: 0Diminutive: 1Tiny: 2Small: 4Medium: 8Large: 16Huge: 32Gargantuan: 64Colossal: 128So, why do I do this?A) It solves the "kill rats in the basement" problem.  It makes 1st level characters much more survivable.  With 8 bonus hit points, a first level character can reasonably survive almost any single unlucky hit barring a critical hit or a brute with a large weapon.   This extends the games 'sweet spot' down into 1st level, and lets the DM be a bit more creative in monster selection.B) It solves the "house cat vs commoner" problem.   D&D has traditionally been very bad at dealing with small creatures, because fractions of 1 HD are still basically 1HD, and you don't have any more granularity than '1'.   So you can have a situation where a 1st level commoner framer with a hoe, is severely disadvantaged in combat with his housecat, because they both have just a couple of hit points but the cat has higher dex, better to hit bonuses, better AC, and 3 attacks while the commoner gets minimal advantage from his much larger size (basically, just reach).  It also becomes a problem that a wasp, a mouse, and a cat might each have 1 hit point and do 1 damage on an attack, meaning none is the reasonable predator of the other.C) It solves the "Moby Dick" problem.  In D&D, traditionally large animals - even large herbivorous animals - are very high HD.  They have to be in order to have the sort of hit points we'd expect a large creature to have.  But high HD comes with high attack bonuses, high saving throws, and other artifacts of great combat ability, and often as not this doesn't make a lot of sense.  Hit point bonuses due to size allow for animals with less than god like combat ability, if you want them.D) It generally feels more realistic.  And in general it solves a problem in 3.X that its generally a straight up advantage to be small (or smaller).  If you don't drop your ability scores to do so, you'd almost always prefer to be Fine sized - +8 to AC, +8 to attack bonus(!!).  Now, there is a significant penalty to shrinking, and you can legitimate run a "Puss in Boots" scenario where if an Ogre were to shrink to mouse size, he'd suddenly become a more manageable foe.E) In general, it adds an extra round to combat that 3.X very much needs.  3.X tends to have glass cannon issues where things go down hard in 1 to 1 1/2 rounds.  4e over compensated and dragged out combat too much, but the small bump in hit points to monsters and PCs in 3e adds in my experience another 1/2 to 2 rounds to combat, and gives it more opportunity to play out without normally running so long it starts to drag.   I should also mention that under these rules, undead and oozes get double the normal size class bonus.  This is much more elegant than the kludgy fixes 3.X used, of either giving undead a special kludge ability that gave bonus XP based on charisma (and then forced undead to have high charisma), or of giving oozes a fixed amount of hit points based on size class that was completely unrelated to any other class of creature.  There are a few problems, but they are tiny compared to the gains.1) It exaggerates the "White Tailed Deer" problem.  D&D has always had a bit of trouble explaining how humans hunt game animals, given than a 1d6 damage arrow shot isn't going to do much to a 2HD or larger creature and is only minimally useful against even a 1HD creature that has a CON bonus.   Once you start factoring in bonus hit points, arrows are even less use in hunting.  There are some ways to handle this and yes its ugly you need a critical to have a reasonable chance of killing a deer with a bow shots (although, arguably that's realistic, what is not realistic is that D&D doesn't track blood loss, which is how arrows usually kill), but compared to the gains the loss of realism and gameplay here is small.2) If you do refactor animal HD, it can create problems with balancing animal companions.</blockquote>

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