Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 5924753" data-attributes="member: 17077">I was very saddened to see the return of randomly determining the number of hit points a player gains at each level. I think that hit points are far too important to be determined randomly. I personally do not like randomly determining any aspect of a character, but I will note that there is a significant difference between rolling ability scores and rolling for hit points, even in this new ediiton which places so much emphasis on ability scores. Why? For starters, ability scores are typically rolled with 3 or 4 six-sided dice. This creates a bell curve where average scores are far, far more likely to be generated than either very high or very low scores. With the popular 4d6, drop the lowest die method, very low scores are even less likely, narrowing the difference in ability scores even further. Since odd numbered ability scores don't really do anything (since you only get a +1 bonus or penalty for every 2 ability points above or below 10), the actual difference between a very well rolled character and one which rolled poorly is not actually that great. Even if you have an 18 and I have an 8, you have only a +5 advantage over me on rolls in that ability. That is significant, yes, but on a d20 roll that only equates to about a 25% difference in success vs. failure. It's not insurmountable.Also, unless you are using the extremely stringent rolling method where you don't get to allocate your scores to whatever abilities you wish (In my experience I have never seen a group do that), players can also further diminish the effects of bad rolls by putting them in ability scores that aren't as important to the class they want to play.With hit points, this is not at all the case. Hit points are generated using only one die, so there is no bell cuve. A fighter is just as likely to roll a 1 as is he to roll a 10. This makes the variation between poorly rolled characters and well-rolled characters potentially extreme. One 20th level fighter could literally have 180 fewer hit points than his comrade. Sure, it's very unlikely for one character to roll 20 1's and the other 20 10's, but even half that margin, 90 hit points, is an enormous difference in character survivability and power. Ironically, the classes that need hit points the most, such as fighters and barbarians and other classes that are expected to be in melee and take the most punishment, have the widest variation in hit points due to using larger hit dice.To me, it is poor game design for one character to be vastly weaker than another just because of a few unlucky die rolls. Sure, lots of things in the game come down to the luck of the dice, but as I pointed out, with things like ability scores, the difference is nowhere near as great. And characters have means of recovering from failed saving throws or missed attack rolls. At the very worst, they die and can have their character resurrected. This is a far cry from having a character who is so irreperably fragile that he is practically worthless.I strongly recommend that in DnDNext that players gain a set number of hit points per level based on their class.</blockquote>

Verification