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| Guillaume Singelin |
Both PCs and NPCs have Hit Dice. All Hit Dice are d6s by default.
PCs can gain HD by leveling up, drinking from the fountain of youth, and eating the hearts of dragons.
PCs can turn their HD into MD permanently, sell their HD to the devil, or lose HD to level-draining monsters.
Healing
Your HD become HP at the end of a rest.
After a long rest, roll all of your HD. If the sum is greater than your current HP, it becomes your HP. You may reroll one HD for each luxury you have.
After a short rest, roll one of your HD for each luxury you have. If the sum is greater than your current HP, it becomes your HP.
After a week of downtime, your HP becomes the maximum possible value on all of your HD.
Luxuries are any comfort items you take into the dungeon that exceed the essentialist lifestyle of an adventurer. An item doesn’t count as a luxury if bringing it into the dungeon has a negligible cost; comfort always has its tradeoffs.
Example Luxuries:
- alcohol
- protein
- tea
- a dedicated masseuse
- cheese from the motherland
- the object of your addiction
All magical and non-magical healing sets your HP to some value if it is greater than your current HP. For example: a "potion of minor healing (3d6)" sets your HP to the rolled sum if it is greater than your current HP.
Design Thoughts
The motivation behind this mechanic is entirely frivolous: i just like the idea of handing a player a hit dice more than telling them to write +4 HP on their character sheet.
I also like the idea of giving players mechanical opportunities to role-play moments of weakness. Just like how an 8 HP, 8 HD dragon might be critically injured or sick compared to the average, sometimes an adventurer just has a bad day. Narrating a low roll on HD as “This PC is looking rough today, maybe they caught a chill?” could inspire some cute moments between players: “Let me carry that for you, you’re not looking so hot” etc.
Sacrificing HD has a lot of weight because it’s a tangible loss. It could be a cool resource to spend for some class mechanics; maybe you can use hit dice as an alternative resource, like GLOG MD.
Last but not least, there's something comforting about having universal mechanics for PCs and NPCs. I don't think its a virtue by any means, but knowing that "[dice] HD target" means something similar for both PCs and NPCs feels very good somehow.
Is any of this worth using in a hack?????? Probably not. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
Very cool!
ReplyDeleteI like this - been thinking of something very similar, tying it in to using inventory to represent actual wounds so that HP more reflects an adventurer's not-being-hit ability.
ReplyDeleteRe-rolling hit dice could have some other effects:
- HP is no longer seen as a refillable bar. There's no max HP other than what you can mathematically roll. The character just has a single 'current HP' box.
- It prevents PCs from being hamstrung by a single HP bad roll at character creation, where a magic user is hardier than a fighter because they rolled better that one time.
- Magical healing isn't really 'healing' anymore; it's more of a divine blessing to keep one from harm since it can now add to current HP instead of just refilling the HP bar.
Yes yes yes! This is exactly what I was thinking. All of it feeds into a modern OSR understanding of what HP represents.
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