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Oct 4, 2012 -- 2:25AM, Garthanos wrote:

I want them to do more than healing its a nice resource with versatile possibility wherever anybody is using the word healing ... change it to Heroic or Hero.

Well to be fair I've never liked the term hit dice even before. I remember my 10 year old brain hitting that term in my basic set and finding it fairly unfathomable so I just ignored it entirely.

Maybe they do have more plans for it? Whatever the intention might be, there's no other purpose in the playtest and that's really all we've got to go on. There isn't any further mention of what hit dice might do anywhere, is there?

Just had a brain wave. Hit dice could be a means to pull the class tables away from the mechanics of accessing special abilities. So a possible answer to the warlock's eldritch blast question when creating magic systems is you use hit dice for the eldritch blast damage rather than some independent scaling mechanism.

That'd create some strange irregularities, like the cleric based warlock doing more eldritch blast damage than the wizard based one, but the trade would be in the form of magic attack and spell selection I guess.

Thoughts?

Oct 4, 2012 -- 3:40AM, Garthanos wrote:

Oct 4, 2012 -- 2:54AM, kadim wrote:

Well to be fair I've never liked the term hit dice even before. I remember my 10 year old brain hitting that term in my basic set and finding it fairly unfathomable so I just ignored it entirely.

Maybe they do have more plans for it? Whatever the intention might be, there's no other purpose in the playtest and that's really all we've got to go on. There isn't any further mention of what hit dice might do anywhere, is there?

Just had a brain wave. Hit dice could be a means to pull the class tables away from the mechanics of accessing special abilities. So a possible answer to the warlock's eldritch blast question when creating magic systems is you use hit dice for the eldritch blast damage rather than some independent scaling mechanism.

That'd create some strange irregularities, like the cleric based warlock doing more eldritch blast damage than the wizard based one, but the trade would be in the form of magic attack and spell selection I guess.

Thoughts?

Hmmm 4e allowed healing surges to be spent to fuel a few things beyond just healing (like activating magical devices).

I think since the melee/warrior classes are likely to have more or bigger in the case of HD, their use to allow extremes of heroic exertion for those types would be handy. 

Yeah the big danger with that is the difference between the wizard's d4 hit dice and the fighter's d10 hit dice. The balance would be in the wizard's spell selection and uses/day but you run the risk of high HD-value classes becoming "musclebound" with really only hit dice to work with. Still, you could roll combat superiority and rogue schemes into hit dice somehow.

What if we actually looked at what a hit die is and divorce the notion of a class always using the same die value per hit die. What if your hit dice was just a number.

So a fighter would roll HD in d10s for hp, but HD in d8 for combat superiority. I know the expertise dice scale slower than HD but the fact that the fighter has to worry about using those dice to heal themselves after would temper their use.

Course, that shifts combat superiority to a daily resource so that might not be so hot. Or you could bring back some recovery method for fighters. It could be driven by feats.

They shouldn't be "hit" anything.  "Hit" implies I'm using that dice to attack some target, as in "to hit."  Yes, I know that 1e monsters used "hit dice" as a measure of a monster's vitality to get monster HP (and a general approximation of the monster's threat level) but that's still something you, the player, are trying to hit. 

It makes much more sense to use "healing" or "recovery" or some other term as the modifier of "dice" or "roll," in order to denote the actual function of these rolls, i.e., to gain some hp back during rest.  I think "healing roll" makes perfect sense.