House Rules: Generating Stats and Hit Points

Generating Stats


The rules:
Get a deck of cars and pull out two sets of Ace through 6. You should have 12 cars.


Shuffle the cards and then deal a pair to each stat, in order.


Add the cards together, plus six. This is the value of the stat.


You may swap one pair of stats.


The reasoning:


Some people want total control over the character generation process, the same way a Magic: The Gathering player has total control over the content of their deck. But I don't see it that way. Part of the game of D&D is making the best of what random happenstance hands to you, and role-playing with it.


At the same time, I understand that some rolls matter more than others. If you roll one bad attack, you'll probably get another chance. If you roll bad stats you're stuck with them for as long as the character survives, and you may have a much worse character than the other players at the table. This isn't very fair.


So how do we square the desire for randomness with the desire for fairness? We do it with a deck of cards. Everyone has the same cards in their deck, so no one is going to get to the table with straight 18s, or straight 9s. Everyone will be working off the same dealt hand. Some people might get two sixes and start the game with an 18, but this meaans all their other stats are lower. Other people will have more average stats across the board. Different, but fair.


Rolling Hit Points


The rules:
At first level, you start with the maximum value of your Hit Dice plus any modifiers from your Constitution, race, or class. This is your Maximum Hit Points.


At each subsequent level, when you level up, you roll the entire dice pool of Hit Dice you have accumulated, plus all modifiers. A 2nd level Fighter might roll 2d10+6, and a Rogue 4/Wizard 4 might roll 4d8+4d6+8. And so forth. Add all the dice results and modifiers together. If this number is larger than your current Maximum Hit Points, this is your new Maximum Hit Points. If the rolled total is less than your current Maximum Hit Points, your new Maximum Hit Points is equal to the previous Maximum Hit Points plus one.


The reasoning:
As with rolling stats, rolling Hit Points is too important to make characters live with bad rolls their entire career. I've see 4th level fighters that rolls two 1s for HP, and it's sad. It makes them impossible to play. With this system a bad HP roll only lasts as long as the level you're in. Next level you roll the whole pool again and get another shot at a higher result.


In the long run this will cause PCs Max HP to be somewhat random but also they'll always revert to the mean value. If  you roll low for two levels in a row, that's too bad, but you'll probably see a huge jump the third time. Similarly if you roll really high for a level or two you'll have outsized HP for a while, but then you'll probably have to live with the +1 HP for a couple levels until you revert back to the mean.