So after playing the Baldurs Gate games as well as Icewind Dale quite a few times I began to develop my own little rule system for rolling hp. The reason for this is because I would often have games where my melee character(s) would roll 1's, 2's or 3's so often that they became virtually useless and it annoyed me to no end. However, I always felt at the same time that just going max hp on rolls made the game too easy and a bit boring. So here are the rules to this system which I think is pretty fair. For all your characters, you can reroll up to half of their max hit dice. So, for example, you would have five rolls per level up for a pure class fighter because their hit dice is 1d10. However, if you were not satisfied with your first roll and decided to roll again, your previous roll is permanently gone, so if you rolled a 5 on your first chance and wanted a little more but got a 1,4,2,2 respectively with your remaining chances, then your last roll which in this case would be 2 would be the roll your character receives. And yet again, if you were to receive a 7 on your first roll and decide that it was sufficient then your remaining rolls can be used as bonus rolls but ONLY on the next level up. So, for example you roll that 7 and accept it, you now have four bonus rolls to use on the next level if needed, but on your next level up you roll a 2, 6, and then a 10, those four bonus rolls from your previous level up are gone and you only have 2 unused rolls from this immediate level up to use as bonus on your next level up. So you would essentially have 5 + the 2 bonus rolls to get a decent roll. But believe it or not I have still had within one level up rolls that went a bit like 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 2, 1, 3 so it is still very possible to get very low rolls with this system but its not nearly as likely as with just rolling once every time and accepting it however crappy it may be. Multi classed characters also get half their hit dice for each class so for a fighter/druid with 17 con like Jaheira, you would get 2 rolls on each level up with druid. The fighter class though would get 2 on one level up and 3 on the next and then 2 again and so on since 5/2 is 2.5 I round down for the first fighter level up and then the .5 comes back into play on the next to give you that extra roll if you follow what I'm saying. Also, for multi classed characters, if they level up in both classes at the same time, they are confined to the amount of rolls of their lower hp class so going back to Jaheira again, she would only get 2 rolls in fighter if she leveled up in druid at the same time even if her fighter level up should have gotten 3 rolls. So, I think that pretty much covers it I just thought I would share my own way of going about avoiding those ridiculously bad luck games and see if anyone else thought this system was useful to them. Feel free to critique if you wish.

Personally, I think I like the way Wizardry handles HP rolls at level up. Whenever you level up, you reroll your HP from scratch. That becomes your new max HP if greater; otherwise you gain 1 HP at the level up.

This system decreases the chance of being horribly unlucky; you would need to have a lot of bad luck (or reloading/save abuse) to keep a poor hit point total. On the other hand, maxing out you max HP by reloading becomes infeasable.

One other nice trait: you can continue using this system after level 9/10, giving you a new chance of getting lucky at every level. In other words, if you are level 10, but have bad HP, gaining a level gives you another chance of getting a good HP roll.

Another nice aspect of this system is that it behaves better for multi-class characters, as there is much less possibilities of getting more or less HP due to rounding. This benefits fighter multi-classes slightly, while it slightly hurts high level triple class characters.

I do not currently own nor have I ever played Wizardry but that system certainly sounds much more balanced. You have peaked my curiosity with it. But yea, I always felt that fighters, rangers, and paladins should have had 2d5 rolls instead of 1d10 but I don't even know if a five sided die exists or even if that would really matter for a computerized version of D&D. But alas, I shall adhere to my method.

If you want to try a game that uses the method I mentioned, try Elminage Gothic. Note that Wizardry 6 through 8 handle HP completely differently; Wizardrys 1, 2, 3, and 5 are the ones that use the system I mentioned. (I actually don't like the mechanics of 6 and 7, but that's another story for another topic on another subforum.)