Dungeon Master: Rolling Player Health

Rolling player health is a classic feature of Dungeons & Dragons and 5th edition has it included in the rules (unlike 4^th edition). However, rolling health can result in problems that an inexperienced Dungeon Master may have difficulty handling. Due to pure luck the party's cleric could end up being better at taking damage than the fighter.

Is It a Problem?

What's wrong with having a fighter that's hard to hit thanks to their armour but isn't very tough? It's as valid a character as any other! If you are rolling health, your players should go into it knowing that this kind of thing is possible and be able to roll with it. Some might not like the idea of playing a flimsy fighter. They became a fighter because they wanted to be tough. From the Dungeon Master's perspective, it's potentially an issue. Statistically, the party should be roughly fine in the long term. However, especially in early levels, lucky or unlucky rolls can have a very big influence on the total amount of health a character has. In these cases, challenge ratings and experience tables can become completely inaccurate (though how accurate they were in the first place is debatable).

Too Little Health

The party may need to play smarter and use more healing potions and other things. That's perfectly fine. You may also want to send a little less stuff at the party in order not to overwhelm them. This is especially true if you've run something before for a more average party and it was difficult. However, I've seen parties play smart and get by. Through their rests, the party has a measure of control over their hit points. It may not obviously help them in a particular combat situation, but through their rests the party can control how much hit points they go with into a combat situation. As a result, the combat encounter itself may not need to be changed but the party will need to adjust their tactics and logistics to account for their weakness.

Too Much Health

This right here is why I decided to write all of this in the first place. I had a ranger that rolled an 8 and a 9 when leveling up to level 2 and 3. The result was that they were very tough early in the game. To keep the tension, the possibility of death needs to be constant. However, the other characters didn't roll as well, excluding the fighter. As a result, adjusting the difficulty of encounters before hand wasn't very easy. Anything I did to make it harder for the ranger would also punish everyone else, who had roughly the expected hit points. However, in practice it worked well. If I wanted to challenge the party, I could be more confident putting them into deadly situations. Dice can be fickle and the health turned out to be not too much of a problem in play. Lucky damage rolls helped even things out. It also let me more confidently employ tricky tactics against the party and know that they had a bit of a buffer. If you want to put your characters into more dangerous situations than normal but still level them as normal, letting them max out or almost max out their health is an option. The result is that players feel harder to take down and as such more can be thrown their way. You will want to do so, however, or things just become too easy.

Issues with Adjusting

If we are just going to adjust things anyway, there's an argument that the rolling for health doesn't matter anymore. I'm not sure I agree, since the distribution of hit points in the party still matters. Also, taking on a group, even if it's just 2 more enemies, feels more impressive for the players generally. Even if it's not by as much as before, characters will still get better when they level up so having the characters feel like they haven't grown isn't that much of a concern. I do have to note that it can change how powerful a particular level up feels to a player. Whether you want to adjust or treat them as normal, it'll still probably work (as statistics says that getting all 9s and 10s for a fighter is very unlikely).

How Badly Skewed Are We?

How badly skewed and for how long will it affect things? If it's a 10 rolled on a d10 at level 2, it's not so bad by the time they reach level 20. However, if it's 9s and 10s all the way up to level 20, the difference becomes massive. At level 2, that good roll provides similar issues as a string of great rolls from level 2 to level 20.  At a certain point you need to do something to continue threatening these kinds of characters, whether through effects that ignore health or through more things to fight. How this is done is best left up to a case by case basis but it's something worth mentioning at the least.