Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne came out in 1975, just one year after OD&D, and it does a lot of things exactly the same way as OD&D - but not everything. But if that second option, rerolling HP every level, sounds weird, consider Empire of the Petal Throne ( paid link). I don’t see anything in OD&D that clarifies this, which suits the game’s DIY spirit just fine in my book. It doesn’t matter how many he had before - this is a fresh roll. The fighting man rolls 8d6+2, and now has that many hit points.The fighting man adds 1d6+2 to his existing hit point total (which has been going up by 1d6, sometimes with a small bonus, every level).If I hadn’t stumbled across folks talking about hit dice online, and then read those two threads above, I’d almost certainly have assumed you rolled HP the same way in OD&D as in every other edition - and maybe you do! Which is the neat part.Ĭonsider this: Which of these is correct? I don’t think I’d have noticed this on my own. At 8th level, our doughty fighting man gets 8 + 2 Dice for Accumulative Hits - and in the example, they’re all rolled at once. “Superhero” is the title for an 8th-level fighting man, listed as “Super Hero” in the chart. And the second sentence just explains what “3 + 1” means: add the “+ 1” just once, at the end. That first sentence seems clear enough: you roll hit dice to find your hit points. Thus a Superhero gets 8 dice + 2 they are rolled and score 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6/totals 26 + 2 = 28, 28 being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death. Pluses are merely the number of pips to add to the total of all dice rolled not to each die. OD&D: Dice for Accumulative Hitsĭice for Accumulative Hits (Hit Dice): This indicates the number of dice which are rolled in order to determine how many hit points a character can take. It’s fun to talk about this stuff, and here on Yore is where I like to talk about it. I’m just a dude exploring old-school D&D and having fun poking things with a stick, and one of my maxims is that everything is new to someone. These two threads on the Original D&D Discussion boards are both great reads on this topic: In defense of the original HD system and Origins of hit point re-roll at every new level?. This isn’t news, and I’m not a scholar uncovering D&D’s Hidden Truths TM. I don’t think that’s been true since the late 1970s, as each edition since has spelled things out much more clearly. I double-super-love that in OD&D ( paid link), how you roll them for your character is completely open to interpretation. They’re a brilliant abstraction, though often misunderstood, and they work beautifully in play.