Hacking 3.5 Part I – Hit Points

Now that our group is sticking with the 3.5 ruleset we are faced with the task of figuring out what hacks/tweaks/changes we will make to freshen it up.  So far we are looking at Monte Cook’s Book of Experimental Might I and Book of Experimental Might II from Malhavoc Press as well as the new Pathfinder RPG from Paizo.  The biggest issue is to help the melee types (mostly our group Knight) to have more to do in a round especially since he was the biggest supporter of a change to 4e.

When deciding to hack 3.5 the questions most on our minds were: what needs to be freshened up and what is broken in our opinion?  Foremost on our knight’s player’s mind was that he had little to do in a round other than swing his sword and absorb damage.  He also found that he was absorbing a lot of damage for himself so he had little chance to use his abilities to absorb damage for others negating much of his classes’ special abilities.

From this we decided to look for some other alternatives to the hit point system other than Healing Surges (I really don’t like that system.  Sorry 4e lovers!).  There are many alternative HP systems out there but I do like the options presented in the first Book of Experimental Might.  The idea of the Grace Points being similar to 4e HP in that it regenerates fairly quickly (1 per minute) while the rest of your hit points working like the traditional hit points (1 per day) called Health Points. Healing magic restores grace points first so that your fatigue and superficial wounds restore faster than the deeper wounds. 

In the Book of Experimental Might II, the idea of Grace Points is expanded to allow PCs to burn them to do extra maneuvers.  This gives more flexibility and does add to the options that PCs have when in combat which might help our fighter but it doesn’t seem enough by itself.

Finally, the Pathfinder RPG seems to offer some interesting changes to the standard hitpoint rules.  However, these are all based on beefing up first level characters and since we are headed to 9th level next session they really don’t offer a lot of help at this point unless we retcon them. 

Right now we are using at least half of maximum per level and bleeding to the PC’s Constitution score as a way to give a little extra but that does not address the need to rest up between encounters which has been the knock to 3.x edition.  I am leaning towards employing the Grace/Health model at this point.  What are some of the alternative Hit Point systems out there that others have used?

In Part II, I’ll take a look at Feats and Skills to see if there are some answers for our wayward Knight lack of round to round activity.  In Part III, I’ll look at the other house rules we are considering adding to spice good old 3.5e.  Have a house rule suggestion that has worked really well for your group?  Have some suggestions on how to get that knight some more round to round action?  Feel free to post it in the comments.