Low HP

[Egavactip]

So I have an 11th level gnome mage. He has only 43 hp, averaging less than 4hp a level. Should I continue on or just start him over while I haven't waste too much time on the character?

[Derakon]

Gnome mages have a d8 hit die and a -1 CON modifier. You always get max hitdie on your first level, so that's 35 HP over 10 levels, which is only a little below average rolls (3.5 vs. 4.5 average). If your CON is 9, then you apparently get a -.1 HP/level penalty, which is not really relevant.

Gnome mages are gonna be fragile, that's just a fact of life. d8 hit die is just not very good.

[Egavactip]

Gnome mages have a d8 hit die and a -1 CON modifier. You always get max hitdie on your first level, so that's 35 HP over 10 levels, which is only a little below average rolls (3.5 vs. 4.5 average). If your CON is 9, then you apparently get a -.1 HP/level penalty, which is not really relevant.

Gnome mages are gonna be fragile, that's just a fact of life. d8 hit die is just not very good.

Hmmm, okay, thanks. I guess my HP had just been quite lucky the first few iterations of this deathprone character.

[Egavactip]

well, he just got a Ring of Speed +7 at DL6, so that might increase his survivability.

[Pete Mack]

Nice. I disagree with derakon about how weak your HP is. There's only about a one in 12 chance of doing so badly--it's 1.38 standard deviations below average. Not terribly unlikely, but still it qualifies as a bad roll.
Edit: fixed probability. I included both tails in computation, not just low tail.

[Derakon]

Yeah, I didn't mean to claim that Egavactip wasn't unlucky, just that their results aren't that far from the average, and that gnome mage in general is going to be easy to kill.

They're definitely in the contention for most fragile race/class combo. Hobbits have a d7 hit die, but they get an extra +1 CON compared to gnomes, which might just be enough to put them ahead in the long run; it depends on how plentiful CON boosts are on gear. Each extra side on your hit die is an extra 25 HP on average at level 50; the difference between max and almost-max CON is 75 HP at level 50. Of course in the early game CON matters much less.

Kobolds are the only other low-hitdie race at d8 and also 1 CON higher than gnomes.

[Gwarl]

I think there's a function which biases HP characters toward low rolls and vice versa, so your gnome should catch up. Especially with that ring of speed, dang.

[Derakon]

I think there's a function which biases HP characters toward low rolls and vice versa, so your gnome should catch up. Especially with that ring of speed, dang.

Hit die rolls are all decided at the beginning of the game, and if their total is too far from average then they get rerolled. So it's not possible to get a character that rolls 1 or 2 on every roll (unless you made a race that had a d2 hitdie and played as a mage) -- but it's also not possible to have a character roll perfectly on every roll either.

[AnonymousHero]

[...] and if their total is too far from average then they get rerolled.

Just curious... is that really true? (I.e. is there actual code for this?) It just seems like a weird thing to guard against such rare events. (I think we're talking a roughly normal distribution when we have independent rolls for each of the 50 levels?)

[Pete Mack]

The limit is +/- 1/4 of the mean HP value (biased slightly low, because it doesn't account for the guaranteed dice of cl 1.)
For a half-troll warrior, this is only 2.7 standard deviations, so yeah, it will happen occasionally, given the number of games that are played over all. (For a hobbit mage, it will almost never happen.)

[Egavactip]

I think there's a function which biases HP characters toward low rolls and vice versa, so your gnome should catch up. Especially with that ring of speed, dang.

Sadly, he died very soon after, ring of speed be damned. As did the next couple of tries. I think it took me seven tries to win with the gnome mage (the win is on the ladder).