It seems that one topic in D&D lore generates more discussion, and maybe house-ruling, than any other and that is Hit Points - HP. I am pretty sure that the idea of hit points is a carry over from certain wargames, especially naval wargames where each ship typically has armor (class) and hit points. In a naval wargame armor reduces the amount of damage caused by certain weapons thus reducing lost hit points. The hit points themselves are an abstract method of calculating the capacity to absorb and take accumulated of damage. It isn't hard to see the parallel in mechanics. If this sounds familiar, it should because the authors of the original edition of the world's first role-playing game had previously collaborated on a naval wargame, Don't Give Up The Ship.
In White Box era D&D, adding additional hit points is a chief feature of character advancement and allows characters of higher level and therefore with more HP to survive a greater number of damaging hits - rather like a battleship that can absorb more damage than a destroyer can. It would be a silly concept were it not for the fact that it has worked fairly well for nearly half a century. The use of hit points to track character damage was eventually ported over to computer and consul games when they arrived and despite there being systems that track individual wounds having been devised early on in role-playing games (Arms Law/Rolemaster) the idea of hit points (or health as it is sometimes called) is still the way we gamers roll.
An ample supply of hit points allows each player to "calculate" how much damage their character can take before they risk character death. This is a key element of old school play, the trade-off between calculated risk and reward and the management of limited resources. Hit points are in effect "game currency", as they are spent adventuring and then renewed upon "healing". The players must add their own narrative either verbally stated out loud for all or internally as they mentally think about what the numbers mean in order to "make sense" of this abstract concept.
From the beginning, players using the three little brown books (and later editions) have been rolling dice for hit points in an effort to make each character a bit different from others. The number and type of dice rolled varies according to character class and level and those differences are part of what sets some classes apart from the others and establish some as having more staying power in combat. The early editions of D&D have often been characterized as producing greater numbers of character "deaths" due to factors such as hit point totals can be as low as 1 for a starting character and character "death" occurs when HP reaches zero. Later editions increase the potential hit points and cushion "death" with various saves and allowing characters to go into negative HP. Digital RPGs frequently reboot the character as they are reduced to zero health, thus avoiding the need to suffer meaningful character death.
One solution to even-out the fickleness of our hit point dice can be to allow players to assign maximum hit points for each character based on the number and type of hit dice rather than rolling randomly. Using this method a White Box edition first-level fighting man who would normally roll a d6, adding 1 for being a fighting man and then adding any constitution bonus for their total starting HP would instead always assign 6 points (maximum possible roll on a d6) plus the appropriate adds as the character's starting HP. Thus a level 1 fighting man with "normal" constitution would have 7 HP. A successful hit in White Box delivers one d6 damage which is subtracted from the character's current HP. Using this system a first-level fighting man would survive the damage from at least the first blow in combat. Maximizing HP for first-level characters has been a frequent house-rule, but it could also be applied to every level making characters of all classes much more resistant to damage. If the same rule is applied to monsters balance can be maintained.
Using values for hit points based on the maximum total possible if dice had been rolled would even out the extremes of randomness and make all characters a bit more robust regarding their ability to absorb damage. Such a house-rule will undoubtedly extend combat as everything takes a greater number of hits. If longer combats with characters who are better able to shrug off damage seems desirable, the flexibility of the role-playing hobby rules means that there are methods to alter the mechanics to produce the type of game one desires.
As with most things in classic D&D and other games, there are trade-offs to changing the rules. The modular nature of the White Box game rules allows for very heavy modifications without seriously damaging your ability to play D&D. If you find the temptation to summon the demon of innovation at your table irresistible, you are not alone. I have tried (and eventually abandoned) a number of "fixes" for my HP dilemma include weapons that do a fixed rather than random amount of damage with each successful hit (1 or 2 pts.), assigning part or all of the damage from each attack to armor points until they are used up, adding the raw constitution score to the initial character hit points, and the list goes on. Each new method I have personally tried tends to slow the game's combat down a bit. There is something to be said for a very "fast" combat mechanic.
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