If hit points are a reflection of your character’s health, resolve, wellbeing and importance to the plot, then Hit Dice should be the font from which those things are recharged. This means making hit dice a commodity for more than just healing, and turning them into a stack of your character’s inner reserves that they can call on in a pinch.
The following are suggested ways in which you can choose to expend hit dice:
- Healing. As usual, characters can expend their remaining hit dice during a short or long rest to recover hit points.
- Spell Slots. Spellcasters can summon up the magical forces within them to cast spells when they are out of spell slots. Spell slots used this way cost 1HD per spell slot level. So in order to cast a 4th level spell using HD, a character would have to expend 4 hit dice for that spell.
- Special abilities and powers. Class/Racial abilities or feats with a set number of expenditures can be called upon again by expending 2 hit dice per use. Examples of this include Ki Points, Bardic Inspiration dice, Wild Shapes, and Superiority Dice.
- Paying for flashbacks. Whenever you invoke a flashback (below), the GM sets a “stress cost” in the form of a Hit Dice expenditure.