I was reading a review of 5e game play here from our RSS Feed. And in it he makes an observation about a strange rule:
Weird rule thing. You recover half your level in hit dice during a
long rest, which means level 1 characters never recover hit dice.
That didn't make sense to me, and so I double checked the long rest rule and it reads:
At the end of a long rest, a character regains all lost it points.
The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice
equal to half of the character’s total number of them. For example, if
a character has eight Hit Dice, he or she can regain four spent Hit
Dice upon finishing a long rest.
And of course the rules state that in general you always round down.
Am I missing something? Is there a good explanation for why at first level you can't recover hitdice?
Best Answer
A few folks have mentioned to me that Mike Mearls has stated elsewhere that it's an oversight in the text, and the intent is that a level 1 character should recover 1 hit die. Seems likely errata-fodder.
The rules for long rests were later updated to say that the minimum is 1 hit die.