My first version of D&D was 4th Edition and one of the things that was new to me during the Next playtest period was the inclusion of Hit Dice (which I understand were present in earlier editions). On the surface, they seemed intuitive enough: Hit Dice are tied to how many hit points a character has overall.
However, I always seem to have trouble with Hit Dice in relation to healing. In 4e, healing means you expend a Healing Surge and regain a number of hit points equal to your Healing Surge Value. In Next/5e, the amount you heal is tied to your Hit Dice. While I guess it makes sense that you recover hit points based on your Hit Dice, it seems that I always have a mental disconnect when I want to heal (a positive thing) and I have to think about getting hit (a negative thing). I know it may sound trivial especially if you are one who intuitively gets it, but it has been a problem for me as I often waste 5 seconds or so searching my character sheet for "Heal Dice" or something similar before I remember that I'm looking for "Hit Dice".
To my disappointment, the name has remained Hit Dice through the playtest and into the final version. I've really tried to brute-force memorize this, but for whatever reason I have a hard time associating Hit Dice with Healing. Are there any tips, tricks, mnemonic devices, whatever that can help me and other 4e players remember this?
Best Answer
It's funny how things like this go crazy when you look at how different editions on different languages work.
Hit Dice, in Portuguese, was translated (incorrectly) as "Dado de Vida", or "Life Dice". In portuguese, you don't have "Hit Points", you have "Pontos de Vida", or "Life Points".
So, at least for portuguese-speaking people, associating "Life Points" with "Healing"(Gaining "more life") is trivial.
The same don't happen on english, however. I had a player who was on the same situation a few days ago, having this same issue (albeit on another system). He simply couldn't plug on his mind that the same value for "Hit Dice" would be used for Healing.
So, we went up to try to find a few mnemonic ways to remember that easily. We came up with something... fuzzy. We went to write some verses, to find something easy to remember. We came up with this (Keep in mind that I'm a GM, not a Poet, so yeah, that's a heck of a silly thing):
(It's actually bigger than that, but I removed the non-relevant parts)
The last two verses did the trick, when you read them in a "Dr. Seuss"-like way.
Yeah, it's bad, but hey, it worked!