The thing is, though, no player ever finds it fun getting stuck with a low hit die roll, just as no player ever particularly enjoys getting level-drained by a spectre. That shit ain't fun, and I'm not some kind of macho old-school dogmatist here to tell you that you must implement harsh rules or else you're doing it wrong.
One solution very popular within OSR circles, then, is to make hit points ephemeral rather than static—that is to say, by analogy with the way hit dice appeared to work in the white box rules (even if Gygax didn't actually run his games that way—by his own account, when a fighting man went from 1+1 hit die at first level 2 hit dice at second level, the player just rolled 1d6 and increased his total, ignoring the presence of the previous level's bonus pip), some OSR players advocate re-rolling all hit dice at every experience level, or even before every adventure, or in some extreme cases, before every combat.
That last one is a mite bit too fiddly for me, and I'm not sure how it would be meant to interact with hit point damage if damage is supposed to be persistent throughout the game-day or adventure. But re-rolling hit points each day/adventure? That actually sounds kind of cool.
One of the reasons I'm starting to particularly like this idea, is that I've always run hit points as "breath" rather than "meat"—that is to say, wind and not wounds. Stamina and not bodily integrity. A full night's rest is enough to heal all hit points; which means that player characters in my campaigns don't often take a lot of downtime unless they're actually severely wounded and need to heal, or have some project they're working on. But if the players have the option of re-rolling their hit points each day until they're satisfied, that can stand in for reasonably lengthy periods of rest between adventures (and such periods should be reasonably lengthy if they're to be believable).
In the interest of verisimilitude, in other words, I need to do something to make player characters want to stay home for several days between dungeon delves. But a slow natural healing rate of 1 hp per night of rest is not that thing, because I really just can't cotton to the notion of a 1st level fighter always healing up all his hit points in a week when a 10th level fighter might need two months.
So what happens if we implement a rule that says to the players, "you may, at your decision, re-roll your hit points at the start of each game day"? Well, what's gonna happen, is that every player in the party is going to spend however many days they have to in order to get a decent enough roll that they're happy with. Some players might be happy after a day or two and then stand pat, but other players are going to re-roll several times; one player might just be unlucky and wind up spending a week. But that's okay. In-game, the characters are resting, recovering their wits and their courage. And I kind of like the picture of a dungeon-delving campaign that this idea paints. Characters need time between adventures to recover, physically and emotionally. And at last, when every player deems that their character has enough hit points—which is to say, in game, each character deems that they once again feel courageous and hale enough to strike out again and risk their luck—the next delve can begin.
Okay, wow, I'm really talking myself into this here. But perhaps someone can think of a downside to this rule? Is there any real chance, for example, that a particularly stubborn player might hold out for a nigh-impossible maximum roll on several hit dice, and never succumb to the peer pressure of their fellows, to get on with the game? I don't know—and I think that I'll have to playtest this rule to find out.
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