Since Pathfinder is a sane system that understands dice pools are evil, my group just adds any situational modifiers afterwards. It's not hard to remember to add a +2 for flanking or stuff like that to the final roll.
Now, for something like Shadowrun, situational modifiers are a right pain in the ass.
Roger A. said:
hmm,
auto calc hp from con mod for con mod changes..... ok. Makes sense to
me now. What about a way to roll your hit die at each level? From what I
can tell, your sheet only has the ability to multiply a single number
for each class by your level in that class, and add that to what you got
from your con mod and other classes.... Am I missing something?
Just roll normally and add it to the total, I can't think of any really convenient way to make it do that for you.
If you're not rolling for HP but instead taking averages (round down on even levels, round up on odds, max HP for first character level), you can use to this to calculate HP automatically as you level:
(@{CON-mod} * @{level}) + @{class-0-hp} + floor((@{class-0-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor(@{class-0-level} / 2) + ceil((@{class-0-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor((@{class-0-level} - 1) / 2) + floor((@{class-1-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor(@{class-1-level} / 2) + ceil((@{class-1-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor((@{class-1-level} + 1) / 2) + floor((@{class-2-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor(@{class-2-level} / 2) + ceil((@{class-2-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor((@{class-2-level} + 1) / 2) + floor((@{class-3-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor(@{class-3-level} / 2) + ceil((@{class-3-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor((@{class-3-level} + 1) / 2) + floor((@{class-4-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor(@{class-4-level} / 2) + ceil((@{class-4-hp} + 1) / 2) * floor((@{class-4-level} + 1) / 2)
Put the HD in the HP column for each class in on the left, and make sure the first class that character takes a level in is on top.
A level 1 barbarian with 10 CON would have 12 HP, at level 2 he'd have 18 HP, and at level 3 he'd have 25 HP. If he then took a class in Fighter (d10) to become a Barbarian 3/Fighter 1, he'd have 31 HP. If he took another yet another level in Fighter, that'd be 36 HP. Pretty easy.
I much prefer this to rolling. It's yet another thing you don't have to explain to your players, it keeps chance from permanently gimping a character (definitely keeps the completionists and perfectionists in the group happy), and I've never had anyone in my group tell me they felt their character was any less unique because of it.
Point buy's pretty fun too, though if minmaxing annoys you too much you can also opt for attribute arrays. Anything to make those damned dice go away in chargen.