Short Rest Hit Die

Quote from sethtucker1 >>

I don't disagree with you, and didn't realize I was posting in the "wrong" forum; I was just establishing that it would narrative sense to me if you were still allowed to gain your CON modifier (if positive) on a short rest, since it's still an opportunity to get a reprieve from combat/action.

And I only posted here because of the topic associated with a Google search on the idea; not because I thought I was posting in a homebrew or RAW space.

 Your hit dice represent how much energy/health/whatever you want to call it you can recover. If you're out of hit dice, you're getting too fatigued to recover quickly. I hope that makes at least some sense.

One of the sort of unwritten design rules for 5e and 5.5e is "No Free Healing". Pretty much anything that can restore HP requires you to spend some kind of limited resource, whether it's Hit Point Dice, spell slots, a pool of dice or HP that recharge on a Long Rest, whatever. This seems to be pretty important for balancing purposes, or at least the designers of the game think it is.