Hit dice used in ways other than to bolster hit points

[Amiel]

So, was randomly thinking of this (and also trying not to procrastinate), what if you could use your hit dice in ways other than just expending them to bolster your hit points?

Say you want to scramble up a cliff face and you're barely hanging on to the cliff edge, you could expend a hit dice to give yourself advantage. Or use them in other ways in other, but like situations to gain advantage in Str, Dex or Con skills.
Or even you could use the hit dice as an exertion or stamina system to bolster your physical attacks, giving them advantage? or giving you maneuver-lite attacks a la the battlemaster?

Also, you could even use your hit dice as a draconic sorcerer to give yourself draconic physical traits, like the breath weapon or the claws, in a way how they initially designed the draconic sorcerer.

But you would still need to balance this resource as you still need to keep any uses of the hit dice to expend them to bolster your hit points.

What do you think?

[Kane0]

Trading them for other resources like spell slots and item charges is a common concept, as well as interacting with exhaustion or action economy.

[Mith]

In my opinion, any system that makes more use for Hit Dice, should make Hit Dice more valuable to make the choice be more tactical. So natural healing is only done through Hit Dice. Perhaps you only get Hit Dice back on a Long Rest. So they are still used to recover Hit Dice, and any use of extra features can result in a slow death spiral if you have no other sources of healing in a long stretch of fighting.

As far as what the extra uses you can use, I would say that in general, one should be able to boost saving throws, not skills. Your ideas of allowing for boosting Draconic Sorcerer abilities, I would probably avoid Class boosting, since I am not sure if you can balance things around classes. I can see using this concept to boost racial abilities, such as a Halfling can gain a luck point, or an Orc can spend a Hit Die to do more damage on a crit. However, this should be further limited by maybe half proficiency or half CON modifier per long rest.

[Lord8Ball]

I think it would be reasonable to be able to spend some hit dice to remove a rank of exhaustion on short rest instead of healing. The amount of hit dice spent would be up for the dm to decide. Perhaps if you are in an extreme environment like a blizzard, desert, or surviving in the ocean alone I would allow some hit dice to be used to give the advantage to survival or constitution checks to endure such environments assuming you are not already prepared for the terrain beforehand in which case you wouldn't need a check to survive.