Hacking 5E Inspiration

[Landwaker]

I’m preparing to run some 5E again, and I don’t want to run inspiration RAW; as Adam has hacked it for CoS, I thought this was reasonably relevant here, but feel free to punt it to General if you prefer (maybe we could add a simple “D&D” tag?)

RAW inspiration feels problematic on both the earning and spending sides. I think the earning side is inherently looser and is best tailored to the campaign; I appreciate how Adam has connected it to his setting via the cards and am curious to see the players further engage with that. Steven’s flashback system in West Marches also worked well especially given its rotating format. I think I’ll just focus on having the PCs choose/design solid ideals and bonds that translate into concrete decisions and actions, which should be sufficiently “significant” to merit an inspiration award, but that’s unavoidably arbitrary … in my group it has tended to distill down to obvious cool or funny moments that enrich the table, regardless of whether it was hard roleplay. Be that as it may, I’m more concerned with inspiration spending than earning.

I don’t think inspiration functions well as a binary charge that only grants advantage. In my experience, players that have the charge hesitate to use it (and new players often forget it), especially if the GM follows the written guideline of awarding it once per player per session (I don’t). And often when the player does wish to use their inspiration to improve their chances on a critical role, they are unable to because they already have advantage on the role for whatever reason (I certainly encourage players to argue for situational advantage based on fictional positioning). Furthermore, the binary charge means that the GM cannot further reward the player if they already have it. I want inspiration to feel more fluid and enable the PCs to potentially achieve epic feats in the moments that matter most to them.

What I’m considering: Rather than a binary charge, let players store multiple charges of inspiration. Not an unlimited pool, but one that scales with the proficiency bonus, so that a new PC can store 2 inspiration charges, increasing to 3 charges at 5th level, and so on. This means more powerful characters will be able to use their inspiration more powerfully, because once they have advantage on a roll, they will have the option to expend additional inspiration charges to add +5 to the same roll for each charge spent. Thus a fully-inspired 5th level PC could spend all three of their charges to gain advantage and +10 to a roll, or +15 if they already have advantage by other means. This is obviously powerful and lets PCs almost certainly succeed on mid-range difficulties, and even try for the impossible – but they’re supposed to be heroic/exceptional folks, so I think it fits (I’d probably want them to connect the use of inspiration back to their ideal/bond, within reason). Mostly I’m drawn to letting PCs use inspiration as a more flexible resource to better transcend the chaos plateau in those critical moments. Maybe +3 per charge is more reasonable … or maybe the roll bonus should also link with proficiency, hmm.

Anyway, playtesting definitely needed, but I wondered if anyone might have feedback or similar ideas that have (or haven’t) worked. Cheers!

[AthleonGaming]

Yeah the default guidelines for giving out inspiration are pretty bad. In the campaign I’m currently playing in we basically ignore it. We’re a pretty strong party so we don’t really need the boost.

I think inspiration can be a flexible “carrot” to award to your players for engaging with the game in the ways that you want them to.

Here’s one idea that I had that kind of expands on Steven’s inspiration rule: Give each player one chance per short rest to describe a scene, almost as if they were the DM for a moment. Things like a cool combat sequence, a stealth scene or a montage if you’re skipping over something. If they do it well the DM accepts the scene and awards them inspiration. I feel this is a good way for the players to bond with the characters and think more “in ficition”, because now they have a mechanical profit for finding, or even creating, opportunities to earn inspiration. Plus, you get them to do your job for you! That’s a win-win situation in my book.

[cazark]

I think it sounds interesting but If any of the characters have the Lucky trait it’s going to be a bit redundant/overpowered (I mean lucky kinda is anyway, but that’s beside the point), that would give them essentially 5+ charges of inspiration per long rest. I’m a fan of Steven’s model, I think it works pretty well. If no one wants to take advantage of that then that’s their loss (which I found to be the case with my group).

[AthleonGaming]

Yeah Lucky is an abomination, it’s super bad design and I have no idea how it made it in the game. If I was running a game I’d just ban it.

About inspiration, you can tailor the cooldown depending on how much of a boost you want it to be. Per session or per long rest also works.

[Typoko]

Atm in my game, i ask players at the end of the session if they think that they or someone else deserves an inspiration. This is the main way to get inspiration. Sometimes when cool stuff happens, i hand out it during sessions. It’s mostly used for death saves or on something that would down a player if they fail a saving throw.

I feel like being able to stack multiple inspirations can be a good way to get the inspiration to be used to more things than just saving ones life. This also drives players to play more to their character as they know that there can be some kind of an reward if they don’t munchkin every situation.

The ability to gain +5 bonuses and then have them stack just seems like a slippery slope to what 5ed is completely against. Everything is meant to be simple and i personally like it that way. You either have advantage and/or disadvantage. You can’t have multiple ones stacking. Stuff is easy to figure out instead of calculating multiple bonuses together. If i would be using multiple inspires (which i will most likely start to use) i would just let people pass a test if they use two inspires. Maybe not on death saves but pretty much everything else. It’s a huge commitment to a single roll and for that to fail it would feel really bad for the player. Also, i feel like the player would need to explain the situation how the miraculous auto success goes down. Maybe reserve a right to say “Yeah, that doesn’t sound so awesome that it would be an auto success. You only use one inspiration to the check.” That said, i can see the +5 stacking being more relevant in a higher level content compared to low level content and how differently it would work in comparison to the auto success.

All in all, i have the same feeling that most players seem to have - regular Inspiration rules aren’t really that inspiring. I think i need to set up a gaming session and see what kind of shenanigance the players manage to come up with to gain multiple inspirations.

[Adfraech_Erdian (Twitch: adfraech)]

I’ve been thinking about using an inspiration rule that works more in the moment:
If you want inspiration right now, for this roll (before the roll), tell us how or what inspires your character in inspired a short vignette or flashback.
I kind of imagine it as a Lost type flashback scene.

It doesn’t really mesh with your inspiration ideas but I thought i’d throw it out there. I haven’t tested it or anything, and it needs some mechanic so players can’t use it for every rule.

[Adfraech_Erdian (Twitch: adfraech)]

Yeah, i definitely wouldn’t want to do the latter. I was thinking 1/day or 1/encounter, but I don’t know. It would need some play testing.

[Landwaker]

I do like scene-based inspiration, but I know at my table it would work much better for some players than others. I’ll try including it as an option during rests, so that those would choose to engage with it have a reliable source of inspiration beyond GM awards, and the quieter players have a real incentive to try it.

[Landwaker]

Good point about Lucky, that feat should probably be removed/changed when I try my “proficient inspiration” idea. I don’t want to make scene-based inspiration exclusive, as it feels somewhat punitive to the less articulate players and doesn’t allow me to reward cool moments (though really they’re their own reward), but I will try making it an option and see how it goes.

[Landwaker]

Lucky does seem a mesh of boring and effective; it’s not flavorful on its face but has enough mechanical benefit that a player can feel obliged to take it.

[Landwaker]

We’ve done some player-nomination at my table but folks tend to be too egalitarian for my taste (more concerned about who hasn’t been awarded yet than who actually stood out). Not saying it can’t work, but I think giving everyone the option for scene-based inspiration is sufficient mitigation of a GM’s selective taste in awarding moment-based inspiration. As almost always, really depends on the group dynamic.

I grok the gist of your “slippery slope” concern, but I regard 5E as somewhat oversimplified and don’t mind adding a bit more adding in this discrete area; I almost always announce the final target number before the roll so players know exactly what they need. I agree +5 might be overkill at low levels (I’m inclined to making both the pool size and the roll bonus scale with proficiency), but I think allowing for autosuccess is more so. To me it seems a foundational premise that a 1 always fails in some way and a 20 always succeeds in some way. But I’d be curious how it goes if you try it out, thanks for your thoughts!

[Landwaker]

I like directly linking the action and the inspiration, but having immediate flashback scenes could disrupt the flow of the current scene, and the flashbacks could tend to be rushed as a result. But maybe not if the group is ready for them, and an epic flashback in the midst of a battle could go off quite well. As you noted, there’d need to be cap on frequency (startlingly, my first thought is proficiency). Thanks for your input!