Hi all,
I haven't been entirely happy with the way the inspiration mechanic in 5e works. I like the idea of it, but I've found that it was just one too many things for me to keep track of during play.
Since most of my players are familiar with FATE, we tried the Angry DM's variant inspiration rules (options 1, 9 and 10) ... but we're still not used to it, so we haven't used it much ... and I'm still not sure it addresses the fundamental issue I have with inspiration.
That is, I'm just not sure tying inspiration to advantage is the way to go. I think that's kind of boring, especially since there are so many other ways to get advantage in the game already.
I think it would be more fun if inspiration let you do other things besides just gain advantage. What if you could spend inspiration to regain an expended spell slot or to gain another use of an ability that normally only recharges on a short rest? What if you could spend inspiration to automatically stabilize yourself when you're dying? What if you could spend inspiration to deal max damage on a crit?
SWSE's Force Points mechanic worked in a similar fashion to this. It also let you roll a d6 and add that to a d20 roll. (No doubt the inspiration for the optional Hero Point rule in the 5e DMG.) SWSE also had the optional (and much rarer - more like inspiration) Destiny Points. They let you do things like automatically score a crit, cause an attack against you to automatically miss, take the damage meant for someone else within your reach, and so on.
Anyone got any thoughts on this? Anyone tried anything like this already?
Thanks in advance!
Cheers,
Jonathan
Since tracking it an issue maybe some extra rules that will make tracking inspiration easier. You already own some Star Wars stuff use light and dark side points, you can use those to track inspiration. Just flip the chips to light side when inspiration is available. An idea I plan on using to track chips is to use an antique scale like the one below, to treat it more like the hand of fate (for Al Qadim).
