Cinco: DM Inspiration

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I drafted an (unused) rule that players can sacrifice their characters to let the rest of the crew escape whatever situation they’re in. It was requested by friends online and offline because they think of moments in adventure fiction where that sort of thing happens, and it’s epic and gets at your heartstrings. But it wasn’t used in practice. I think it’s because on some level it interrupts the ‘game’: not in the sense that it’s non-random necessarily, but in that it bypasses standard play procedure and imposes logic external to the situation. I don’t think we really want to cause Boromir moments as much as we want them to emerge from the game itself.

Another problem I encountered pretty regularly while playing is that characters with spells and magic items use their inspiration pretty quickly, and then are restricted from doing anything for the rest of the session. I don’t necessarily want to increase how much inspiration someone has or make it easier to restore. You’re supposed to earn inspiration in D&D 5e by doing cool shit for which the DM rewards you, but I’ve felt like that approach puts the cart behind the horse: rather than giving inspiration for extra cool shit, I think we should spend inspiration to do that cool shit or increase the chance of cool shit happening—it was already on the table for your character to amputate someone below the neck, but players can make it more likely by spending inspiration to better control the situation.

So, I’m just going to allow players to spend inspiration past their limit, whether for magic or to do cool shit, but in doing so they give me a karmic IOU which I can use to make life more difficult for their characters guilt-free. This was inspired by fear tokens in Daggerheart, except rather than it just kinda happening all the time, it’s an explicit devil’s bargain to improve one’s current situation in exchange for things getting worse down the line. Unlike the mechanic called “devil’s bargains” in games such as Blades in the Dark or Trophy, neither I nor the player are under immediate pressure to invent a negative side-effect on the spot. It just means I can let opponents or environments do cool things and give players a hard time that way. The easiest way to spend this is to give opps free actions or supercharged attacks in combat.

Not sure what to call it. DM inspiration? Karma? Hubris? Devil’s bargains again? But you get the gist. And I think the application here could be beyond my own campaign to any relying on inspiration or similar resource.

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