Cinco: DM Inspiration
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.
I changed Inspiration into the Resonance.
ReplyDeleteThere is an article on my about it but in short, any player voluntarely break the reality around them and can re-roll any d20, any number of times but each such re-roll it adds 1 to Resonanse (which starts typically at 0). When hitting certain thresholds (5, 10, 15, 20 for usual lands, or more / less frequently for lands which have softer/harder fabric of reality) a player needs to roll above the current threshold on 1d20 or suffer some eldritch change (not neccessary visible mutation, per se, but something similarly odd and/or dangerous; yes, this roll can be also Resonanced but the failure here would be harsher). The Resonance fades on its own extremely slowly (1 per downtime) although downtime actions (usually getting more grounded in reality), could be used to bleed it off faster, up to about 4 per downtime additionally.
Not sure if it works for you, but I found 'Self-selected Sword of Damocles' method working very well for me.
that's a really clever approach! i think i've seen something similar in prismatic wasteland, or one of its revisions. i definitely like the idea that worse outcomes are only possible once you start pushing your luck, but wish it didn't require player-side tracking (unless it were on the party level instead of the PC level). still really cool!!
DeleteI didn't read Prismatic Wasteland, so cannot tell how similar it is. Mine was made out of distaste to default 5th ed implementation, and I usually track Resonanse for players (so I'd know to trigger a threshold depending on where they are) although the counter is a transparent to players as well, if they wish to know.
DeleteFull article, if you are interested, is on my blog (noisesanssignal one, from about October 10, 2025, but it is just the same thing with more words.
thank you! :) i like your article! and i just realized i have a similar player-facing mechanic which represents exhaustion using item cards, so i may jot a note that exhaustion could be a possible effect of overusing inspiration (and that will certainly be nice in a jiffy). ty!!
DeleteAnytime. Glad if it was useful.
Deletethis is so clever and so straightforward that it boggles my mind I've never thought of it or heard of it before now
ReplyDeleteKyana's Resonance idea is intriguing, but I feel like it needs the right feel for the campaign. Like there's a reason reality bends to the PCs, and that there are consequences. I could using this concept in a restricted area/arc, though, where the PCs are specifically in a reality-weak area!
ReplyDeleteIn my own campaign, I used "DM Inspiration" as a concept for a while, because I agree with you - I want the players to *use* Inspiration to do cool things, not get Inspiration after the fact for something that ended up being cool (although I'll hand it out then, too). So when someone had an idea, and no Inspiration, I'd offer that bargain: The Cool Thing (tm) happens, but the next boss gets Inspiration. Most of the time the players decided NOT to do the cool thing, to avoid boosting the boss.
So now, instead, I tied awarding Inspiration to die rolls, with a twist: if you roll a nat20, you Inspire someone else in the party WHO COULD SEE YOU. (Which has generated some laughter when the nat20 came from the stealth'd rogue or the invisible warlock!) This way there is a constant KNOWN mechanic feeding Inspiration to the party, so they feel more comfortable SPENDING it on Cool Things.
The BBEGs get Karma when one of their minions (not "random monster #4") scores a nat20, or the BBEG's plans advance for whatever reason (most of the time, because the PCs allowed time to pass - one of the reasons my players tend to do Forced Marches and accumulate Exhaustion, to avoid this!).
I will note that in 5e24, Inspiration is officially spent after a roll, to reroll; in 5e14, it was spent before the roll, to get Advantage. No one ever wanted to spend it before the roll, because you might succeed anyway, "wasting" it. So we came up with two compromises. #1: if you roll with Advantage or Disadvantage, the dice come up matching, and you succeed... you give Inspiration as if it were a nat20. #2: if you spend Inspiration BEFORE the roll, you roll *three* d20s, not two.