D&D 5E What makes the Lucky feat so good?

[ccs]

I've never seen a skill check that was literally life or death,

I have. 2 sessions ago our bard walked out an open window - 10k feet directly above the pyramid we were raiding (1e module I3: Pharoh).
She thought the trick to reaching the floating funeral barge, anchored to a small cloud, was the walk of faith bit from Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade. Unlike Indy, she did NOT test this idea with a handful of gravel. Just walked straight out the window. The DM was kind & gave her a Dex save to catch the edge.

All of the other characters were busy doing stuff - looting, deciphering runes/clues, healing, two of us were having a serious in-character argument. Some in the same room, some in the adjacent room.
So the DM had us all roll initiative to see what order we'd all be responding in. The bard, hanging on by her fingertips, beat us all.
Rather than simply wait for the next person in order to come help, the 8str bard decided to make an athletics/climb check to pull herself back up & in.
The DM told her that this was not a good idea & that if she failed she'd remain hanging there BUT if she failed by 5 or more she'd plummet to her death.

She failed by way more than 5.
She dearly wished that she had taken the lucky feat.


And so our poor bard fell 10k feet & then rag-dolled down the side of the pyramid.

We gave her mangled remains a proper burial once the rest of us had escaped the tomb.

 

[Li Shenron]

I realize you want to hang onto this as the last defence against having to say the feat is too good...

But...

Asking a player to...

...doubt his result is good enough, spend his Luck point only to be told he wasted his point, he did succeed is just not any fun.

...just hope his roll was good enough, not use the Luck point, and then be told his character <s>dies<s/> sucks as a result is even less fun.

In other words if the sole redeeming aspect that holds the feat back is something that's decidedly unfun...

...maybe it's time ask ourselves if it isn't better to just accept the feat is too good, and stop our attempts at actively using unfun to stop its power?

Just an idea...

That's not my problem. I didn't write a feat that is causing DMs to ban it because it's too good. But I also didn't write its main limitation that says you have to choose before knowing whether the original roll succeeded or not. It's not me who is making the feat unfun.

 

[Li Shenron]

It depends on how many moments arise when the player **thinks it might be** a key momenr **and* they roll bad in a single long rest bounded period.

These are unlikely to be during the warm up resource fights and in a between long rest period there are not that many tough fights...

If you then spread those key monents with failure betwen those few big fights abd between the four or more pcs... Remembering that your character has three post roll lucks... the odds shift pretty good.

Consider the impact if every pc took luck, so that you were dealing with a dozen rerolls between each long rest.

A lot depends on the structure of the campaign of course. But in my experience three per character per long rest is easily two too many.

Well I just said that 2/day or maybe even just 1/day and IMHO the feat would still be worth...

There is way too much theorycraft in our discussion by now. In practice, I think I would personally 'save up' my lucky points to when I'm down to few HP* or anyway fearing for my life, and probably end up often with unused lucky points. But I am quite a conservative player when it comes to finite resources.

*although lucky points don't work well when applied to someone else's attack against you, since most DMs won't roll in the open

Still... the more you guys talk about "key moments" as they were clearly identifyable, the more I am having doubts about my original opinion... because in 5e there aren't actually that many, there are few save-or-die effects for instance, and you cannot use Lucky to make someone elsr fail their ST against your spell, only your attacks or your own saves... so you can use it offensively only on some attack roll. If you have a winner ability that applies on weapon attacks or a save-or-die spell delivered with an attack roll, that's what you should use your Lucky points with, otherwise you are going to use them defensively.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I think people are overlooking that you can force enemies to re-roll attack rolls. Turning a crit into a regular hit (or even a miss) is pretty amazing. It's an incredibly versatile feat, it's powerful and it's fun. You'll likely use it every session. As noted, it might not be your first pick, but it's normally near the top for your second.

 

[CapnZapp]

That's not my problem. I didn't write a feat that is causing DMs to ban it because it's too good. But I also didn't write its main limitation that says you have to choose before knowing whether the original roll succeeded or not. It's not me who is making the feat unfun.

I didn't say it was your fault.

I'm saying it's not a good idea to argue the feat might be reasonable because its limitation. That limitation is one you don't want to enforce.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Doesn't matter.

9 out of 10 attack rolls aren't individually so important you will spend a Luck point to change them. (In short: You miss an attack? Just attack again. No feat needed for that)

It's saves, and possibly character-defining ability checks, where the feat's real power lie.

It's logically important for the purpose of determining relative value.

Due to poor design in the underlying system math, there's no way for us to estimate the value of re-rolling a save. You could roll a 3, use a luck point, roll a 20, and still fail. That's even assuming that saving throws were predictable enough that you would know to save your luck points for them (your luck points are wasted if you wait to fail saves, but then don't fail any all day), or frequent enough that a stat bonus alone would have a statistical impact. None of those factors are known, though, or even reasonably approximable.

Attack rolls are reasonably predictable. You make enough of them in a day that a stat bonus should matter every day, and your base success rate is consistent enough that we can approximate the value of a re-roll. As long as you follow certain other guidelines, you can also be reasonably certain that you will fail three of them in a day. Increased accuracy with attack rolls is also the main benefit of increasing your primary stat, which is the main alternative to taking the Lucky feat at level 4.

By establishing that Lucky is comparable to a stat increase in the least-favorable-case scenario (a day with only standard attack rolls, where the stat bonus should come out ahead), it strongly implies that Lucky is better than a stat boost in a normal-case scenario. In any day where you fail a check more important than an attack roll, the feat should come out even further ahead, in proportion to how important that check is. We don't know how much further ahead, because of the aforementioned issues with unpredictability, but we can infer that it's significant.

 

[Caliban]

It's the best feat to take if you don't want to take an ASI, and don't have a specific feat in mind. It makes any character better, regardless of class, race, or build. (Specific feats can make specific builds better, but Lucky makes any character just a little bit better.)

 

[CapnZapp]

Well I just said that 2/day or maybe even just 1/day and IMHO the feat would still be worth...

There is way too much theorycraft in our discussion by now. In practice, I think I would personally 'save up' my lucky points to when I'm down to few HP* or anyway fearing for my life, and probably end up often with unused lucky points. But I am quite a conservative player when it comes to finite resources.

*although lucky points don't work well when applied to someone else's attack against you, since most DMs won't roll in the open

Still... the more you guys talk about "key moments" as they were clearly identifyable, the more I am having doubts about my original opinion... because in 5e there aren't actually that many, there are few save-or-die effects for instance, and you cannot use Lucky to make someone elsr fail their ST against your spell, only your attacks or your own saves... so you can use it offensively only on some attack roll. If you have a winner ability that applies on weapon attacks or a save-or-die spell delivered with an attack roll, that's what you should use your Lucky points with, otherwise you are going to use them defensively.

What you should do is treat Luck points as Legendary Saves.

Anything that doesn't outright shut you down you ignore.

Unless it's low stakes, of course. Then do what you want.

 

[Dausuul]

That said, Crawford admitted at some point that this particular oddity in the RAW of the Lucky feat was a design mistake. But they are not willing to correct design mistakes in 5e, they would rather defend the RAW, and that's why Sage Advice confirmed this interpretation.

It isn't "defending the RAW," it's "defending the RAIBJC" - Rules As Interpreted By Jeremy Crawford. The actual text of the feat is ambiguous and could be interpreted a couple of ways. Crawford just picked one interpretation and declared it RAW.

 

[Li Shenron]

What you should do is treat Luck points as Legendary Saves.

Anything that doesn't outright shut you down you ignore.

Unless it's low stakes, of course. Then do what you want.

I think that if the feat lets you turn a failed save into a success, it's working as intended.

It's never going to be as good as legendary saves however, because (a) it's not an automatic success, and (b) you have to use it before the outcome is determined.

By contrast, a legendary save is used only after knowing the save was a failure (so it's never wasted), and is an automatic success. Lucky is an automatic success only in that unfortunate case when you have disadvantage AND you roll one failure and one success (and you can't always be sure that's really the case).