D&D 5E The Case for Inspiration

Li Shenron said:

- it grants advantage, which is statistically powerful but also boring: there's already many sources of advantage in the game, if you grant inspiration too frequently then you get advantage more often than not, if you grant it scarcely then the benefit is underwhelming

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Li Shenron said:

- it's too easy to roleplay with some personality traits. A player could come up with a trait like "I absolutely delight in combat", what are you then going to do, grant inspiration once per encounter? If players know that it's only a matter of roleplay to earn advantage, it can become devastately annoying... think of what a PC with the Entertainer background and trait "I get bitter if I'm not the center of attention." can do to your game! And that is the same whether you grant inspiration easily (the player will use advantage immediately and try again all the time) or only on really good roleplay (the player will still try all the time in hope of scoring)

The phenomenon is not dissimilar to granting XP for roleplay. It can get very annoying quickly.

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Li Shenron said:

The only situation when IMO it really works well is when you grant inspiration as a reward for roleplaying the trait or flaw in a way that actually leads to paying a price. For example, a PC gives away her treasure to the poor, or lets a prisoner escape out of pity, or loses temper and starts a fight they should not. But it must be clear that the player is aware she is making a wrong decision tactically, and does so because it is believed it would be very much in-character. That to me is a good way to use inspiration, since it's a trade-off between a more convenient decision and a compensation, for the sake of the story.

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Saeviomagy said:

Yeah, it is.

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AaronOfBarbaria said:

No, it's not.

Here's 20 rolls: 10, 14, 15, 10, 17, 1, 13, 5, 13, 9, 20, 4, 1, 18, 12, 9, 3, 15, 6, 3. A +2 bonus would only affect the outcome of trying to hit DC 10 on 2 of those rolls like you said it would... but against a DC of 15 it affects the outcome of 3, and against a DC of 20 only affects 1.

Here's 20 more rolls: 14, 1, 9, 8, 12, 8, 11, 2, 6, 2, 18, 15, 12, 10, 18, 18, 17, 9, 10, 1. A +2 would make 4 of those higher than 10 that wouldn't be without it, or 1 higher than 15 that wouldn't have been, or 3 of them 20.

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Because "you chance of success is 10 percentage points higher than without the bonus" and "2 out of every 20 rolls will be affected by your bonus" are not synonymous phrases - the later suggests that having a +2 bonus affect 4 rolls in a row is impossible, when the reality of probability with a d20 roll is that such an event isn't even unlikely.

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Saeviomagy said:

I feel like you're being disingenuous.


The latter suggests no such thing. It's common parlance for either "in the sample population" or "in a sufficiently large population". It's commonly used in all kinds of media. If I say "1 in 10 people have a problem with alcohol", only an idiot is going to assume that if he's got a problem with alcohol, none of the other 9 people in the room do.

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Li Shenron said:

I am still not sold on Inspiration.

For me the problem is not that it depends on the DM (and I would argue that it still does even with this self-claimed variant), bu rather these:

- it grants advantage, which is statistically powerful but also boring: there's already many sources of advantage in the game, if you grant inspiration too frequently then you get advantage more often than not, if you grant it scarcely then the benefit is underwhelming

- it's too easy to roleplay with some personality traits. A player could come up with a trait like "I absolutely delight in combat", what are you then going to do, grant inspiration once per encounter? If players know that it's only a matter of roleplay to earn advantage, it can become devastately annoying... think of what a PC with the Entertainer background and trait "I get bitter if I'm not the center of attention." can do to your game! And that is the same whether you grant inspiration easily (the player will use advantage immediately and try again all the time) or only on really good roleplay (the player will still try all the time in hope of scoring)

The phenomenon is not dissimilar to granting XP for roleplay. It can get very annoying quickly.

The only situation when IMO it really works well is when you grant inspiration as a reward for roleplaying the trait or flaw in a way that actually leads to paying a price. For example, a PC gives away her treasure to the poor, or lets a prisoner escape out of pity, or loses temper and starts a fight they should not. But it must be clear that the player is aware she is making a wrong decision tactically, and does so because it is believed it would be very much in-character. That to me is a good way to use inspiration, since it's a trade-off between a more convenient decision and a compensation, for the sake of the story.

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AaronOfBarbaria said:

There is a significant difference between "1 in 10 people have a problem with alcohol" (an observation of outcomes) and "each person has a 1 in 10 chance of having a problem with alcohol" (an observation of probability) - the same as there is a significant difference between "2 times out of every 20 rolls" and "a 2 in 20 chance on each roll."

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Saeviomagy said:

Sure, but that difference would be whether each individual had some unique traits that meant they didn't match the population observation. This is fundamentally NOT the case when we are comparing rolls of a supposedly random and balanced d20.

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AaronOfBarbaria said:

That's the difference between the subject matter of both examples - you've missed the difference in the phrasing which I was using a different subject matter as a means of highlighting.

To reiterate the point as clearly as I can: "2 times out of every 20 rolls" and "a 2 in 20 chance on each roll" are two completely different things, not two ways to say the same thing.

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