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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6735739" data-attributes="member: 996">Yet that actually /is/ an odd exception to a basic rule.  It would certainly be a nice feature to have:  you can bring allies back into a fight, you can apply it to unwounded allies before a fight, two of the nicer features of both restoring hps and granting temp hps.  So for in-combat and pre-combat it'd be a pretty nice feature.  I'm not sure it's fair to give a class an exception like that to the way temp hps work, and it strikes me as needlessly complex, but it's a step towards 'an offer you can't refuse.'  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I've considered possibilities like that before, and they generally get shot down as 'OP.'There's that line between character and player again.  The Warlord should be able to model a character who is inspiring and tactically adept, even if the player is neither.  Requiring near prescience on the party of the player certainly doesn't help with that.  Reactive powers that interrupt the action and change it can, though, and they can be very similar.  A damage mitigation ability, like an AC boost, that you put on an ally in advance, for instance, requires some 'prescience' on the part of the player, it can easily seem 'wasted' even if you put in on a PC who gets attacked it the attack roll is so high it hits anyway, or so low it would have missed anyway - conversely, a reaction that grants an AC bonus after you've heard the result of the attack roll is prettymuch always going to work, and can represent a warning or other all-but-'prescient' tactical insight on the part of the /character/ in the narrative.  Taken far enough, abilities good at modeling tactical ability (or, more extreme, actual magical prescience) can require retconning whole scenes.It can be fun to dovetail player tactics and abilities modeling a character with tactical acumen, but it's not necessary.  They still don't stack, and can exceed your max hps, so not exactly the same, no.Suddenly much closer, though.In 5e, when you take a long rest.  So, not that handy.To /really/ capture the idea of inspiration-fueled extra hps, you could even create an additional category of hps beyond restored hp, current hps, maximum hps, and temp hps.  The game has design space for that, since 5e's pretty wide-open that way.  But, it does seem like excess complexity, when simply restoring hps works fine, and it'd be taking hit points to a lower level of abstraction than they'd ever had in the game before.   'To some extent,' means that actually restoring hps is /not/ curing wounds.  Not literally Healing.  (To some extent).   D&D hps are abstract.  You can lose hps to something that in no way implies you're being wounded - like psychic damage.  You can re-gain hps from something that in no way implies physical wounds are disappearing - Second Wind, a natural 20 on your death save, spending HD after a mere hour's rest.A complaint, and a big one.  It also seems to be a major sticking point the other way.  Do you really think people who would relent on Inspiring Word if it didn't work on unconscious characters would be equally willing to relent if it got unconscious characters up, but with the fig-leaf of the hps granted being otherwise 'temporary?'  As nice as a special-snowflake hp mechanic might be for modeling the Warlord's Inspiration - and, indeed, as nice as it might be to differentiate healing word vs cure wounds vs healing potions vs Second Wind &c in similar ways - it seems like it would just open another set of objections.A much simpler compromise, without adding needless complexity to the rules, has already been proposed:  include both hp-restoration and temp hps (among other things) as options when the Warlord inspires an ally.  Give the player flexibility to customize his Warlord to eschew certain of those while having versatility in when & how he uses the ones available to him.  It's a level of flexibility a support-oriented class needs, anyway, and it lets each campaign and each player implement their vision of the class.Another idea that's been floated to help address some of the hp-model objections to Inspiring Word is that the hps restored would 'require' mundane attention - bandaging and such, at the earliest possible opportunity.  It's mainly a narrative thing.  I don't think an actual rule would be required, given how abstract hps have always been in D&D, but if hp-restoration were to be modeled in greater detail for Inspiring Word than it has been for any other hp-related mechanic in the game, that could be part of it.</blockquote>

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