D&D 5E Inspiring leader feat questions

[crashtestdummy]

...
The final wording thus becomes:

INSPIRING LEADER
Prerequisite: Charisma 13 or higher
You can take time during a short or long rest to inspire your companions, followers and allies, shoring up their resolve to fight. Each creature gains temporary hit points equal to your level + your Charisma modifier. A creature can't gain temporary hit points from this feat again until it has finished a short or long rest.[/I]

I appreciate that you seemed to be after clarification if others agreed with your view that the ability could be used more than once as long as it's used on a different set of six allies, and that you therefore wanted to reword the feat to make the ability clearer, but did you really need to change when the feat could be used?

The existing feat can be used at any time. It doesn't have to be used in conjunction with a long or short rest. For example, if the party comes across some survivors of an attack on a merchant's caravan, why can't the Inspiring Leader take ten minutes to inspire those survivors as part of enticing them to join in a counter-attack? Why would they have to wait for a long or short rest before they could do so? The current feat doesn't require that.

I think the best way to view this feat is as a cantrip with a casting time of 10 minutes. You can 'cast' it as often as you want, but the 'cantrip' has an inbuilt restriction on who it can be used on.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's not so much that I'm wondering whether the wording is wonky or not... it's that I just haven't really thought about a time when the Inspiring Leader giving out Temp Hit Points to a lot of people is going to be an actual issue at the table.

So the IL gives the party and another 6 to 24 NPCs temp hit points by speechifying for up to an hour. Okay. Then what? How is that actually going to impact the game part of the game?

It's awesome, is what it is. In my experience, anyway, and I've been using it off and on in various ways and settings for most of a year. It allows a Necromancer to Fireball-proof his skeletons; it allows a military leader to Fireball-proof his troops; it allows you to use hobgoblin mercenaries against Fire Giants in combat and almost guarantee that they won't be insta-killed even if the giant hits them full-on with his greatsword. That in turn means that your troops are more loyal, less fearful, and more willing to take risks, because they know that Captain Vlad keeps his men alive even in deadly circumstances, so it indirectly lives up to its "inspiring" name.

In some cases it even works on conjured minions (Giant Owls, Magma Mephits) if you speak the right language and/or have some other way to communicate with them.

All that's true in a solo campaign, and in a party campaign it obviously has additional uses to boot. Effectively you're adding +2 Con to everyone in the whole party and healing them every short rest. It synergizes very well with high-defense characters with ways to impose disadvantage on attackers, allowing them to e.g. burn temp HP instead of Shield spells when an enemy gets in a lucky hit. Overall I'd guess that that feat has single-handedly added a good +10% to the efficiency of any party with access to it, at my table. Furthermore, there have been several (three?) occasions when the extra temp HP from that feat, sometimes combined with HP from the Aid spell, have been the difference between a character going down disastrously in the middle of combat vs. managing to escape.

It's a great feat.