D&D 5E Inspiring leader feat questions

[CapnZapp]

I searched for previous discussions, found these:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...in-Inspiring-Leadership-versus-Polearm-Master
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?467306-How-to-Break-5E
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?366703-Feats-that-are-particularly-great-at-low-levels

None of them focus on my questions though, so here we are.

What, if any, limititations are there on the Inspiring Leader feat:

INSPIRING LEADER
Prerequisite: Charisma 13 or higher
Vou can spend 10 minutes inspiring your companions,
shoring up their resolve to fight. When you do so, choose
up to six friendly creatures (which can include yourself)
within 30 feet of you who can see or hear you and who
can understand you. Each creature can gain temporary
hit points equal to your levei + your Charisma modifier.
A creature can't gain temporary hit points from this feat
again until it has finished a short or long rest.

Taken at face value, it appears you can shore up six allies per ten minutes of pep-talking. Not six allies fulll stop.

But time is most often very cheap. If you successfully complete a rest, that means you just had one hour free. It is very likely you will have another half hour (for 3x6=18 allies) or two hours which is 120 minutes (for 12x6=72 allies).

Obviously, this matters little in the archetypal situation, where you only have 3-5 allies including yourself.

But in a module such as OotA, you can easily have dozens of allies. Is it really the rules as intended (RAI) that this feat should be able to provide temporary hp to everybody, with the only downside the extremely minor "you'll have to stay and listen for an extra hour after each rest".

And that you can top up any lost temp hp after each and every rest?

Why then have the limits at all? Setting a limit of 6 allies per 10 minutes seems awfully... pedestrian? When a more straight-forward phrasing would say something like "You can shore up every ally who can see and hear you clearly, and you talk for half an hour" and be done with it.

Having the pep talk take 20 minutes for 7 allies but only 10 minutes for 6 seems strangley obsessed with the minutae 5th edition wasn't supposed to do?

---

All of this assuming, of course, that the feat isn't really hard-limited to 6 allies full stop.

But how do you then justify this reading.

I wish the feat worked like this: You can shore up 6 allies including yourself, once after each rest. The temporary hp disappears after each rest, but you can shore up the same or different allies each time.

Am I missing something?

Why haven't this been discussed previously? I mean, there are a lot of much less unclear rules that have spawned ten pages of thread... but this feat - almost nothing? How can y'all be so clear on how to run it?

I am missing something, aren't I?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I am missing something, aren't I?

I don't think you're missing anything. I just don't think the feat's benefits are that important. In order to get really ridiculous, you've got to be high level for the adventure--both because the feat scales with level, and because a feat + max Cha requires no less than 8th level (for a Fighter who puts unusual emphasis on Cha), and more likely 12th level for most characters, excluding Variant Humans because, frankly, allowing them is already opening the door to feat shenanigans.

Even at level 8, you'd be talking about 11 THP. For a Wizard with 10 Con who rolls average HP (rather than taking the numerically superior static number), that's 6+7*3.5 = 30.5, or 31 HP. Nearly the most fragile possible character in the game, and they're getting around 35% THP from this, once per short rest. Compare that to typical damage done by a successful attack, from even a CR2 creature--the Bandit Lord, which can multiattack for 3 total attacks, a total of ~16 damage if all three attacks hit, and ~10 damage if at least two hit. So you get, more or less, a single round's worth of deferred damage from a relatively typical threat. Is it useful? Sure. Is it overpowered? Eh, I don't think so.

I haven't looked at any of the APs published, partially because they're official adventures and those are very rarely any good, partially because what little I've actually read about them suggests they largely live up to the reputation of official adventures But do they actually give you more than double a large party size in extra NPCs? Would giving them 1 extra hit's worth of ablative defense really be so game-warpingly ridiculous?

I also have misgivings because this feat is almost always the "go-to" suggestion for emulating a certain class, but your "fix" would create some major problems for that. This isn't the temporary forum created for that class, though, so I won't pursue that line of inquiry any further--just pointing out that it would do so.

 

[CapnZapp]

You are answering as if I said "omg this feat is too powerful".

In reality, my question is: if the limit on 6 people isn't really a limit, why even have it?

Why write the feat so you have to break down a crowd in chunks of six people a pop? That seems uncharacteristically detail obsessed for this edition?

Either I'm missing something and the 6 people limit is supposed to be more than a "omg we only have ten minutes but not twenty so one of you seven guys will have to go without! Oh voy, what a horrible limit on my feat"...

...or I'm missing something and the feat could much easier have been written "you prop up everybody that cares to listen, it takes a while, now go focus on something much more interesting than counting 1,2,3,4,5,6 stop; 7,8,9,10,11,12 stop; 13,14,15,16,17,18 stop;...

 

[ryan92084]

Would you prefer it to read "this takes 10 minutes per 6 (rounded up) friendly creatures (including yourself) within 30ft that can see/hear/understand you"? Mechanically the same but reads more complex for your average adventuring group.

I think they meant the feat as more of a one on one pep talk rather than a rousing speech to a crowd. Mingling takes time I suppose.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You are answering as if I said "omg this feat is too powerful".

In reality, my question is: if the limit on 6 people isn't really a limit, why even have it?

Why write the feat so you have to break down a crowd in chunks of six people a pop? That seems uncharacteristically detail obsessed for this edition?

Either I'm missing something and the 6 people limit is supposed to be more than a "omg we only have ten minutes but not twenty so one of you seven guys will have to go without! Oh voy, what a horrible limit on my feat"...

...or I'm missing something and the feat could much easier have been written "you prop up everybody that cares to listen, it takes a while, now go focus on something much more interesting than counting 1,2,3,4,5,6 stop; 7,8,9,10,11,12 stop; 13,14,15,16,17,18 stop;...

They put a limit of 6 on it for the same reason I assume they put limits on everything else-- so there there ARE limits. Why does Bless only affect 3 people? Because they wanted a limit on it. And if you want more people blessed, then you spend another spell slot to cast it again.

In the feat's case... rather than the resource management of spell slots, it's the resource management of time. At that point though, it'll come down to whether "time" in your table's game actually is a resource to manage. As you point out, the Inspiring Leader could talk for 30 minutes and inspire 18 people... if time isn't an issue for the table. But if time *is* an issue for a particular table, then obviously those limits of 6 people mean something. And that's all these abilities are written for-- so that it's an important decision for certain tables.

Speaking personally... while the book does put in these artificial "limits" so that decisions do have to be made by certain tables at certain points... if I find that the artificial limit isn't necessary, then I just ignore it. So for instance... if my table consisted of 8 PCs and a player had and used the Inspirational Leader feat, I probably would just give them the extra 2 people so that all 8 were inspired in that one 10 minute speech, rather than making the PC talk twice as long just to get those last two characters in there.

The rules are always fungible. And if there's no good reason to stay hard and fast on a limit, then you just handwave it and save the time and energy.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You are answering as if I said "omg this feat is too powerful".

In reality, my question is: if the limit on 6 people isn't really a limit, why even have it?

Why write the feat so you have to break down a crowd in chunks of six people a pop? That seems uncharacteristically detail obsessed for this edition?

Either I'm missing something and the 6 people limit is supposed to be more than a "omg we only have ten minutes but not twenty so one of you seven guys will have to go without! Oh voy, what a horrible limit on my feat"...

...or I'm missing something and the feat could much easier have been written "you prop up everybody that cares to listen, it takes a while, now go focus on something much more interesting than counting 1,2,3,4,5,6 stop; 7,8,9,10,11,12 stop; 13,14,15,16,17,18 stop;...

Well, firstly, the THP don't actually disappear after a short rest, so your rewrite actually does change how the feat works. When combined with the "what stops you from using it 3x back to back?" bit, plus the reference to the feats usually exclaimed as "broken," I don't think it's weird to have interpreted your post as questioning the power of the feat.

As for the limit, my guess is that they figured there had to be some limit (e.g. you can't Inspire an entire army, in this way, in just 10 minutes), and set it as the large end of a typical party. Few DMs I've known, outside of those who specifically enjoy "old-school" play, will DM for a group of 7+ people (and even then, it's usually "rotating cast, 3-6 people a night out of 12-18" not "8 people every single night"); having 7 simultaneous regulars, even if you CAN get them all together at the same time, is just too much work for many DMs.

So it's really just a pragmatic limit. Nothing more to it. The THP don't disappear after a short rest, most likely because it's really not that many to begin with (like I said, typically 1 hit's worth of damage, possibly 2 if you're lucky or fighting low-damage enemies). And while it might be possible to make it slightly more succinct, your wording really isn't much different. Hell, it might even be *more* words, I don't care enough to actually check.

I also really don't see it as being unclear. The only thing it doesn't explicitly state is the "once per rest" bit--which I don't really think needs to be specified. You have...an "application" time (10 min, like most rituals), and you have a limit on application (targets cannot benefit again until after a short or long rest). Since no duration is stated, the THP last until you take a long rest or they're depleted (PHB 198). Given the wording, it's clear that you can apply it to more people, it just takes time. I like @ryan92084's explanation: it's more of a personal "get people psyched up" interaction than a lofty oratory over the whole group at once.

This, IMO, is little to nothing like the lack of clarity in, say, the spell Contagion. I'm all for criticizing the unclear, vague, or even contradictory points that appear in 5e--it's certainly not my favorite edition--but I'm honestly not seeing the serious problem you do.

Edit:
In fact, I really think you answered this question almost immediately in the opening post.

Obviously, this matters little in the archetypal situation, where you only have 3-5 allies including yourself.

WotC does care about designing the game for a particular goal, even if I think their "balance" is so loosey-goosey as to be more wobble than level. That particular goal IS "the archetypal situation." That's what the feat is for, and (unusually, for me) I am entirely inclined to think it was fine to leave it as it is.

Or, another way to put it? Even in "non-archetypal" situations, I expect most Inspiring Leaders would run out of followers long before they ran out of time.

 

[CapnZapp]

Okay, so first:

The community consensus is that, given time, the character can give temporary hp to any number of allies?

Secondly, nobody except me thinks the wording is wonky? As in, a cursory read gives you "up to six people, got it" which then doesn't pan out because that's per usage.

And this usage is essentially free. (Who has time for a 60 minute rest but not 70 or 80 minutes?! The only case I see is where the DM specifically wants to hose the party for unknown reasons and throws in an encounter, not after 50 minutes, not after 60 minutes, not after 80 minutes, but after 70 minutes so the feat's only real limitation comes into play... Something that would almost never have happened if nobody had that feat... :-( )

 

[DEFCON 1]

Okay, so first:

The community consensus is that, given time, the character can give temporary hp to any number of allies?

Secondly, nobody except me thinks the wording is wonky? As in, a cursory read gives you "up to six people, got it" which then doesn't pan out because that's per usage.

And this usage is essentially free. (Who has time for a 60 minute rest but not 70 or 80 minutes?! The only case I see is where the DM specifically wants to hose the party for unknown reasons and throws in an encounter, not after 50 minutes, not after 60 minutes, not after 80 minutes, but after 70 minutes so the feat's only real limitation comes into play... Something that would almost never have happened if nobody had that feat... :-( )

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? I mean, if I was DMing and the party plus a large number of NPCs are going into battle, I'm probably going to be moving over to mass combat rules and not play out all 18 to 30 characters individually in a massive battle anyway... so having all that extra THP lying around won't really affect anything (other than perhaps I give a bit of a bump to the side when I roll out the mass combat checks.) Yeah, it's "cool" the IL gives out all those THP... but will I actually run the game in such a way that those THP to all the NPCs will have a tangible affect on the mechanics of the scene? Probably not.

And even if we just come at it from the perspective of just the party itself... if the party always starts with a handful of THP after every short rest because they rest for 70 minutes instead of just 60 minutes... again, to my mind so what? It's just a resource that I as the DM have to plan for-- just like I have to plan for every skill check DC to possibly have a Guidance cantrip at the ready to affect it. It's a part of the game. And it's something a player chose to spend a precious resource on (a feat slot), so why be concerned if they want to use it?

So for me personally... it really just strikes me as a concern looking for a problem.

 

[jodyjohnson]

Play it out in real time. The Inspiring Leader should have no problem speaking 'inspiringly' for an hour or two while the other players sit around.

Huge amounts of prep -- and nothing happens.

 

[CapnZapp]

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 for me personally... it really just strikes me as a concern looking for a problem.

Please. First you change the subject, then you dismiss that changed subject?!