Fortune Favors the Bold
8/3/20263 min read
Inspiration, bennies, hero points, inspiration, karma, fate: whatever you call it, many role-playing games have rules that represent a character’s luck. Even in games that aren’t traditional heroic fantasy, luck can be a part of any game; even grittier games with a focus on realism benefit from it. The 2014 (5th edition) rules for Dungeons & Dragons include Inspiration, a mechanic which rewards players for playing their character well, player creativity, or roleplaying background traits. From a cursory Google search, the newest edition has Inspiration as well, which is called Heroic Inspiration, but I haven’t gotten around to trying the 2024 rules yet…maybe a comparison between those rules and 5th edition will be a future article.
Most often, luck is earned playing your character well, excellent roleplay, or by having those big, awesome moments that every table lives for. This not only rewards great gaming, but it also provides in-game currency to spend on tasks they really want to succeed on, or to gain an advantage for a really cool moment during a game.
Here are a few examples of what luck can do in a role-playing game:
Allow rerolls on a failed attack, damage, or skill roll
Reroll a saving throw
Attempt to mitigate damage, or deal extra damage
Gain an extra attack or action
Influence the game’s story
My first experience with luck in role-playing games was playing Mutants and Masterminds, Second Edition, where a superhero has Hero Points that allow them to perform heroic feats, reroll dice, and add extra damage. This felt like a natural addition to a superhero game, where comic-book characters can regularly push past their own limits to overcome obstacles. Many times I failed a roll only to spend a Hero Point and get just what I needed to defeat the villain or overcome impossible odds. It also just feels cool to simulate those big, comic-book moments, so Hero Points felt very thematic with this game.
My favorite ruleset, Savage Worlds, uses luck tokens called Bennies to represent control over your character’s fate, representing good luck your character has access to. Player characters in Savage Worlds are collectively called Wild Cards, and they get to roll an extra six-sided die with every roll just because they’re the main characters. In addition, they get Bennies to represent their skill, luck, and talent. I like the back-and-forth of players spending Bennies while the Game Master spends their own: enemy Wild Cards have a stack of Bennies they can use against the players! It makes battles that much more exciting knowing you have an evenly-matched opponent working against you.
Even horror games benefit from luck rules: investigators in Call of Cthulhu have a statistic called Luck they can spend to turn failures into successes. Especially in a horror game, failure can have catastrophic and potentially life (or sanity) threatening consequences, so having enough luck to succeed might make all the difference in the deadly world of Call of Cthulhu. That being said, the last game I ran did result in half the group dying, but hey, at least they beat the evil cult! Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, after all.
Luck rules add a fun twist to any game, and I don’t feel like they “break” the game, despite giving you extra chances to succeed. In my experience, their inclusion in a game only invests the players more in their actions: I’ve played numerous Savage Worlds games where the players had a big stack of Bennies, and instead of saving a small number of Bennies to reroll things they needed to succeed on, they spent them succeeding on things they wanted to.
So even if your favorite game doesn’t have rules for luck, why not add it yourself? After all, fortune favors the bold!
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