Sometimes your players have an idea for something cool that just doesn’t fit into the normal rules of D&D, an epic moment where your character could achieve something really memorable and turn the tide. Often these ideas are unconventional, inspired, and don’t fit neatly into D&D’s action economy. Especially in the heat of combat. I like to give these actions a chance of succeeding or failing but I’ve never been happy with just asking then to make flat skill or ability checks. Mostly because a lot of the weird things players want to try don’t fit neatly into a skill or ability check, but also because as-written D&D just gives you a success or fail and I like to have a delineated palette of options that’s understood by both the player and the DM.
Hero’s Favor is a rules hack I used with a fair amount of success on Saving Throw, starting with the When A Star Falls arc/adaptation of the Iron Keep Chronicles. It’s intended to give players a chance to influence the given circumstances of the game or even outright break the rules. At the same time, it’s not guaranteed to give the player exactly what they want (in fact, most of the time they don’t specifically get what they asked for) and it’s designed to let the DM retain some leeway in interpretation of the result. It was very much inspired by PbtA game mechanics.
Hero’s Favor
How You Get It
The DM awards a player Hero’s Favor — usually represented by a token. Like Inspiration, you either have it or you don’t, and if you have it you can’t get more of it. It does not carry over from session to session. Also like Inspiration, there’s nothing that says you can’t get it again once it’s spent. (Note for DMs: If you want to be generous with it, give everyone Hero’s Favor at the start of a session. If you want to moderate its appearance in your game, award it like Inspiration or give it to a player when they act to help another PC.)
What It Does
On your turn, you can invoke Hero’s Favor. Describe the Cool Thing you’re doing and its expected outcome. The general parameters for this: you can stretch the rules but you can’t outright break them. Some examples:
“I smash the boulder at the top of the cliff and surf the resulting rockslide to the bottom, closing with the orc raiders!” Mechanical effect: Extraordinary movement.
“I fire my hand crossbow and try to shoot the bag of gems out of the wizard’s grasp!” Mechanical effect: Attended object goes up for grabs.
“I cut the rope and swing the boom across the deck, knocking the frog monster away from the injured priest!” Mechanical effect: Reposition a foe.
“I kick over the cask of whale oil and slap a candle off the table to form a flaming pool between us and the bandits!” Mechanical effect: Add a new aspect to the environment.
“One of the guards blinks twice, and says ‘…Anton? Is that you?’ Turns out, we have a history.” Mechanical effect: Fabricate a relationship.
Note that these moves are not about directly doing damage, they are more about bending the fiction. The DM does retain the right to veto or alter the suggestion and likewise, the player can withdraw if the compromise doesn’t suit them. In this case or in the event of a DM veto, the Hero’s Favor is not spent.
The Roll
Roll 2d10. Add your proficiency bonus.
| Roll | Result |
| 2-10 | Unfavorable. Your cool thing doesn’t just fail, it flops and makes matters worse. It could complicate things for you, another party member, an important NPC, etc. A monster might get an extra attack, the ritual might come to completion, the assassin might slip down the hall. Things take a turn for the worse. On the upside, your Hero’s Favor is returned to you. |
| 11-15 | Mixed Result. You achieve your goal, but it didn’t go quite the way you pictured and there’s a hitch. Maybe there’s some collateral damage, or you’ve opened yourself up to an attack with Advantage or that guard also recognizes the thief. |
| 16-19 | Success! You did it. The tides of fate are with you! |
| 20+ | Extraordinary Success! Your heroic moment exceeds beyond expectation. You might gain Advantage for the rest of your turn, bonus damage, or create an ongoing effect that the rest of the party can draw on. The exact effect is left to the DM to adjudicate but fortune favors the bold. |
Note that invoking and executing Hero’s Favor is a free action. Like any free action, it only happens on your turn.
DM’s Addendum
Hey! Why not just use skill and Ability checks?
First and foremost, Hero’s Favor clearly demarcates a moment in the game that’s an exception to the rules. (“Ok, normally you couldn’t move that extra 10 feet and swing that lantern right at the rope, but if you want to try that, you can spend Hero’s Favor.”) It says This Moment Is Special. Both the DM and the player know that this thing they’re trying is outside the normal scope of play.
If you call for an Ability check, there are no meta-game boundaries around the action. When Dahlnak the half-orc does an extra burst of speed to swing up into the crow’s nest and cut the sails loose, there’s nothing about that check that keeps any other character from trying the same check with similar effects later. Maybe that’s cool with you and how your run your table. (Awesome!) But it’s not how D&D is designed. Actions, abilities, movement… in D&D 5E these things all have precise meanings, measurements, and interactions. Once you start allowing a Dex check for Dahlnak, you open that option up for everyone else going forward and it starts to create rules bleed.
Hero’s Favor is intended to handle exceptions to the rules in a way that is both defined and understood by everyone at the table. To use some programming language: it’s an exception handler. When the players break the game, we don’t have to lean so hard on Rule Zero and weigh the fairness or applicability of DM judgement calls (both past and present). Instead we use this subroutine.
Second, skill and Ability checks don’t do anything to address the fairly rigid constraints of D&D’s action economy. Often times players really want to pull off something cool but it’s a chain of actions that don’t fit neatly into their turn. It is anticlimactic to have an awesome moment teed up and then realize you’ve moved twice, you’ve interacted with an object, you’re out of actions and your turn is burned. Now you’re just standing there waiting for everyone else to go.
Finally, for unusual circumstances, skill and Ability checks don’t have a defined set of difficulties or outcomes. Is throwing a lantern at a swinging rope the same DC as rolling a barrel in front of a team of charging horses? (Most DMs won’t tell you the DC, they’ll just say “Roll” which IMO is one of the worst exploits of player trust.) With Hero’s Favor, everyone knows the number needed for success or failure, everyone has basically the same odds of succeeding (since it’s based on Proficiency Bonus) and furthermore, there are defined gradations/variations of success and failure. The player knows that what they’re doing could make things worse. And no one is just fishing for a natural 1 or a natural 20 to explain why things went so wildly different than what they intended.
Listen, I encourage you to use skill and Ability checks broadly and liberally. I use Hero’s Favor for those moments when the players are inspired but what they want to do will break the rules as written and/or the action economy. It creates an opportunity for players to disregard the precise bounds of the game for just one moment and to think and act like the extraordinary heroes they are meant to be.