Prerequisite: Halfling
Your people have extraordinary luck, which you have learned to mystically lend to your companions whenever you see them falter. You're not sure how you do it, you just wish it, and it happens. Surely a sign of fortune's favor!
When an ally you can see within 30 feet of you rolls a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, you can use your reaction to let the ally reroll the die. The ally must use the new roll.
When you use this ability, you can't use your Lucky racial trait before the end of your next turn
Bountiful Luck: A Small Fortune
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
God I love halflings. I love halflings so much. You don’t understand: the majority of my favorite characters have been halflings. There was Charles Irwin, zoologist (rogue warlock multiclass) who infiltrated a cult of the Fathomless to better understand and study a real kraken. Gabby Thinthistle, a jovial, naive hero who was driven by a call to destiny she didn’t ever understand whose entire build was seeing how I could create a cohesively thematic character with two levels in every class. Halflings are the best.
Mechanically, a reason I rate them so highly, outside of them being utterly delightful in every possible depiction, is I want consistency. I want my characters to do the thing they’re good at, and do it well. Natural 1s make that difficult, and their lucky racial trait solves a lot of those problems. Bountiful Luck takes what is already an incredibly powerful racial trait and gives you a team support tool to help everyone out. This feat is gas.
I feel I probably should broach how this version of luck feels more fair than a different feat built around being lucky: Lucky. Lucky takes a single character, manipulates dice in a unintuitive way, and offers you fine selections over when you want to use it. It doesn’t feel like you’re Lucky, and more like you’ve been divinely chosen. With the Bountiful Luck feat, you’re taking instances of almost certain disasters, and in a pinch, preventing the disaster. Crucially, it's not just affecting you as well: it takes a feature that initially was just empowering a single character and gives you a way to help everybody with it. It opens up collaboration, and makes the whole group feel “lucky” just for being with you.
Bountiful Luck (and the halfling luck racial trait) aren’t for everyone, nor every table. A lot of people out there, myself included sometimes, revel as much in the horrible failings from a 5% chance outcome as they do in the impressive successes you get with a 20. Bountiful Luck fits in at tables where rolling 1s is more a pain, a drag, than an exciting moment. Those tend to be playing close to rules as written, with frequent encounters and a higher level of lethality. It takes an underplayed race and gives them a majorly impactful tool, spreading their mechanic out to the entire group and multiplying its usefulness by the number of people you share it with.
Bountiful Luck is one of my favorite feats, yet I still have only ever taken it on one of my characters. Feats are competitive; a lot of builds ask you to take multiples on top of also scaling up your main ability score to 20. It can be hard to find room for a fun, moderately powerful team based support feat, especially on characters who do have reactions they want to be taking. If you find yourself wanting to help the group more, or mitigate some of the terrible rolls you keep seeing your friends roll, Bountiful Luck is a great time, and on its own should be a reason to consider rolling up a halfling.
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