Prerequisite: Charisma 13 or higher
You 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 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.
Inspiring Leader: I Will Follow Him
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Magic does a lot of the heavy lifting in Dungeons and Dragons (duh). Most of the time temporary hit points are twisted dark magic invigorating the flesh with False Life, demonic scales writhing over your flesh from Fiendish Vigor, or a righteous shield of mercy protecting you from harm. In Inspiring Leader’s case, it's just good old fashioned positive morale.
While I like conceptually Inspiring Leader, I think the mechanic is just a bit too underwhelming to feel great to play with. It's the kind of feature that will get a rouse out of the table the first time the paladin gives the speech, but quickly devolves into “we get 9 temp HP each rest, cool”. And that’s fine, I guess. But it loses some of its meaning to me as it dissolves into just a pool of HP everyone gets because one guy took a feat.
You probably don’t need Inspiring Leader, especially if you’ve got other mechanics on your team giving out temp HP. It doesn’t stack, so it doesn’t play well with the other common avenues players get this bonus HP from. Abjurers and fiend-locks in particular tend to rely on a lot of temporary hit points they get by just existing and doing their own thing. That doesn’t mean it's worthless in those groups, but it is definitely worth less.
Most mechanics that give you something for free in a fight are good. Like Aid, Inspiring Leader gives you an extra hit or two from the baddies, part of a trap ignored, the ability to take a breath weapon and live. The opportunity cost of another feat is massive for a lot of characters, though. Magic Initiate is almost always a superb choice for opening up a character's options. Lucky is so good it's regularly banned at many tables. Sharpshooter, Polearm Master, Sentinel, and Great Weapon Master are build defining must takes on their respective characters. Even just getting an Ability Score Improvement is a major power pump; adding an extra +1 to every die roll for a specific ability is exceptional. Probably better than a chunk of temporary hit points every short rest.
There are likely some tables out there running enough short rests to get a lot of mileage out of these temporary hit points. Going in and out of fight after fight can be a massive tax on hit points, and Inspiring Leader can be a consistent tool to alleviate that pressure. In its best use case, I think it could find a home on a caster’s sheet, like a Bard or warlock, or on a martial in the mid to upper tiers who already has assembled the feats that support their playstyle. If you’re only taking one or fewer short rests between long rests, or are doing big set piece encounters with major players and life threatening monsters, you’ll probably find it's just not all that worth it versus the other options you have at your disposal. Inspiring Leader just needs to be a bit more for me to want it, you know?
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