You have inexplicable luck that seems to kick in at just the right moment.
You have 3 luck points. Whenever you make an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, you can spend one luck point to roll an additional d20. You can choose to spend one of your luck points after you roll the die, but before the outcome is determined. You choose which of the d20s is used for the attack roll, ability check, or saving throw.
You can also spend one luck point when an attack roll is made against you. Roll a d20 and then choose whether the attack uses the attacker's roll or yours.
If more than one creature spends a luck point to influence the outcome of a roll, the points cancel each other out; no additional dice are rolled.
You regain your expended luck points when you finish a long rest.
Lucky: Do I Feel Lucky?
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Without a doubt Lucky is the most banned option printed in 5th edition. I’ve known more tables that opt to ban it than play with it, and I can’t say that for literally any other option that exists. It is a feat so mythically busted that every character can use to break the game in half, and it gets better at the majority of tables who don’t follow the outrageous encounter suggestions posed by Wizards of the Coast. Lucky is the perfect storm when it comes to examining 5th edition’s problems. If you're wondering if you should ban it at your table, or if you’re a player wondering if it's good enough to take, the answer in both cases is absolutely. The feat is broken beyond belief.
Mechanically, Lucky takes one character and gives them three “rerolls” a day that turn a known disaster into super-advantage. It is vital in understanding why Lucky is so busted to understand how outrageously powerful it is to make the decision of using it after knowing what you’ve rolled. This gives you a tool to mitigate rolls you functionally know are bad. You don’t need to guess, or spend it to help bolster a roll that’s critically important. You can’t waste the feature if you only roll well, it will always only affect the worst rolls you make when you need it to. And it will let you do that THREE TIMES per long rest. Three times you can turn a known failure into a good chance at success, often better than before.
It takes the advantage/disadvantage mechanic and turns it into a super-advantage mechanic. Regardless of which type of roll is made, you always get to pick whichever of the three dice rolled to use. Making an attack roll with disadvantage and roll a 3 and a 12? By using Lucky, you’ve now turned what was certainly a miss with the 3 to a minimum of a 12, plus you could roll higher on the third dice and take that instead. Disadvantaged situations are normally rough, a penalty imposed for trying against the odds. 5th edition leans heavily on it; more rolls than not in mid to upper tier play will be working with advantage or disadvantage because so many other game elements provide them. Because there aren’t many other meaningful modifications to dice rolls, Lucky gets even stronger than it is at its baseline as the game goes on. Complex circumstances dealing with heavy obscurity, poisons, or even just exhaustion become leveraged as advantageous to you because you took Lucky. It can get to the point where you can voluntarily move to make attacks or ability checks with disadvantage in high stakes scenarios specifically because Lucky can leverage it instead as super-advantage. It's bananas.
Another contentious system in 5e is the rest system, with characters built around short rests largely suffering because the way people actually play the game doesn’t line up with the designers intent. People long rest. A lot. There are few games where you’re going four or more encounters between them, and the DMG recommends almost double that. This functionally makes it feel like the resource is always available when you need it fight to fight. It becomes easy to expend and use whenever you simply don’t want to fail. Some tables running weekly or bi-weekly with just one or two major encounters per level are going to find all the Lucky points turning one character into a superhero who can’t miss or fail anything. Its ludicrous. The game needs to be able to support a more varied encounter quantity, and the short/long rest system has not been working for that meaningfully since the games inception. Lucky benefits off fewer fights per long rest.
Finally, the last element that makes this spell endemic of 5th’s problems is who can be affected by it: you. You, and only you. This isn’t a feat you take to help your buddy getting their ass beat by a giant scorpion; it only helps you deal with the giant scorpion. It encourages the individual player to stand as an island and take risks alone. With Lucky, getting yourself into trouble maximizes its effectiveness, and that will often result in a lot of other players twiddling their thumbs while you become a badass breaking the rules of reality in half by getting supervision in the Fog Cloud. There aren’t enough cooperative elements in 5e, and those that do exist are plagued by tending to offer advantage while dozens more features open it up to players on their own.
Lucky, to me, embodies most of the problems 5e has. It is powerful enough to justify not using it, specifically because it is powerful in a way that empowers only one person to just be so much better at everything they do. It doesn’t play well in a team environment, takes advantage of the flawed advantage system, benefits majorly from a poorly executed and tested rest system, and turns the system's tools for imposing penalties into strengths. It's not good for the game. I’d steer clear of it, even if it's allowed at your table.
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