Prerequisite: Halfling
Fortune favors you when someone tries to strike you. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Dexterity, Constitution, or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
When a creature you can see hits you with an attack roll, you can use your reaction to force that creature to reroll. Once you use this ability, you can’t use it again until you roll initiative at the start of combat or until you finish a short or long rest.
Second Chance: Thanks, but No Thanks
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Halfings get the best feats. Second Chance is in my top five best feats in the game because oh baby does this feat go hard. It's just one more reason to play a halfling.
First, you get to increase your Dex, Con, or Cha by one, which means if you have one of those with an odd number, this is bumping them to even and giving you a bonus +1 to the modifier. Dexterity specifically is integral to a lot of halfling builds and classes, from the iconic halfling rogue to just any medium or lightly armored class. A charisma increase makes it so all of the charisma casters (bards, sorcerers, and warlocks) suddenly care about this as well. The occasional halfling paladin might also be here for that bump, or even potentially constitution for some more hit points.
Where the feat gets very good though is in its actual ability. It gives you a once per encounter forced enemy reroll; if you know they’re going to hit you, you can say I’d rather you didn’t try again. EVERY character in the game is happy to have this ability on their sheet, and it's something you’ll get to use not just once per long rest, not even once per short rest, once per encounter. This feat gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, we can reintegrate some of the encounter specific mechanics 4th edition highlighted and give some of the short rest classes more consistency encounter to encounter. But beyond the wider game design scope this feature pushes us towards, as an option to have as a reaction, its excellent.
I want to highlight that you get to make them reroll a dice after you know it would hit you. This makes it so you can’t ever “waste” the feature on an unknown. That is powerful in a game which is largely dictated by a big variance spread. Having a tool that adds additional variance to influence unfavorable outcomes is incredibly valuable when often features influence unknown outcomes. Granting an ally advantage on their next attack roll, as an example, can have no meaningful effect if the first die they roll would hit anyway. It affects an unknown outcome, and you have to decide if the chance of it not actually influencing the outcome is worth the risk. If you could choose to give them advantage after they rolled, it’d be a major upside, as now you’re only using the feature to bolster a known failure as opposed to a potential one. Second Chance works in the known space, and makes it so you only need to use it when it’ll actually matter.
That’s all there really is to Second Chance: a good ability score increase, and a great once per encounter reaction. It's a feature any halfling can make use of. I wish you could help allies with it, as team work mechanics in this game are frighteningly few and far between, but if you’re mainly interested in getting more things to do with your reaction while also getting an odd score even for the modifier increase, Second Chance is excellent.
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