Dungeons & Dragons Makes Big Change to Inspiration in 2024 Player's Handbook

Dungeons & Dragons is changing up how one mechanic works in the Player's Handbook.

By Christian Hoffer

Dungeons & Dragons is making a notable change to its Inspiration mechanic in the upcoming 2024 Core Rulebooks. This week, Wizards of the Coast started to preview what players could expect in the upcoming 2024 Dungeons & Dragons Core Rulebooks, which will be released starting in September. Among the many changes made to D&D's 5th Edition ruleset is a change to Inspiration, which is now called Heroic Inspiration (likely to better separate from Bardic Inspiration, a separate mechanic.) While Heroic Inspiration previously gave players the ability to roll any D20 roll with Advantage, it will now provide players with a free re-roll, no matter what roll they want to use it on. 

"Rather than dealing with Advantage, which is what Inspiration did in 2014, we realized this rule needs to play better with the rest of the game," explained D&D lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford in a video detailing some of the changes in the Player's Handbook. "And the game is already chock full of ways to get Advantage. So the final version of it is that it is a reroll that the player can apply to any roll, not just D20 rolls. Because we realized we wanted players to be happy to have this even when let's say you're rolling the amount of hit points you restored to somebody with a healing spell, or you're rolling damage, or the DM has you randomly roll a dice for some mysterious reason like DMs sometime do. We want players to have this little ace in their pocket... so that if they roll really bad is, no matter what the dice roll is, they can reroll it and hope they get something better." Notably, this change was not included in any of the Unearthed Arcana playtests, although Crawford noted that it was inspired by some of the feedback they received from the playtests.

While Inspiration was mainly doled out by the DM in the original 5th Edition ruleset, the new rules provide players with several mechanical ways of obtaining Heroic Inspiration. For instance, the Champion subclass for Fighter has an ability called Heroic Warrior that grants the character Heroic Inspiration at the start of a turn if they don't already have it. 

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The new change is a subtle one, but could be useful in many circumstances. Players can re-roll on a Wild Magic table, for instance, or they can try to improve their damage by re-rolling a 1 on a damage dice. It could become even more useful if there are more mechanics to grant players Heroic Inspiration without worrying about the whims of a DM. 

The new Player's Handbook comes out on September 17th.

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