Kobold Press's Project Black Flag Offers Alternative to Dungeons & Dragons 5E Inspiration

Kobold Press is offering up an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons' Inspiration mechanic. In the most recent playtest packet for "Project Black Flag," the playtest for a Core Fantasy Roleplaying ruleset designed to enhance and replace parts of Dungeons & Dragons 5E ruleset, Kobold Press introduces a new Luck system that allows players to manipulate the results of various checks in the game. Players earn Luck points whenever they fail an attack roll or save, or when they survive a particularly tough encounter. Players can then spend those Luck points to add to the results of any d20 roll to potentially turn a failure into a save. For instance, a player who rolls a 14 on an attack roll against an opponent that has an Armor Class of 17 can spend 3 Luck Points to turn that failure into a success. 

The system is intended as a replacement for Inspiration, a 5E system that allows players to re-roll a d20 when they potentially failed a check. Because 5E requires a Dungeon Master to distribute Inspiration to players, the mechanic is often neglected within the context of the game. The One D&D playtest is also offering alternate solutions to handing out Inspiration, although none have appeared in multiple playtests. 

The new playtest also introduces revised Wizard and Fighter class rules, which introduces new class features such as a Last Stand for the Fighter that allows players to instantly expend Hit Dice when a Fighter takes damage that would reduce them to less than half of their Hit Point total and a Magic Sense for Wizards that allows players to automatically sense nearby magical workings. 

Project Black Flag was first announced last month as a potential alternative ruleset to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, after Wizards of the Coast announced plans to de-authorize the Open Gaming License, which provided a legal framework for creating third-party D&D material. While Wizards of the Coast eventually abandoned these plans and released the 5E SRD (which contain the basic rules for 5E) under a Creative Commons license, many publishers are still moving forward with 5E alternative systems that they can control and directly support. 

You can check out the full playtest packet by downloading it from Kobold Press's website for free.