Dungeons & Dragons: Is The Lucky Feat Worth It?

Feats in Dungeons & Dragons allow you to customize your character outside the typical class progression. They represent talents, knowledge, or skills that the character has acquired through formal training, study, or experience. Some players choose feats to optimize their build for mechanical purposes. Others see feats as an opportunity to add flavour or roleplaying potential to their character.

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D&D's Lucky feat acts like an insurance policy against bad rolls. It gives players three luck points per long rest, which they can use to alter the results of their attacks, ability checks, or saving throws. The Lucky feat even allows players to influence attacks made against them.

How Does The Lucky Feat Work In D&D?

The Lucky feat gives you three luck points daily. It's supposed to simulate an unusually fortunate character who always avoids the worst possible outcome by a narrow margin.

The feat involves several components:

• When you make an attack, ability, check, or saving throw, you can use a luck point to roll anadditional d20. You can choose to spend the point after you've rolled but before the outcome is determined. Lucky allows you to choose which of the d20 results is used for the attack, ability check, or saving throw.
• When an attack is made against you, you can use a luck point toroll a d20. You choose whether the attack uses your roll or the enemy's.
• If more than one creature uses a luck point to influence a roll, the points cancel each other out. No rolls are required.
• Luck points are replenished after a long rest.

Is The Lucky Feat Overpowered?

Players and DMs often malign the Lucky feat, calling it overpowered. In truth, it does feel significantly more powerful than some other options. Still, it depends on the DM and their campaign.

The Dungeon Master's (DMG) guide recommends six to eight daily encounters. These can include combat, puzzles, traps, andsocial interaction. However, many campaigns only run one combat encounter before the players slink off to camp for a long rest. In this context, Lucky is overpowered.

Although the DMG suggests six to eight encounters per day, many officially published adventure modules seem to support much fewer. Eight is probably overly ambitious but including at least three or four combat scenarios daily forces your players to manage resources.

The Lucky feat upsets the balance if your players use it in every significant encounter. Throw a mix of challenging scenarios at your players between long rests, forcing them to use their luck points carefully.

House Rules For The Lucky Feat

There are two interpretations of Lucky. One interpretation says when you dislike the result of a roll, you can roll a d20, wait to see the result, and then decide whether to use your luck point to keep that new result. This can feel open to abuse. Players can literally reroll any time they want without expending resources unless the results are favourable.

The other interpretation of Lucky states that a player must expend a luck point to roll the d20. Once the die is rolled, the player can choose between the old result and the new one. Making players decide first makes luck points feel more valuable.

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