Expanded Luck

In the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide, there are three ways to earn luck:

• Once per turn, when you fail to hit with an attack roll or fail a save, gain 1 Luck.
• The GM can award 1 Luck as a reward for a clever idea, excellent roleplaying, or pursuing an interesting, rather than optimal, choice.
• The GM can award any amount of Luck to one or more PCs for surviving difficult encounters or achieving story goals (in addition to XP or other rewards).

Now, an attack roll means any attack roll, melee, ranged, melee spell attack, or ranged spell attack. Some interpret this to also include a successful enemy save versus a spell when cast as an attack, such as using a Hold spell on a bandit, and the bandit making their WIS save.

Characters can have a maximum of 5 luck, and if you gain another point of luck when you have 5, roll a d4 and reset your luck to that. Use it or lose it!

You spend your luck two ways:

• As a 1-for-1 bonus to any check you make.
• Spend 3 luck to reroll the d20 used for the check.

Luck can't stop a critical miss or create a critical hit! Luck can't be used on the same roll that created it. These are the complete rules for luck, and they replace D&D's inspiration mechanics.

Luck as a Narrative Tool

Now that narrative story games are popular, let's tweak luck to make this more interesting. We are going to turn luck into a narrative resource and borrow a few concepts from other games to tweak Tales of the Valiant into more of a story-like roleplaying game, such as Cypher System or Daggerheart.

This borrows a little from Cypher System's XP mechanics, where you can trade away or gain XP for narrative shifts, and these can be done on both the player and game master side. Cypher System calls them "GM Intrusions" and "Player Intrusions," but we will name them "Narrative Twist" or just "Twist" for short.

Player Twists

A player can spend 3 luck to change the narrative slightly according to their desires. Now, this is a slight change, such as losing the trail of an enemy, and the player wanting to "stumble upon them anyway." Or a player saying a door is unlocked when the question is open. A goblin fumbles a reload and, luckily, spills his quiver of arrows all over the floor. The player states a minor happening or fact, and it is now so.

The game master must approve of the shift or can change it to something plausible. These can't cheat death or do anything more than the reroll could, but it takes the reroll mechanic and gives it another interesting narrative use. They could be used in combat to create a complication for an enemy, or they can be used narratively to say a crowded inn still has a room available.

If you have five luck, and you have no way to spend it, consider suggesting a beneficial twist to the game master to burn that down and create an opportunity for the party and yourself.

Limit this to one twist per turn for the party if it gets too intrusive and overused.

Game Master Twists

The game master can offer a player a "potential twist," which is often a complication or other adverse outcome, in exchange for awarding the player three luck points. Your bowstring snaps. You drop your weapon. You lose the trail of the bandit. The door is locked with a good lock. The guards wander by and hear something. 

The game master does not need to say what it is, just that the offer is out there, and the player can either accept or reject the potential twist. If rejected, don't tell them what it was, and move on.

This should focus more on the narrative than on turning a miss into a hit in combat, and it rewards the player who takes on a bit more adversity in the narrative on their own. This is a good tool for quickly recharging a player's luck pool, but at the cost of something happening in the narrative that may (or may not be) bad.

And this does not always have to be a negative! This could be a twist or other change in what was expected. Keeping them from always being a hardship makes them a bit more tempting to take, and it increases the uncertainty of "if I should", increasing tension. A game master could use this to let the player find a new dungeon in the middle of nowhere, something that is neither good nor bad, but it changes the narrative. An NPC could run up, asking for help. A shady character may be in the tavern tonight with unknown motives. The princess is in another castle.