Heroic Inspiration: How Inspiration Is Changing For The D&D 2024 (5.5e) Revision?

Inspiration is now “heroic inspiration” and it’s getting some heroic sized changes for D&D’s 2024 revision.

Wizards of the Coast has been slowly revealing more and more about the new 2024 revision of D&D 5e. Something you may have missed is that inspiration is now known as heroic inspiration and is getting beefed up for the new rules revision.

Below is everything you need to know about how this rule is changing.

Why is inspiration changing?

I suspect the name change is for 2 reasons;

To make it feel like a more epic mechanic
To distinguish it from similarly named mechanics like bardic inspiration

Of course, it’s not just the name of inspiration that’s changing, the way it works is changing too. This seems to be due to the desire for heroic inspiration to have more flexible application.

In the 2014 rules, inspiration would give you advantage on a d20 roll (an attack roll, ability check or saving throw). The problem with this is that there are many ways to gain advantage on a roll, making inspiration redundant in many scenarios.

The new rules work to overcome this limitations with a more broadly useful version of heroic inspiration.

Heroic inspiration rules for D&D 2024

The new rules for heroic inspiration will now allow players to reroll any dice roll. This changes how it works in 2 crucial ways:

Any dice can be rerolled, it’s not just limited to d20s. While I suspect the more compelling use of heroic inspiration will remain for crucial d20 rolls, players may find other important moments to use it too. Imagine landing a critical hit and then rolling a 1 for damage, or similarly when providing healing or using a bardic inspiration die. All of these remain great uses of heroic inspiration and give players the flexibility to use the benefit however they see fit.
Its a reroll rather than advantage. This means that heroic inspiration no longer conflicts with regular advantage and can even be stacked with advantage. There’s nothing worse than getting advantage on a crucial roll and still failing. Now you can reroll one of the dice you used for advantage too for those really crucial rolls.

There’s also the possibility here that you might be able to reroll a reroll if you have enough heroic inspiration, but I’ll need to see the fully written rules to be sure of this.

This is particularly useful for the updated fighter champion who gets a free heroic inspiration every turn of combat if it starts without any. This means that they can use their heroic inspiration even if they land every hit. I do wonder if this makes them a little overpowered, but I’ll need to see how they play in practice and how this affects the balance of the game. In reality, most classes and subclasses seem to be improving so this may remain balanced anyway. There may even be other subclasses with similar features.

You can see the original reveal for the revamped heroic inspiration in the fighter 2024 reveal video below in the chapter on champions:

Greater flexibility seems to be a key philosophy in the 2024 revision of the rules. And I think heroic inspiration accomplishes this without necessarily making inspiration more overpowered which works well for me. D&D has always been about flexibility within the right kinds of parameters and I think changes like this encourage greater tactics and less reliance on luck.

What do you think of the changes to the heroic inspiration? Let me know in the comments below.