Six Feats Worth Arguing About
Feats are optional rules, but that framing undersells them. The right feat doesn’t just make your character stronger; it changes how you play the game entirely. Here are six worth serious consideration, including one that will start a fight at your table.
Grappler
Grappling is already underused, and Grappler rewards players who commit to it. The basic grapple drops a creature’s speed to zero. Grappler adds advantage on attack rolls against your grappled target, plus the ability to pin: both of you become restrained, which means attackers have advantage on the pinned creature and the creature attacks at disadvantage. Your whole party is now rolling dice with a grin. The caveat is real, though. Restrained means disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws for both of you, so if a dragon decides to exhale, you are in the blast radius too.
Chef
The short rest version is solid: cook enough food for your party plus a few guests, and anyone who spends hit dice during that rest gets a bonus d8 hit points on top. Clean, no downside. The treats are where Chef gets interesting. Equal to your proficiency bonus in treats per batch, each one granting temporary hit points equal to your proficiency bonus as a bonus action. You can make a batch in an hour outside of a rest, hand them out tactically, and let your fighter chain-eat them across multiple turns as a buffer. At a +4 proficiency bonus, that’s 16 temporary hit points per treat, and you’re handing out four of them. It also functions as a legitimate roleplay tool; cooking for an NPC faction you’re trying to win over is exactly the kind of move that makes a session memorable.
Inspiring Leader
Prerequisite: Charisma 13. Benefit: a 10-minute speech that grants up to six creatures temporary hit points equal to your level plus your Charisma modifier. If you’re building around Charisma, that number gets genuinely impressive before you hit the midgame. The limitation is timing. Ten minutes is awkward if you’re about to get ambushed. Plan ahead, use it before a boss room, and the temporary hit points act as a damage sponge that can absorb a whole attack or two before the real attrition begins.
War Caster
Three things: advantage on Constitution saving throws to maintain concentration when you take damage, the ability to perform somatic components with your hands full, and the option to cast a spell instead of making an opportunity attack. That last one is the headline, but the second is quietly the most flexible. Carrying something? Still casting. Multiclassing into a gish build? War Caster is the connective tissue that makes it function. It’s worth a conversation with your DM about exactly what counts as “hands full,” because the RAW has some gray area with two-handed weapons.
Sentinel
When you hit a creature with an opportunity attack, its speed drops to zero immediately. Creatures provoke opportunity attacks from you even if they Disengage. And if a creature within your reach attacks anyone other than you, you can use your reaction for a melee attack. Sentinel turns you into a choke point. On a grid, your position becomes a resource. In theater of the mind, your DM needs to track it carefully, but the payoff is worth the overhead. Opportunity attacks go from a mechanic people forget about to the entire reason your fighter is standing where they’re standing.
Lucky
Three luck points, refreshed on a long rest. Spend one after any d20 roll, attack, ability check, or saving throw, reroll and choose which result to use. You can also spend a point when someone attacks you, forcing the attacker to reroll and letting you pick which d20 they use. The math is good. The argument against it is not about math.
The problem with Lucky is that failure is where D&D stories come from. The rogue who critically fails the lockpick on the vault they’ve been building toward for three sessions generates a better story than the rogue who just rolls again. Lucky doesn’t eliminate failure, but it concentrates rerolls exactly where they’d hurt narrative tension the most: high-stakes skill checks. Players rarely burn luck points on minor combat rolls. They save them, and then they spend them on the moments that were supposed to matter. If you want to allow it at your table, consider it carefully. If your campaign runs on consequences, it works against you.
Bountiful Luck from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, which extends the effect to your allies, is a separate conversation entirely.