D&D: Always Have the Upper Hand – Five Ways to Increase Your Advantage
In D&D, Advantage is a powerful tool for counteracting the fact that you just rolled a 1. Here are five ways to make sure you have that.
Advantage is an important part of the D&D 5E and 5.5E ecosystem. It increases your odds of success at whatever it is you’re doing. Advantage also feels good, because you’re rolling two dice. And D&D is a game where the more dice you roll, the better it’s going to be for you.
Advantage in D&D also helps with the “my character is good at what they do, but I can’t roll over a 2 when it matters” feeling that can creep into D&D when you least want it. It won’t cure it completely. But the odds of rolling TWO natural 1’s are something like 1 in 400. So when it happens to you for the third time in a row, you’ll know it really IS just you.
At any rate, here are five ways to make sure you’ve got Advantage.
Be a Human
Playing a human in D&D is boring. It’s the vanilla ice cream of D&D. But vanilla is a delicious flavor—and humans come with the ultimate Advantage—Heroic Inspiration. Technically it’s a little different from the regular D&D advantage because instead of rolling two dice at once, you get to reroll one of your dice AFTER you’ve rolled. So you can double it up with Advantage to give yourself a ghostly third dice. Or when you don’t have advantage and need to hit, you can give yourself a more reactive advantage that only goes off if you think you need it.
Just try not to hoard it. You get Heroic Inspiration after every long rest as a human.
Lucky Feat
Every class gets an origin feat—and Lucky is a great one for anyone who is hoping to have Advantage whenever they need it. You gain Luck Points equal to your proficiency bonus and can spend them on giving an enemy Disadvantage when attacking you or giving yourself Advantage on ANY kind of D20 test.
Be Invisible
It is surprisingly easy to become invisible in D&D. This is because Invisible is a condition now, and while you can gain it from casting spells like Invisibility, you can also become Invisible (the condition) just by hiding from your enemies. It makes sense but also is weird. Whatever the case, if you’re invisible—magically or just because you’re underneath a large box, your next attack roll has advantage. This can be a great way to give yourself Advantage at the start of a fight.
Be a Barbarian – At Least a Little
Another way to have easy access to the Advantage mechanics—at least for attacks—is to play a Barbarian to level 2. You’ll get a lot for being a Barbarian, if you’re someone who wants to make a lot of attacks. And at level 2, you gain Reckless Attacks. This is the ability to gain Advantage on any attack you make – at the cost of your enemies getting advantage to hit you. So it’s not without some kind of cost, but if your enemy’s dead, they can’t hit back.
That Old Familiar Feeling
Finallly, one last way to make sure you’veg ot a reliable source of Advantage is to takethe Find Familiar spell. You don’t even have to be a caster to pick it up—you can just take the Magic Initiate (Wizard) feat and grab it off of the Wizard spell list. It doesn’t care bout your Intelligence, even. But then you’ll have a familiar who can go around using the Help action to Help you in combat, giving you Advantage on whoever you’re attacking.
Happy adventuring!
